When the menu prices at our everyday lunch spots creep up and we hesitate before reaching for a few apples at the grocery store, we feel the sheer exhaustion of daily life. In a reality where tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s lunch are under constant threat, news claiming that "core inflation is stabilizing" sounds like a distant story from another world. Why are food prices—the very ones that hit our daily lives the hardest—always pushed to the sidelines of economic policy, treated merely as an after-the-fact issue to be managed later? Behind this painful disconnect lie the practical limitations and structural paradoxes of macroeconomics.
Beyond the Reach of Interest Rates: Volatility and the Limits of Control
First, food prices reside in an "uncontrollable realm" that is notoriously difficult for governments and central banks to regulate directly through monetary policy.
A drastic rate hike by the Bank of Korea will not suddenly end a drought, nor will it restore fruit knocked from trees by heavy rains. Agricultural and food prices, which fluctuate wildly in response to external shocks like extreme weather, epidemics, or wars, are not an illness that can be cured by the central bank’s primary tool: controlling money supply. From the perspective of policymakers, they have no choice but to prioritize "Core Inflation"—which falls within their sphere of control—as their benchmark. Consequently, food prices are inevitably relegated to reactive, follow-up measures such as import tariff cuts or distribution subsidies.
What Goes Up Rarely Comes Down: The Shadow of Downward Rigidity
Second, food prices suffer from severe "downward rigidity."
While oil prices or exchange rates may drop back down after a spike, dining-out costs and processed food prices rarely budge once they go up. Even if raw material costs decline, food prices refuse to return to their previous levels, cited by rising labor costs, rent, and logistics expenses. For this reason, rather than attempting to artificially push down food prices directly, economic authorities focus all their energy on curbing the root causes that drive them up in the first place—such as exchange rates, raw material costs, and core inflation. Once food prices explode, policy tools are practically powerless to reverse them.
The Gap Between Daily Pain and Statistical Figures
Finally, there is a fundamental disconnect between the "weight of daily life" felt by ordinary citizens and the "statistical weights" used by policymakers.
While we buy home appliances or cars once every few years, food requires daily, multiple transactions. Human psychology experiences a far stronger sense of loss and distress from expenditures that recur every single day. However, in national statistics like the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the weight assigned to food is distributed proportionally based on overall consumer spending ratios. Thus, while food prices are the single most important metric determining the quality of life for most people, macro-level policymakers view them as merely one indicator among many.
Between Economic Reason and Everyday Emotion
Ultimately, the reason food prices seem to be treated as an afterthought is not that consumer lives are being ignored, but because the "illness" that can be treated with monetary policy (core inflation) is fundamentally different from the "symptom" triggered by weather and external environments (food prices).
The gap between the cold, economic rationale declaring "core inflation is being brought under control" and the burning emotional reality of ordinary people crying "I can barely afford lunch today"—bridging this very chasm remains the oldest unresolved task for economic policies that aim to care for people’s lives rather than remaining buried in macroeconomic metrics.
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