Your shop eased a little this month. Everyone who sells you food expects it to climb again.

There is a small mercy in this week's numbers. The Food Foundation's June tracker has food-and-drink inflation easing to 2.2 per cent, down from 3 per cent a month ago — the kindest the weekly shop has felt in some time. If you have noticed the bill flattening out, you were not imagining it.

Do not get comfortable. The same trackers reporting the dip are openly braced for a climb: food inflation, they warn, has "yet to accelerate in the way we expect" over the coming months, as the Middle-East energy shock works its way down the supply chain — into the cost of growing, chilling, baking and hauling everything you put in the trolley. It is the very warning the Bank of England gave when it held interest rates at noon today: energy first, everything else on a delay. The forecourt and the fridge run on the same clock.

And remember what "cheaper" is measured against. Food prices are still about 30 per cent higher than they were in the spring of 2022. The rate of increase has slowed; the prices themselves have not come down. The Food Foundation's basic weekly basket now runs to around £53 for a woman and £60 for a man — and that is for the basics, before anything you might actually look forward to eating.

So treat this month for what it is: a window. If your budget has a little give right now, this is the time to build the dull, useful resilience that makes the next rise hurt less. Cook the things that freeze — a big pot of ragù, a tray of dal, soup by the batch — while the ingredients are at their softest price in months. Buy the slow cuts now rather than in October. Lean on what is genuinely in season here in June, when it is both cheapest and best: new potatoes, broad beans, the first of the berries. None of this is hardship cooking. It is just cooking a little ahead of the weather.

The kitchen table has always been where the big abstractions — inflation, energy, a war eight time zones away — finally turn into something you can taste. A figure of 2.2 per cent is a line on a chart. A pot of something good in the freezer, made in the cheap week before the dear one, is what that figure actually means by the time it reaches your house.