A2 · Elementary
9 min
food and cultureglobal tradegeopoliticshistory
The Flavor of the World: India, Spices, and the Cost of a Crisis
El sabor del mundo: India, las especias y el precio de una crisis
This week, India's three major airlines warned the government they may stop operations due to the Strait of Hormuz closure. Fletcher and Octavio use the story as a door into the history of Indian spices, how Indian food changed the world, and why a crisis at sea affects what ends up on your plate.
Esta semana, las tres grandes aerolíneas de India advirtieron al gobierno que pueden dejar de operar por el cierre del Estrecho de Ormuz. Fletcher y Octavio usan esta noticia para explorar la historia de las especias indias, cómo la comida de India cambió el mundo, y por qué una crisis en el mar afecta lo que comemos.
6 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| especias | spices | Las especias de India son muy famosas en el mundo. |
| lentejas | lentils | Las lentejas son baratas y tienen mucha proteína. |
| arroz | rice | India exporta mucho arroz al mundo. |
| exportar | to export | España exporta aceite de oliva y vino. |
| el petróleo | oil (petroleum) | Cuando el petróleo sube, la comida sube también. |
| la raíz | root (linguistic or botanical) | La palabra 'lentejas' tiene la misma raíz en español y en inglés. |
A friend of mine who spent twenty years covering South Asia used to say that every major global crisis eventually shows up on someone's dinner plate.
This week I think he's been proven right.
Air India, IndiGo, and SpiceJet, which together carry most of the flying public in a country of 1.4 billion people, told the Indian government they are, quote, on the verge of stopping operations.
The reason is fuel costs, driven up by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz during the Iran war.
Now I want to talk about food.
Because India and food have a relationship that goes back thousands of years and touches almost every cuisine you've ever eaten, and I think most people don't fully appreciate that.
La comida de India es muy importante.
Indian food is very important.
Las especias son muy importantes.
Spices are very important.
Right, and that word, "especias," spices, is basically the reason Europeans sailed off the edge of the known world in the fifteenth century.
Columbus wasn't looking for America.
He was looking for pepper.
Sí, la pimienta es de India.
Yes, pepper is from India.
Es muy antigua.
It is very old.
Very old is putting it mildly.
Peppercorns were found in the nostrils of Ramesses II when they unwrapped his mummy.
The Egyptians were using Indian pepper in embalming three thousand years ago.
That trade route, connecting the subcontinent to the Mediterranean, is one of the oldest in human history.
India tiene muchas especias.
India has many spices.
La canela, el cardamomo, el jengibre.
Cinnamon, cardamom, ginger.
And those three alone, cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, you find them in every major food culture on earth.
Scandinavian pastries, Moroccan tagines, Mexican hot chocolate.
They all trace back to the Indian subcontinent or the trade networks India anchored.
El curry tiene muchas especias.
Curry has many spices.
Es comida nacional de India.
It is the national food of India.
Well, here's a thing that surprised me when I first learned it.
"Curry" is essentially a British invention.
There's no single dish called curry in India.
What the British encountered was a whole universe of spiced dishes, sauces, stews, and they collapsed all of it into one word when they brought it home.
Exacto.
Exactly.
En India hay muchos platos diferentes.
In India there are many different dishes.
No es un plato.
It is not one dish.
So give me a sense of the range.
What are we actually talking about when we talk about Indian food?
En el norte hay naan y pollo.
In the north there is naan and chicken.
En el sur hay arroz y lentejas.
In the south there is rice and lentils.
Es muy diferente.
It is very different.
The north-south divide in Indian cooking is genuinely as stark as the difference between, say, French cuisine and Moroccan cuisine.
The north is wheat, dairy, rich meat dishes, Mughal influence.
The south is rice, coconut, tamarind, a lot more vegetarian cooking rooted in Hindu and Jain traditions.
Muchas personas en India no comen carne.
Many people in India do not eat meat.
Es una tradición religiosa.
It is a religious tradition.
India has more vegetarians than the entire rest of the world combined.
Something like 400 million people.
And their vegetarian cooking isn't a compromise, it's centuries of refinement.
Dal, the lentil dish, has more regional variations than pasta does in Italy.
Las lentejas son muy importantes en India.
Lentils are very important in India.
Son baratas y buenas.
They are cheap and good.
Cheap, nutritious, versatile, and now, with global supply chains under pressure from this Hormuz crisis, increasingly expensive everywhere.
That's the part that connects our opening story to dinner tables well beyond India.
Cuando el petróleo sube, la comida sube también.
When oil goes up, food goes up too.
Es un problema grande.
It is a big problem.
That link between oil prices and food prices is something a lot of people don't think about until they're standing at the checkout and wondering why their grocery bill just jumped.
Fertilizer is made from natural gas.
Trucks run on diesel.
Cold storage runs on electricity.
The whole food system floats on fossil fuels.
India exporta arroz y trigo al mundo.
India exports rice and wheat to the world.
Es muy importante para África.
It is very important for Africa.
India is actually the world's largest exporter of rice.
Full stop.
And when India gets squeezed, whether by drought, by fuel costs, by a shipping crisis, countries in Africa and the Middle East that depend on Indian grain feel it fast.
En 2023, India paró las exportaciones de arroz.
In 2023, India stopped rice exports.
Los precios subieron mucho.
Prices went up a lot.
That's exactly right.
India banned most rice exports in 2023, rice prices globally spiked thirty percent almost overnight, and it barely made the front page in the West.
But for countries where rice is the primary calorie source, it was a genuine crisis.
La comida es política.
Food is politics.
Siempre.
Always.
Completely.
And India understood this early.
The spice trade wasn't just commerce, it was geopolitical leverage.
The Mughal emperors used control of trade routes the way modern states use sanctions.
You want the pepper, you deal with us on our terms.
Los ingleses llegaron a India por las especias.
The English came to India for the spices.
Y después se quedaron.
And then they stayed.
The East India Company, which started in 1600 as a spice trading venture, ended up controlling a subcontinent.
It's one of history's more staggering mission creeps.
They came for the cardamom and left two hundred and fifty years later having run a country.
Y la comida india llegó a todo el mundo con los ingleses.
And Indian food arrived all over the world with the English.
Which is a remarkable irony.
The British colonized India, extracted its wealth, and in the process became so addicted to its food that today chicken tikka masala is essentially a British national dish.
There's a real justice to that, honestly.
En España también hay mucha influencia de la comida árabe.
In Spain there is also a lot of Arab food influence.
Las especias viajan.
Spices travel.
Spices travel and they change everything they touch.
Saffron in a Valencian paella, cinnamon in a Moroccan stew that migrated north over centuries, cumin in a Tex-Mex dish that I grew up eating in Texas without ever wondering where those flavors came from.
The answer is almost always: a long, long way.
El azafrán es muy caro.
Saffron is very expensive.
España produce mucho azafrán.
Spain produces a lot of saffron.
La Mancha saffron, yes.
Though I will say that the first time I tasted really good saffron was in a market in Tehran, back in, must have been 2001, and the vendor told me Iran produced ninety percent of the world's supply.
Which is another dimension of the current Hormuz crisis that nobody's really talking about.
Sí, la guerra en Irán afecta la comida.
Yes, the war in Iran affects food.
No solo el petróleo.
Not just oil.
Iranian saffron, Iranian pistachios, Iranian dried fruits, all of those supply chains are disrupted right now.
And when those disrupt, you don't just lose ingredients.
You lose generations of agricultural knowledge, regional varieties, farming practices that took centuries to develop.
War doesn't only destroy buildings.
La comida tiene memoria.
Food has memory.
Es cultura, no solo nutrición.
It is culture, not just nutrition.
That's the thing I keep coming back to.
We talk about food security in terms of calories and supply chains and price indices.
But food is also where a culture keeps its identity.
When the Indian diaspora cooks their grandmother's dal in London or Toronto, they're doing something that no trade disruption can entirely sever.
Mi madre hace una sopa especial.
My mother makes a special soup.
Es de su pueblo en Castilla.
It is from her village in Castile.
Muy simple, muy buena.
Very simple, very good.
Every family has that dish.
The one that doesn't need a recipe because the recipe lives in someone's hands.
That's what we're talking about when we talk about food as culture, and it's what makes this conversation bigger than one airline industry warning.
Oye, antes dijiste 'dal'.
Hey, you said 'dal' before.
¿Sabes cómo se dice en español?
Do you know how to say it in Spanish?
I was going to say lentejas indias and hope for the best.
Is there actually a Spanish word for it?
No, decimos 'dal'.
No, we say 'dal'.
Pero 'lentejas' es la palabra.
But 'lentejas' is the word.
Las lentejas son muy españolas también.
Lentils are very Spanish too.
And that word, lentejas, where does it actually come from?
Because lentil in English comes from the Latin lens, as in the optical lens, named for its shape.
Is it the same root in Spanish?
Sí, es la misma raíz.
Yes, it is the same root.
'Lens' en latín es la lenteja.
'Lens' in Latin is the lentil.
La forma circular.
The circular shape.
So every time an optician hands you a lens, you're holding a lentil.
Etymologically speaking.
I genuinely did not know that, and now I will never not think about it.
That's either very satisfying or very inconvenient.
La comida y el idioma tienen mucha historia juntos.
Food and language have a lot of history together.
Como nosotros hoy.
Like us today.
Like us today.
I'll take that as a proper ending.
Three airlines, one crisis, and a two-thousand-year-old trade in things that make food worth eating.
Not a bad hour's work.