The can of ravioli is a domestic confession John Kiriakou volunteered on 19 November 2025, and the closest thing in the corpus to a first-person account of what inflation feels like to him.
The polling problem
The context was a new poll showing Democrats far ahead in a generic congressional ballot, and one finding inside it: that 57 per cent of Americans said they wanted prices to drop more than they cared about any other issue. The host’s objection was technical — prices are not going to drop, cannot drop, and should not, because that is deflation — and he then put the alternative to Kiriakou as a question: was not what Americans really needed higher incomes?[1][2]
Kiriakou agreed with the economics — “oh, absolutely” — and immediately identified the gap between what was needed and what was wanted. “But I think they’re not thinking about higher incomes. They want prices to go back to what they were a year ago or two years ago.” And then, in unison with the host: “It’s not going to happen.”[2]
The confession
Having established that the public’s wish is impossible, he then admitted to sharing it, and produced the evidence.
“I’ll admit to everybody — and I’m not proud to admit it — but I really like raviolis. Like, just right out of the can. I don’t even heat them up. I just open the can and eat them out of the can.”[2]
The rule he attaches to this is absolute and, by his own account, not entirely rational. “I don’t know why, but I just have this thing where I refuse to pay more than 99 cents for a can of raviolis. And so I’ll just wait until they’re on sale for 99 cents. They’re usually a buck and a quarter.”[2]
$2.49
“So I went to the grocery store the other day and the raviolis are $2.49. Two forty-nine for a can of lousy raviolis. I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to pay it. I won’t spend the money.”[3]
And then the concession that gives the anecdote its point: “I want everything to come down to where it was a year ago, too.”[3]
Why he tells it
The function of the story in the argument is to deny himself an exemption. Kiriakou has just explained why the electorate’s demand is economically incoherent; he then demonstrates that he holds the same incoherent demand, in the same aisle, over the same kind of purchase. The host’s response was to agree — “me too” — before returning to the position both had already stated: that the solvable variable is wages, not prices, because “higher prices are not a solvable problem, because of the way that the system is currently set up.”[3]