Why do we exclude the price of things like Food, Housing and Energy costs when looking at the total number for inflation?

Question

I’ve been looking for a reasonable explanation for this for a while and literally cannot find one. SO help me understand, please. ❤️🤷‍♀️

In: 42

Answer 1

We generally don’t, but some measures of inflation are useful under certain circumstances for measuring things which don’t have a seasonal fluctuation like food. If a particular crop has recently been harvested the price for that food will drop, but that isn’t really significant to a general measure of inflation.