In India, even the gods are doing without.

Food inflation that has been stuck in the double digits for a year has had a deep impact on school lunches, family meals and holy offerings. Anger with high prices erupted into protests this week that disrupted flights, trains and traffic. While policymakers debate how to feed people without driving the country deeper in debt, Indians grapple with the sad arithmetic of how to do more with less.

Fruit is becoming a luxury. People have cut back on protein. Vegetable sellers complain profits are down because people are buying less.

Take M. Sakkthivel, the cook at a temple in Machimal Nagar, a fishing village not far from south Mumbai's financial center.

Each day Sakkthivel prepares a pot of sweet ground rice as an offering to Tirupati Balaji - a south Indian god.

He used to use 7.7 pounds of sugar to prepare the prasadam, or offering, but with spiraling prices, he's cut back to three.

The residents of Machimal Nagar say rice, potatoes and onions cost about twice what they did two years ago.

Officially, food inflation neared 22 percent in December, a 17-year high. By March it had eased to 16.7 percent, with the cost of wheat 14 percent higher than a year ago and pulses like the lentils known as dal - a crucial source of protein in a nation full of vegetarians - up 31 percent.

It's too early to say whether sustained high food prices will aggravate malnutrition, but advocates worry escalating costs are eroding the diets of millions in a country where one in two children was malnourished before the price spike.

"There are large numbers of people who even in good times don't have sufficient food intake," said Harsh Mander, who was appointed by the Supreme Court to monitor hunger in India.

He estimates that 80 million to 200 million Indians go to sleep hungry each night.

Mander is campaigning for a right to food law being debated within the ruling Congress Party. One version would give poor households the right to 55 pounds of grains like rice and wheat each month at 3 cents per pound, which has sparked heated debate over who qualifies as poor and how much a sweeping food subsidy would add to India's swollen fiscal deficit.

Existing food subsidies have cushioned the poorest of the poor, but they aren't pegged to inflation and, plagued by corruption, they don't always work.

The government has been quick to blame poor rainfall. Last year's monsoon was the weakest since 1972, and on Thursday, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said food prices would likely soften because of good rainfall this year.

But food prices began to rise months before the rains failed. Food grain inflation has been more than 10 percent since December 2008 and fruit and vegetable prices spiked as early as October 2008.

India's deeper problem is a widening gap between supply and demand. Even as the population grows and increasing wealth fattens many appetites, farm productivity has stagnated. India's food supply chain suffers from extensive waste and profiteering middlemen whose commissions can account for up to half the final cost of food.

Eurasia Group analyst Seema Desai says the government could have done more to keep prices in check.