The Sunday Roast Cools by Sixteen Cents

This week the lens is cart math: one Sunday roast dinner for four, priced from the same six numbers in July and August. The track is a lo-fi soft-pop lullaby at a slow swaying pulse — warm Rhodes, brushed drums, one close, dry-humored vocal reading the receipt out like a bedtime list. The roast comes in sixteen cents cheaper than it was in July, and the chorus still hums everything went up again, because across the year it did.

The closest thing to a headline this month is that the headline barely moved. The food-at-home index sat at 321.5 in August, a tenth of a point under July's 321.643, and 2.2% above a year earlier. 1 So the cart is where the story lives.

The BLS U.S. city averages, July to August 2026: a four-and-a-half-pound whole chicken went from $2.005 to $2.012 a pound, three pounds of white potatoes from $0.942 to $0.976, white bread from $1.820 to $1.823 a pound. Whole milk eased from $4.313 to $4.229 a gallon, romaine from $3.469 to $3.286 a pound, and field-grown tomatoes from $2.003 to $1.977. 234567

Added up: $23.4535 in July, $23.297 in August. Down 15.65 cents, from $5.86 a plate to $5.82. The bird and the potatoes crept ahead; the salad and the milk let go instead. Eggs, the standing anchor, went the other way — $2.189 to $2.272 a dozen, up 8.3 cents in a month, and still $1.315 below last August. 8

The ad pages agree in their own mixed way. For advertised prices running September 12 to 24, 2026, and gathered from 25,521 store outlets: russet five-pound bags rose 20% in a week to $3.18, whole conventional fryers were advertised at $1.70 a pound, and eggs appeared in 32.9% of circulars — down from 40.7% the week before, still well above last year's 25.3%. Conventional milk ads thinned 26% while the average advertised gallon climbed 37 cents to $3.35. 9101112

So the verse does the honest thing and the chorus does its usual one. The receipt eases, the oven does not.

Listen while the bird rests under foil, while the potatoes finish, or while you work out whether the drive to a second store is worth three dollars on a bag of potatoes. Everything here is a national average or an advertised price, not a promise about any one store's shelf.