Paris Apodaca's piece for the Daily Caller is a reasonable story about diesel and fertilizer costs since the Iran war began in February. It reports diesel at a nationwide record of $6.00 a gallon, up from roughly $3.72 before the war, and cites USDA projections of a 15.3 percent jump in farm fertilizer spending this year.1 Those are real pressures on food supply chains.
The headline is about something else entirely. "If that grocery store receipt was already making your eyes water" asserts that grocery prices are already surging. The article's own inflation paragraph says:
"Food prices have also continued to climb, rising 2.7% from a year earlier in August … grocery prices climbed 2.2%, fruits and vegetables jumped 3.2% and nonalcoholic beverages rose 3.7%."1
The BLS Consumer Price Index for August 2026, released September 11, reports: "The food index rose 0.1 percent in August, as it did in July." "The index for food at home was unchanged over the month."2 Over twelve months, all items rose 3.4 percent, food rose 2.7 percent, and food at home rose 2.2 percent.2 Grocery inflation is running below overall inflation, and grocery prices did not move at all in the most recent month.2
The category that did move is energy, up 16.3 percent over the year.2 The Energy Information Administration's weekly survey put the U.S. average on-highway diesel price at $6.285 a gallon on September 14, 2026.3 That is the eye-watering number, and it belongs on a fuel receipt, not a grocery receipt.
The "just wait" half of the headline is a forecast, and forecasts of pass-through from diesel and fertilizer to food are legitimate. A forecast does not justify misstating the present, though. Readers are told they are already being squeezed at the checkout when the data the article cites shows a flat month and a below-average year. A headline that said "diesel just hit a record, and food prices may follow" would have been accurate and still alarming. Instead the outlet asserted the alarming part as a fact already in evidence.