美国有线新闻 CNN 新冠疫情致美国食品价格上涨（在线收听）

We're starting at the grocery store and we're going to need some extra cash. In the month of April, the price of groceries grew 2.6% according to the U.S. Labor Department. So if a family spent $1,000 on groceries in March, they would have needed an extra $26 for those same groceries in April. The 2.6% increase was the biggest jump from one month to the next since 1974. You can guess why this happened. It's another side effect, really a series of them, to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

今天首先来关注杂货店，我们需要一些额外的现金。根据美国劳工部的数据，4月份食品杂货价格上涨了2.6%。因此，如果一个家庭3月份花1000美元购买杂货，那他们在4月购买这些杂货时需要多花26美元。2.6%的增幅是自1974年以来最大的月度增幅。大家可以想到发生这种情况的原因。冠状病毒疫情产生了一系列副作用，这只是其中之一。

When restaurants shutdown and businesses closed, more Americans started cooking at home. So demand for groceries went up but then many food producers and farmers had trouble quickly shifting their deliveries from those restaurants to grocery stores. It's a very complex process. And there've been outbreaks of COVID-19 in some food processing plants forcing some of them to shut down. So there's this perfect storm of increase demand, jarring changes in delivery and reduced supply. But on top of all that some shoppers started panic buying, picking up lots of food that they didn't plan to eat right away.

当餐厅和商店停业时，越来越多的美国人开始在家做饭。这导致食品杂货的需求上升，但许多食品生产商和农民很难迅速将货物从餐厅转移到杂货店。这是一个非常复杂的过程。一些食品加工厂爆发了新冠肺炎疫情，其中一些工厂不得不关闭。这就形成了一场完美的风暴：需求增加、交货变化、供应减少。但除此之外，一些购物者开始恐慌性购买，抢购了很多他们不打算马上食用的食物。

So to keep certain groceries in stock, stores put limits on the amounts people could buy. They've also raised prices to discourage people from buying so much and to recover some of the extra money they've had to pay to suppliers. Meat, eggs, bread, cereal, soup, soda, fruit and coffee, all went up in April. Some prices went down though. Ham, breakfast sausage, butter, prepared salads and cupcakes got cheaper.

因此，为了保持某些杂货的库存，商店对人们的购买量进行了限制。他们还提高了价格，阻止人们购买过多商品，并收回他们不得不支付给供应商的一些额外资金。肉类、鸡蛋、面包、麦片、汤、苏打水、水果和咖啡的价格均在4月出现上涨。但也有一些商品的价格出现下降。火腿、早餐香肠、黄油、预制沙拉和纸杯蛋糕的价格都有所回落。