Four weeks ago, cucumbers at Market Basket, my go-to store, were two for a dollar, or 50 cents each.

Three weeks ago, they were 59 cents each.

Two weeks ago, they were 69 cents per cuke.

Last week the price rose to a whopping 79 cents a cucumber. I may be the world’s worst shopper, but even I knew that something was going on, and that it was not good.

The cost of the cucumber, you see, is my barometer on inflation and the rising cost of living under President Biden. I shop. He doesn’t.

In my past life — prior to living alone — I had a mate. So, I never did any grocery shopping. Shopping malls and vast supermarkets were foreign territory. I avoided them at all costs.

The only stores I frequented back then were the package store and the hardware store.

Since I was never good at fixing anything that required a tool, I gave up the hardware store. That left the packy.

But one day, when I suddenly found myself living alone, I had to shop at stores that I had avoided most of my life. Starving was the unacceptable alternative.

I traced my aversion to big supermarkets to my youth. My first job, which I hated, was bagging groceries at a big supermarket. It was worse than high school.

Years later, I feared that bagging might be my last job, too. I feared that I too might end up beside other old geezers bagging groceries at the end of the checkout line just to stay alive.

I also avoided the big box stores out of fear and loathing over the strange-looking new drivers cruising up and down the huge parking lots in tank-like cars looking for a fight over the perfect parking spot.

That kind of action reminded me of a drunken VFW conversation over who of the two aging U.S. Army veterans had seen more combat. Said one to the other: “You haven’t seen combat until you’ve fought for a parking space at Market Basket on a Sunday morning. They take no prisoners.”

People can scoff at my concern over the cost of the lowly cucumber. But as cucumbers go, so goes the country.

And people forget, or do not even know, that the cucumber, which originated in India four thousand years ago, was once, unlike today, highly appreciated. Today cukes get no respect.

As it made way out of India the cucumber was embraced by just about everyone in Ancient Greece and then in the Roman Empire.

Roman Emperor Tiberius (42 BC to 37 AD) was said to have eaten a cucumber every day of his life. He lived to be 77, which was quite old for the time. And he would have lived longer had he not been smothered to death on his sick bed by a Praetorian guard.

Charlemagne of France was a champion of the cucumber even before it arrived in England around the 14th Century. Christopher Columbus brought cucumbers to the New World in 1492 when he landed in what is now Haiti.

Native Americans later took to the cucumber after it was introduced in the north by English and French trappers, fur traders and settlers.

We are not talking about average vegetables here like zucchini here, or cabbage or lettuce. We are talking about cucumbers, which, among other things, prevent dehydration, help manage cholesterol, diabetes, and good bone health. Cucumbers are good for your skin, too.

So, I was pleasantly surprised the other day when I found that the cucumbers at MB were back at two for a dollar, or 50 cents each. What happened?

I figured that either MB had come across an abandoned freight car full of Mexican cucumbers smuggled across the border, or that Joe Biden was right when he said all was good with the economy.

“Take a look,” he told reporters. “Start reporting it the right way.”

So, I did. I rechecked the cucumbers. The price yesterday was back to two for a buck. History will record that reducing the price of cucumbers was one of Joe Biden’s major accomplishments. He should be proud.

But everything else in the Biden economy is still just squash.

Back to the packy.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.