Vashon Thriftway received a letter from one of its baking companies last month saying its wholesale price of bread would soon spike because of an 80 percent increase in the cost of flour.

“Yes, I did say 80 percent,” the owner of the bread company added in his letter.

Call it a sign of the times.

From a dozen eggs purchased at a Vashon farm stand to a loaf of bread bought at a Vashon grocery store, prices on the Island are climbing steadily and in some cases dramatically, worrying Islanders, stretching budgets and causing many to penny-pinch more than ever before.

Annette Spencer, a legal assistant and the mother of one, said she has started a new discipline in her family: Faced with a spiraling food bill, she now goes to the grocery store only once a week.

“If we don’t have it, we try to do without it,” she said as she pushed her cart past the meat case at Thriftway on Monday. “It’s so easy to come in here and drop $20.”

Food prices are escalating on Vashon for the same reasons they’re skyrocketing in Seattle, throughout the Northwest and around the world, observers say. The price of oil is climbing, causing transportation costs to rise; prolonged droughts in Australia and Africa — some believe the result of global climate change — have led to severe rice shortages; and the conversion of farm fields to corn for ethanol production has meant a dramatic reduction in U.S. grain production.

Just last week, after news stories broke about some Seattle stores rationing their rice, shoppers made a run on Thriftway’s rice as well, Norm Mathews, the owner of Thriftway, said.

“The shelves were cleaned out in one day,” he said. “We had to make a special run to get more rice.”

Mark Evans, the manager at Vashon Market, said his store, too, has faced climbing costs.

“Our costs have gone up every month for five months straight,” he said. “I’ve not ever seen it this bad before.”

The situation has not only had an impact on the Island’s grocery stores. Small-scale Island producers, too, are struggling — facing both their own escalating costs as well as the need to pass those costs on to consumers, many of whom are their friends and neighbors.

George Page, owner of Sea Breeze Farm on the Island’s north end, said he struggled mightily with the question of whether to raise his prices, a struggle that made him wonder if he could even hang on to a farm that has won him a strong following both on and off the Island.

“I was ready to quit,” he said in an interview last week.

The thought of raising prices rankled him, he said, because of his deep belief that quality, locally produced food should not be “an elitist product.” On the other hand, he said, he knew he had to raise his prices in order to pay his workers a living wage and keep up with a changing global situation.

Page finally overcame his reluctance, raised his prices by 15 percent and sent out what he called “an epistle” — 11 reasons to continue to buy from Sea Breeze and the Vashon’s Farmers Market — to his mailing list of 700.

“The support has been overwhelming,” he said.

Other producers, too, are finding they have to raise prices — and, like Page, find it hard to do.

Joanne Jewell and Rob Peterson, who own about 100 chickens at Plum Forest Farm in Paradise Valley, know all too well that organic grain prices for chickens are on the rise. They purchase about four tons every six weeks from a farmer in British Columbia, helping to supply other Vashon chicken farmers with grain.

Since last August, when grain prices started their upward spiral, the price for a bag of organic grain has climbed about 40 percent, Jewell said. As a result, their egg prices have gone up, too. Last summer, the couple sold their eggs for $4.50 a dozen. Now, a dozen is up to $5, and they think they’ll have to soon raise the price to $6 or $6.50, Jewell said. When their children wash the eggs, she added, she watches over the process carefully, determined they not crack a single one.

“We know it’s hard to pay that much for eggs,” she added.

Like many in Vashon’s local food community, Peterson has spent a lot of time thinking about how to sustainably and affordably raise food. To him, this current situation has seemed inevitable and a long time in the making — the result, he said, of misguided policies that created a food production chain based in oil.

“For 40 years now, we’ve been using oil to produce food,” he said. “Since oil’s been so cheap and government policy promotes cheap food, for about 40 years we’ve been eating oil.”

Eventually, he said, farmers will have to rely on the sun to produce food — a prospect that will be more sustainable but will likely lead to higher prices over time.

Page said he too thinks government policies have kept food prices artificially low, leading people to have mistaken ideas about the true costs of food. At the beginning of the last century, 50 percent of a family’s income went towards food — and very little towards the cost of a house, he said. Now, he said, it’s just the opposite, with about 10 percent of a family’s income directed towards food.

“As Americans, we consider it our right to have cheap fuel and cheap foods,” he said. “It’s been a nice ride while it lasted.”

Cathy Fulton, who grows a lot of her own food, including about 250 pounds of potatoes each year, said she, too, has been thinking a lot about high food prices and whether there’s a way to make food more affordable and local at the same time. As a result, she said, she’s begun talking to others about whether Vashon can grow some of its own grain and rely less on high transportation costs to bring feed onto the Island. A member of the Vashon Democratic Club, she and other club members are putting together a May 17 panel discussion on food costs to further explore the issue, she said.

But she said she, too, thinks the current state of affairs may underscore a new reality.

“What I always thought is that the cost of organic, local food would eventually come down,” she said. “I now see that’s not going to happen; instead, the cost of industrial food is going to continue to go up.”

At Thriftway, Mathews said he’s addressing the high costs of food by ongoing in-store and coupon specials. His is the only Thriftway among 17 in Washington that kick out the monthly coupon books, he added. He said store managers also plan to feature affordable foods in their displays and merchandizing efforts — creative ways, for instance, to use tuna fish and pastas.

He said he hears complaints and concerns from shoppers, especially old-timers who have lived on Vashon for years, many of whom are now on fixed incomes.

“For people on fixed incomes, it really hurts,” he said.

The Vashon Maury Community Food Bank is also struggling with the higher prices and food shortages — a situation that Executive Director Yvonne Pitrof says has resulted in weeks of sparsely filled shelves.

“We have weeks when we just don’t have certain things,” she said.

Canned tuna and macaroni and cheese, for instance, staples among food bank customers, have recently been in short supply, she said. So has infant cereal and canned vegetables.

“As food banks, we’re used to our crisis moments and getting through them and moving on,” she said. “But this is much more systemic, and that’s what worries me.”

But both the food banks in the region and their clients are trying to be creative and resourceful, Pitrof said. The food banks in the region are talking about how they can work together to pool their resources and thereby strengthen their buying power, she said.

As for clients, one the other day came in and asked Pitrof how to plant a garden.

“It’s forcing us to take a look at our entire food system,” she said.