Food prices are affected by so many variables that it is almost impossible to fix on any one of them. Oil prices affect fertilizer prices. Ethanol mandates affect corn. Weather--which is all over the map and has been throughout recorded history--affects crops of all kinds. Government price controls have an effect. Food fads have an effect. Politics in other countries that export food have an effect. The list is miles long, and all of it interacts with the rest.

Are food prices, corrected for inflation, really unusually high right now?

Not everything in an economy is amenable to somebody "doing something about it." In fact, very few things are. People can pretend they're doing something about it, but usually they end up making things worse.

If somebody decided to alter the ecology of a rain forest so that it would be a stable ecosystem containing only animals that had the letter "o" in their names, ecologists would look at them like they were insane. Yet things like this are proposed in the field of economics every day, and an economy is no less complex than a rain forest, and for the same reasons.