A2 · Elementary
11 min
food cultureinfrastructureclimate and environmentglobal trade
Blackout on the Spice Route
Apagón en la despensa del mundo
A massive blackout plunges millions into darkness across the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Fletcher and Octavio dig into why that matters far beyond Indonesia: Sumatra feeds and flavors a significant portion of the planet.
Un gran apagón deja a millones de personas sin electricidad en la isla de Sumatra, Indonesia. Fletcher y Octavio hablan de por qué esto importa: Sumatra produce aceite de palma, café y especias para todo el mundo.
6 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| apagón | blackout / power outage | Hay un apagón en Sumatra. Millones de personas no tienen luz. |
| especias | spices | El rendang tiene muchas especias. Es muy picante. |
| ponerse | to become / to turn (change of state) | Sin electricidad, la comida se pone mala muy rápido. |
| el mercado | the market | La gente compra pescado en el mercado todos los días. |
| el hielo | ice | El hielo se derrite cuando hace mucho calor. |
| picante | spicy / hot (food) | La comida de Sumatra es muy picante. Hay muchas especias. |
Picture this: you're in a city of two million people, it's nighttime, and every light goes out at once.
Not a neighborhood.
The whole island.
Sí.
Yes.
Sumatra está sin luz.
Sumatra is without power.
Millones de personas no tienen electricidad.
Millions of people have no electricity.
Sumatra, for anyone who needs orienting, is the sixth largest island in the world.
Bigger than Spain.
And last night it went dark.
Es una isla muy importante.
It is a very important island.
Hay mucha comida allí.
There is a lot of food there.
That's actually the thing that got me thinking about this one.
Because when most people hear 'power outage in Indonesia,' they file it under 'infrastructure problem, developing world, moving on.' But Sumatra is not just any island.
No, Fletcher.
No, Fletcher.
Sumatra tiene aceite de palma.
Sumatra has palm oil.
Tiene café.
It has coffee.
Tiene especias.
It has spices.
Right, and Indonesia as a whole is the world's largest producer of palm oil.
A huge slice of that comes from Sumatra.
We're talking about an ingredient that's in roughly half of all the packaged products you find in a supermarket anywhere on the planet.
El aceite de palma está en muchas cosas.
Palm oil is in many things.
En el pan.
In bread.
En el chocolate.
In chocolate.
En el jabón.
In soap.
Soap, yes, which is technically not food but I'll let it slide.
The point is that when Sumatra sneezes, global supply chains feel it.
And when Sumatra loses power for hours during the night, the immediate, very concrete problem is: refrigeration stops.
Sin electricidad, la comida no está fría.
Without electricity, the food is not cold.
La comida se pone mala.
The food goes bad.
Exactly.
And in a tropical climate, that happens fast.
I'm talking hours, not days.
Fish, meat, dairy, anything in the cold chain.
En Sumatra hace mucho calor.
In Sumatra it is very hot.
El pescado es muy importante allí.
Fish is very important there.
La gente come mucho pescado.
People eat a lot of fish.
Tell me more about what people actually eat in Sumatra, because this is, honestly, one of the great food regions on earth and most people outside of Asia have no idea.
La comida de Sumatra es muy picante.
The food of Sumatra is very spicy.
Hay muchas especias.
There are many spices.
El plato más famoso es el rendang.
The most famous dish is rendang.
Rendang.
Slow-cooked beef in coconut milk and a paste of something like fifteen different spices.
I had it in Padang once, which is the city on Sumatra's west coast where it comes from, and I genuinely think it's one of the greatest things I've ever put in my mouth.
El rendang es muy bueno.
Rendang is very good.
La gente cocina el rendang por muchas horas.
People cook rendang for many hours.
Hours and hours.
Which is actually interesting in the context of this blackout, because traditional rendang doesn't need refrigeration.
You cook all the liquid out of it, it's almost preserved by the spices.
It was designed that way, long before anyone had a fridge.
Sí.
Yes.
Las especias conservan la comida.
The spices preserve the food.
Es muy inteligente.
It is very clever.
It really is.
Before anyone had a concept of food science, these cooks figured out that cloves, turmeric, galangal, they're antimicrobial.
They keep meat edible in equatorial heat for days.
That's not an accident, that's centuries of accumulated knowledge.
Antes, no hay electricidad.
Before, there is no electricity.
La gente usa especias.
People use spices.
Las especias son el refrigerador antiguo.
The spices are the ancient refrigerator.
The ancient refrigerator.
I like that framing a lot.
And it puts the spice trade in a completely different light, doesn't it?
We tend to think of it as a story about flavor, about luxury goods, rich Europeans wanting their food to taste better.
But preservation was at least as important.
Las especias son muy caras en la historia.
Spices are very expensive in history.
Los europeos van a Asia por las especias.
Europeans go to Asia for the spices.
And Sumatra was right at the center of that.
The Portuguese were there in the sixteenth century, then the Dutch.
The Strait of Malacca, which runs along the island's northeastern coast, was arguably the most strategically important waterway in the world for a couple of hundred years.
El Estrecho de Malaca es muy importante hoy también.
The Strait of Malacca is very important today also.
Muchos barcos pasan allí.
Many ships pass there.
Enormous amounts of trade.
Something like a quarter of global shipping passes through it.
So when we're talking about a power outage on Sumatra, we're not just talking about inconvenienced households.
We're talking about an island that is structurally embedded in how the world feeds itself.
Sumatra tiene también mucho café.
Sumatra also has a lot of coffee.
El café de Sumatra es muy famoso.
The coffee from Sumatra is very famous.
Sumatran Mandheling.
Dark, earthy, low acidity.
If you've ever bought a bag of specialty coffee in the last thirty years, there's a real chance Sumatra was on the label.
It's the kind of coffee that doesn't taste like coffee to people who are used to the bright, acidic Central American stuff.
A mí me gusta el café de Sumatra.
I like coffee from Sumatra.
Es diferente.
It is different.
Tiene mucho sabor.
It has a lot of flavor.
You have good taste.
Occasionally.
Now, back to the actual news, because I don't want to just do a food tour of the island without asking the harder question.
Several officials declared a state of emergency last night.
Why?
What makes a power outage an emergency beyond the obvious discomfort?
Hace mucho calor en Sumatra.
It is very hot in Sumatra.
Sin electricidad, no hay ventilador.
Without electricity, there is no fan.
No hay aire frío.
There is no cool air.
And we're not just talking about discomfort.
In that kind of heat, you have elderly people, you have infants, you have anyone with a medical condition who depends on a refrigerated medication or a powered medical device.
Heat becomes dangerous very quickly.
Y los mercados también.
And the markets too.
Sin luz, los mercados no trabajan bien.
Without light, the markets do not work well.
The markets are actually a fascinating piece of this.
Because in Sumatra, as in most of Southeast Asia, the daily wet market is still the primary way most people buy fresh food.
Not a supermarket with a backup generator.
An open-air market where the vendor's fish has been sitting in a tray of ice that is now melting.
Sí.
Yes.
El hielo se derrite.
The ice melts.
El pescado se pone malo.
The fish goes bad.
El vendedor pierde dinero.
The vendor loses money.
And that's the thing that never makes it into the headline count.
No deaths reported, infrastructure restored, crisis over.
But the small-scale economic damage, the fish vendor who lost an entire night's stock, that's real and it doesn't get measured.
Muchas familias trabajan en el mercado.
Many families work in the market.
Es su dinero.
It is their money.
Es su vida.
It is their life.
There's also a bigger structural question here, and this is where I think the story gets genuinely important.
Indonesia is one of the countries most exposed to climate change.
Sumatra has lost enormous amounts of forest to palm oil plantations, and that deforestation affects local rainfall patterns, temperatures, the reliability of the rivers that power the hydroelectric plants that keep the lights on.
El aceite de palma destruye los árboles.
Palm oil destroys the trees.
Sin árboles, hay problemas.
Without trees, there are problems.
Es una contradicción.
It is a contradiction.
A contradiction that the world is complicit in, frankly.
Every time someone buys a product with palm oil in it, which is almost every processed food product in existence, there's a thread that runs back to Sumatra.
We're all participants in this.
Pero Fletcher, la gente en Sumatra también necesita trabajo.
But Fletcher, people in Sumatra also need work.
No es simple.
It is not simple.
No, you're absolutely right.
That's the tension at the heart of it.
The people who work in the palm oil industry need that income.
And the communities that depend on the forests, the indigenous groups, the smallholder farmers growing rice and vegetables, they're the ones who lose.
It's rarely the same people on both sides of that equation.
En Indonesia, el arroz es muy importante.
In Indonesia, rice is very important.
El arroz es la comida principal.
Rice is the main food.
And Indonesia has historically been one of the world's largest rice producers.
The word 'nasi,' which is the Indonesian and Malay word for cooked rice, appears in the names of so many dishes.
Nasi goreng, nasi padang.
Rice is not a side dish there.
Rice is the thing.
Nasi goreng es arroz frito.
Nasi goreng is fried rice.
Es muy popular.
It is very popular.
La gente come nasi goreng todos los días.
People eat nasi goreng every day.
I ate it for breakfast every morning when I was in Jakarta, which I realize sounds strange if you're American and breakfast means eggs or cereal, but a plate of nasi goreng with a fried egg on top at seven in the morning is one of the great pleasures of traveling in that part of the world.
Los americanos y el desayuno.
Americans and breakfast.
Siempre es muy raro para mí.
It is always very strange to me.
Meaning what, exactly?
Pancakes are wrong?
Because I will defend pancakes.
Los pancakes con sirope.
Pancakes with syrup.
Eso no es desayuno.
That is not breakfast.
Eso es postre.
That is dessert.
We are not resolving that debate today.
But here, let me pull the thread back to where we started: a power outage on a huge, profoundly important island that is simultaneously feeding the world, being transformed by global demand, and facing infrastructure vulnerabilities that a single bad night can expose.
La electricidad es muy importante para la comida.
Electricity is very important for food.
Sin luz, hay muchos problemas.
Without light, there are many problems.
And it's a reminder that food security isn't just about whether there's enough food.
It's about whether the cold chain holds, whether the market can open, whether the small vendor can keep his fish from spoiling on a night when the grid fails.
It's fragile in ways we don't really think about when we're walking through a supermarket.
Oye, Fletcher.
Hey, Fletcher.
Antes digo 'se pone mala' para la comida.
Before I say 'se pone mala' for the food.
¿Entiendes?
Do you understand?
I thought I did, but now I'm second-guessing myself.
'Se pone mala,' the food 'puts itself bad'?
Like it becomes bad on its own?
Sí.
Yes.
'Ponerse' es cambiar de estado.
'Ponerse' is to change state.
La comida se pone mala.
The food becomes bad.
El cielo se pone oscuro.
The sky becomes dark.
Tú te pones nervioso.
You become nervous.
Oh, that's actually really elegant.
It's a reflexive verb for transformation.
The food transforms itself into a bad version of itself.
We'd say 'goes bad' in English, which is interesting because 'go' is doing the same job there, marking a change of state.
Exacto.
Exactly.
'Ponerse' más adjetivo.
'Ponerse' plus adjective.
'Se pone frío.' 'Se pone viejo.' Es muy útil.
'It becomes cold.' 'It becomes old.' It is very useful.
So 'se pone mala' isn't just 'it goes bad,' it's more like something actively changing, shifting into a new state.
And in the context of fish spoiling on a hot Sumatran night with no electricity, I think that's exactly the right word.
There's almost a feeling of inevitability to it.
Y tú, Fletcher.
And you, Fletcher.
Cuando hablas español mal, te pones muy rojo.
When you speak Spanish badly, you become very red.
I prefer to say I 'se pone avergonzado.' Not embarazado.
We've been through this.
Sí.
Yes.
La mamá de Octavio recuerda.
Octavio's mother remembers.
Siempre.
Always.