Actually most of the recent price spike can be blamed on cold weather in the southern US and especially Mexico:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cold+...ient=firefox-a
Growing your own food is a great idea and should be done whenever and wherever possible. My mother-in-law lives nearby and she has huge gardens and grows all kinds of stuff. The problem is the past few summers have either been too short, too cool and/or too wet so stuff grew slowly and the yield was low. On top of that animals kept eating everything that did grow.
