A2 · Elementary
12 min
food securityenergygeopoliticseconomics
The Oil That Feeds Us
El Aceite que nos da de Comer
JPMorgan analysts warn that oil inventories in OECD countries could run out between May 9 and May 30. Fletcher and Octavio explore how oil became the invisible foundation of everything we eat.
JPMorgan advierte que los inventarios de petróleo de los países de la OCDE podrían agotarse entre el 9 y el 30 de mayo. Fletcher y Octavio exploran cómo el petróleo se convirtió en la base invisible de todo lo que comemos.
8 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| petróleo | oil, petroleum | El petróleo es muy importante para los camiones. |
| inventario | inventory, stock | El supermercado tiene poco inventario. |
| se acaba | runs out, is running out | Se me acaba el aceite de oliva. |
| caro | expensive | El aceite de oliva está muy caro ahora. |
| local | local | Compro verduras locales en el mercado. |
| cadena | chain | La cadena de frío es muy importante para la carne. |
| guardar | to keep, to store | Mi abuela guarda comida para seis meses. |
| precio | price | Los precios en el supermercado están altos. |
JPMorgan released a number this week that I keep turning over in my head.
They're saying OECD oil inventories could hit empty somewhere between May 9th and May 30th.
And my first thought wasn't about gasoline.
It was about bread.
Sí, el petróleo y la comida están juntos.
Yes, oil and food go together.
Siempre.
Always.
Right.
And I think most people, if you ask them, they'd say oil is for cars.
For heating.
They don't think about the fact that the tomato on their plate probably traveled five hundred miles in a refrigerated truck.
El tomate viaja mucho.
The tomato travels far.
Y el camión necesita petróleo.
And the truck needs oil.
But it's deeper than transportation, isn't it.
The fertilizer that grew the tomato, the plastic wrapping it, the cold chain keeping it fresh.
Every step has oil in it somewhere.
En España, el aceite de oliva es muy importante.
In Spain, olive oil is very important.
Pero sin petróleo, no hay aceite de oliva.
But without petroleum, there is no olive oil.
That's an interesting way to put it.
The machines that harvest the olives, the trucks that carry them, the factories that press them.
It all runs on crude.
Antes, las personas hacían todo con las manos.
Before, people did everything by hand.
Ahora, las máquinas hacen el trabajo.
Now, machines do the work.
Which takes us back to the mid-twentieth century, because this shift, this marriage between food and fossil fuel, really crystallized around one thing: the Green Revolution.
La Revolución Verde produce mucha comida.
The Green Revolution produces a lot of food.
Pero necesita petróleo para los fertilizantes.
But it needs oil for the fertilizers.
Exactly.
Norman Borlaug wins the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for developing high-yield wheat varieties.
He's credited with saving a billion lives.
But the wheat those varieties produced required nitrogen fertilizer, and nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas.
The calories people were eating were essentially fossilized sunlight.
La comida es energía.
Food is energy.
Y la energía viene del petróleo ahora.
And energy comes from oil now.
There's a figure I've seen cited, and it stays with you.
To produce one calorie of food in the modern industrial system, you burn roughly ten calories of fossil fuel.
Ten to one.
The math only works as long as oil is cheap.
Y ahora el petróleo no es barato.
And now oil is not cheap.
Hay una guerra.
There is a war.
The Strait of Hormuz, right.
About twenty percent of the world's oil and a substantial chunk of its LNG passes through that corridor.
When that gets disrupted, the shockwaves hit food prices within weeks, not months.
En el supermercado, los precios suben.
At the supermarket, prices go up.
Las personas tienen menos dinero.
People have less money.
And that hits differently depending on where you are.
In the United States, food is about twelve, thirteen percent of average household spending.
In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, it's closer to sixty.
When the price goes up ten percent, that's the difference between eating and not eating for a lot of families.
Sí.
Yes.
Los pobres compran menos comida primero.
The poor buy less food first.
I was in Buenos Aires in 2002, right in the middle of the financial collapse.
I remember going to a neighborhood market in Palermo and just watching the shelves.
Things would appear for a few hours and then vanish.
People were doing calculations in their heads before every purchase.
Argentina tiene mucha comida.
Argentina has a lot of food.
Pero la gente no tiene dinero para comprarla.
But people do not have money to buy it.
Es muy triste.
It is very sad.
That paradox, a country sitting on grain and beef and it can't feed its own people because of how the economics are structured, that's one of the darker ironies I've seen in reporting.
And it keeps happening.
En España, tenemos mucha fruta y verdura.
In Spain, we have a lot of fruit and vegetables.
Pero los precios están más altos ahora.
But prices are higher now.
How much has it changed at the market?
Like, day to day, has this Hormuz situation changed what people are buying or how they're talking about food?
Sí.
Yes.
El aceite de oliva está muy caro.
Olive oil is very expensive.
Las personas compran menos.
People buy less.
Olive oil being expensive in Spain is genuinely unsettling.
That's not just an economic indicator, that's a cultural one.
El aceite de oliva es la base de la cocina española.
Olive oil is the base of Spanish cuisine.
Sin aceite, no hay cocina española.
Without oil, there is no Spanish cuisine.
Es serio.
It is serious.
And this is partly about petroleum prices, but it's also about climate.
Spain's olive harvest has been hit hard by drought two years running.
So you have two crises converging on the same bottle.
Hay poca agua y mucho calor.
There is little water and a lot of heat.
Los árboles de olivo necesitan agua.
Olive trees need water.
Now, let's go back to the JPMorgan number for a second.
May 9 to May 30.
That's an extraordinarily narrow window.
If inventories actually run dry, the immediate food-system effect isn't that the shelves empty overnight.
It's that the cost of moving everything, literally everything, spikes at once.
Los camiones llevan la comida.
Trucks carry the food.
Sin petróleo, los camiones no van.
Without oil, the trucks don't go.
And the cold chain is the part that frightens me most.
You can store grains for months.
But fresh produce, dairy, meat, fish, these things require constant refrigeration.
That system runs on electricity, which in a lot of countries still runs on fossil fuels.
Break one link and the whole chain fails fast.
En el pasado, las personas guardaban comida en sal o en aceite.
In the past, people kept food in salt or in oil.
No necesitaban electricidad.
They did not need electricity.
Salt cod, jamón, pickled vegetables, fermented everything.
The whole pre-industrial food preservation tradition was essentially a hedge against exactly this kind of vulnerability.
We've traded resilience for convenience.
El jamón ibérico puede durar mucho tiempo.
Iberian ham can last a long time.
Los abuelos saben esto.
Grandparents know this.
Your grandmother's pantry was basically a food security strategy.
She just didn't call it that.
Sí.
Yes.
Mi abuela tiene siempre comida para seis meses en casa.
My grandmother always has food for six months at home.
Now here's the piece that genuinely keeps analysts up at night.
The three countries most exposed to a sudden oil inventory shock in terms of food are also among the most politically fragile right now.
Egypt imports more wheat per capita than almost any country on earth, mostly from Ukraine and Russia.
A price spike doesn't just mean hunger there;
it historically means protest, and protest in Cairo can change governments.
La comida y la política están juntas.
Food and politics go together.
El pan es poder.
Bread is power.
Panem et circenses.
The Romans figured that out.
Keep people fed and keep them entertained and you can hold power basically forever.
Take away the bread and you've got about forty-eight hours before things get complicated.
En Madrid, la gente protesta cuando la vida es cara.
In Madrid, people protest when life is expensive.
Ahora, los precios están altos.
Now, prices are high.
And here's the other dimension of this that I find fascinating.
The countries that are least exposed to an oil-food shock are not necessarily the richest.
They're the ones with the most local, diverse food systems.
Parts of West Africa with strong subsistence agriculture.
Certain mountain communities in Peru or Bolivia.
They never fully plugged into the industrial system, and right now that looks like foresight.
Hay un mercado en mi barrio.
There is a market in my neighborhood.
Los vendedores venden verduras locales.
The sellers sell local vegetables.
Eso es bueno.
That is good.
Mercado de barrio.
That might actually be the smartest piece of infrastructure a city has right now, and nobody puts it in the resilience report.
Pero muchos mercados cierran.
But many markets are closing.
Los supermercados grandes son más baratos.
The big supermarkets are cheaper.
Cheaper in normal times.
The supermarket model only works because of long supply chains, and long supply chains only work because of cheap oil.
It's a system optimized for one set of conditions, and we may be leaving those conditions behind.
Antes había muchas tiendas pequeñas.
Before there were many small shops.
Una para el pan, una para la carne, una para las verduras.
One for bread, one for meat, one for vegetables.
The panadería, the carnicería, the frutería.
I actually love that system when I'm in Spain.
It feels slower, but the quality of what you buy is completely different.
Pero Fletcher, tú compras en el supermercado también.
But Fletcher, you also buy at the supermarket.
I do.
In Austin I buy in a supermarket the size of an aircraft hangar.
I have no standing here whatsoever.
En España, el problema ahora es el precio.
In Spain, the problem now is the price.
La gente tiene menos dinero cada mes.
People have less money each month.
And wages aren't keeping up.
That's the real squeeze.
It's not that shelves are empty, it's that the calculus of what you can afford has quietly shifted.
People are buying cheaper cuts of meat, skipping the olive oil, switching from fresh to frozen.
These are small individual adjustments that, when you add them up across a country, tell you something is wrong.
Mi vecina compra menos carne ahora.
My neighbor buys less meat now.
Antes compra carne cada día.
Before she used to buy meat every day.
Your neighbor is the JPMorgan report made human.
The numbers filter down eventually to one woman buying less at the butcher on a Tuesday morning.
Sí.
Yes.
Los números son personas.
The numbers are people.
No es solo economía.
It is not just economics.
So what's the way out of this structurally?
Because the Iran situation will resolve itself eventually, one way or another, but the underlying dependency on fossil fuels in the food system is a permanent vulnerability.
What does a more resilient food system actually look like?
Hay que comprar comida local.
You have to buy local food.
Hay que cocinar más en casa.
You have to cook more at home.
Es más sano y más barato.
It is healthier and cheaper.
Cook more at home.
I feel like that's the beginning of wisdom and also deeply inconvenient for anyone with a job and a commute and two kids.
En España, la comida en casa es importante.
In Spain, eating at home is important.
La familia come junta.
The family eats together.
Es la cultura.
It is the culture.
And that cultural habit, eating together, cooking from actual ingredients, has been quietly dying in a lot of places.
When I was in Jakarta in the nineties, every neighborhood had a warungs, these tiny family-run food stalls where you ate local food cooked by someone's mother.
That system was profoundly oil-independent.
Then the fast food chains came in.
La comida rápida usa mucho petróleo.
Fast food uses a lot of oil.
Los ingredientes vienen de muy lejos.
The ingredients come from very far away.
A hamburger eaten in Madrid might have beef from Brazil, lettuce from Morocco, tomatoes from the Netherlands, a bun made from Canadian wheat.
Every ingredient crossed an ocean or a continent.
And if you laid out the fossil fuel cost of that single meal, it would be genuinely staggering.
Un bocadillo de jamón ibérico es diferente.
A Iberian ham sandwich is different.
Todo viene de España.
Everything comes from Spain.
So the bocadillo de jamón is actually the geopolitically responsible choice.
I need to remember that the next time someone judges me for eating one at eleven in the morning.
Las once de la mañana es un poco tarde para el desayuno, Fletcher.
Eleven in the morning is a bit late for breakfast, Fletcher.
In Austin, eleven is practically dawn.
Look, what I take from all of this, from the JPMorgan warning, from the olive oil prices, from your neighbor at the butcher, is that the food system is a mirror.
It reflects every other system.
Energy, climate, logistics, geopolitics.
When something breaks anywhere in the chain, it shows up first at the dinner table.
Sí.
Yes.
La mesa es el primer lugar donde vemos los problemas del mundo.
The table is the first place where we see the world's problems.
On that note, I want to ask you about something you said a few minutes ago, because you used a verb I really want to nail down.
You said the inventories 'se van a acabar.' And I know 'acabar' but you've used it in a few different ways today.
Bueno, 'acabar' significa terminar.
Well, 'acabar' means to finish or to run out.
El petróleo se acaba.
The oil runs out.
La leche se acaba.
The milk runs out.
El dinero se acaba.
The money runs out.
So 'se acaba' is specifically for things that are used up, that run out.
Not just things that end in a general sense.
Sí.
Yes.
'Se me acaba el aceite' significa: yo no tengo más aceite.
'Se me acaba el aceite' means: I have no more oil.
Es muy útil en la cocina.
It is very useful in the kitchen.
So 'se me acaba el aceite' is basically the sentence that describes both my kitchen situation and the entire global energy crisis simultaneously.
I feel like I can use that phrase a lot.
Y también puedes decir 'se me acaba la paciencia', Fletcher.
And you can also say 'my patience is running out,' Fletcher.
Con tu español.
With your Spanish.