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Felicia Padley and her youngest daughter Jenny Ella are picking up free helpings of pasta, vegetables and other essentials at a Food Bank in Brooklyn, New York . Padley holds down a fulltime government job but still finds it hard to feed her family of four. She needs the pantry’s help now more than ever as her weekly food bill soars

A year ago it's like about 50 or 60 dollars I would spend at a grocery store and that would include meats, that would include vegetables, fruits, cereals stuff like that. But now I’m spending like a hundred dollars.

/ rising food prices are hitting families across the United States hard. Over the past year, egg prices have risen almost 44 percent, fresh milk 21 percent, and poultry and beef more than 6 percent. Economists say severe weather in the southern US and Australia is partly to blame for the jump in prices at food stores like this one behind me. But many are pointing to another culprit, energy, in particular the rising production of ethanol, a bio-fuel made from corn. There are some 130 ethanol plants now in operation across the US churning out billions of gallons of this stuff each year. The US hopes ethanol will slash demand for oil, but to make all that ethanol you need a lot of corn that has sent prices soaring 50 percent in the past year and a half. On top of ethanol there’s also the spike \ in the price of crude oil which makes it more expensive to transport and package foods. Some say demand for food and fuel are on a collision course that could have disastrous consequences.

What we are looking at in a sense is \ direct competition between the 860 million people in the world who own automobiles and who want to maintain their mobility and the 2 billion poorest people in the world who simply want to survive. Others say demand may be outpacing supply now but the market will eventually adjust.

We’ll continue to grow and really that’s a good thing. But people will also produce more. There’s an old saying at economics says the solution to high prices is high prices. What’s going to happen is that people are going to be provided an economic incentive to plant more.

That should help solve the increase in prices. For now though, families struggle. 30 new families are walking into this Brooklyn pantry each day in need of help. This upcoming winter could be a bitter one indeed for many across the United States finding it hard to afford the food basics.

Maggie Lake, CNN New York.