There's a scene that keeps coming back to the supermarket aisles these past few months. A shopper stops in front of the pasta, picks up a packet, puts it back, then takes two. Then three. He isn't quite sure why. The night before, the news was talking about the Strait of Hormuz and a barrel of oil creeping back up. He's been told it's “not like 2022.” He only half believes it. So he buys pasta.
That tiny gesture says just about everything about our current relationship with the plate. The war in Ukraine has dragged on long enough that we've stopped mentioning it in every news bulletin, and this spring's flare-up with Iran has reopened a wound we thought had healed: the fear of going short. Not hunger, no. Fear. It's not the same thing, and it's precisely that gap that makes this moment so strange to write about.
Two wars, one bill
On paper, the numbers almost invite calm. The FAO food price index stood at 130.3 points in June, slightly down from May, dragged lower by sugar, cereals and dairy. We could rejoice and close the file. That would be moving too fast.
Because behind the global average, the machinery is already back in motion. Ukraine means the wheat and sunflower oil that a good part of the planet depends on, a shipping corridor held together by willpower and fragile agreements. Iran, or more precisely Hormuz, is something else: gas, oil, and therefore fertiliser. And fertiliser, we tend to forget, is the real core of the reactor. A farmer who pays more for his ammonia in spring produces less, or produces at a loss, and that bill doesn't show up on the shelf right away. It arrives later, with the quiet lag of a harvest.
The FAO is under no illusion. Its chief economist, Maximo Torero, warned that the tensions around Hormuz could mark “the beginning of a systemic agrifood shock,” with full effect within six to twelve months. Energy first, then fertiliser and seeds, then falling yields, then a spike in prices and finally inflation at the table. The window to act, he says, “is closing rapidly.” Translation: what we'll be eating this winter and next year is being decided right now, in fields and ministries, not in our shopping carts.
Do we eat out of fear?
That leaves the real question, the one that interests me: and us, in all this? How does a country eat when it is afraid without being hungry?
In two contradictory ways, and often within the same person. First there's the comfort reflex. Stress raises cortisol, cortisol calls for fat and sugar, and nobody has ever managed a bout of geopolitical anxiety over a plate of raw vegetables. Manufacturers know it: when uncertainty rises, sales of biscuits, chocolate and slow-cooked dishes hold up, sometimes better than the rest. You don't console yourself after an anxiety-inducing news broadcast with a detox smoothie. You console yourself with what you ate as a child.
And then there's the opposite movement: fear that tightens the purse strings. There, we cut. We give up the Friday night restaurant — the chains feel it, this “crisis of desire” that observers of consumption talk about, this falling-out of love with going out that we replace with a good meal at home costing three times less. We go back to store brands, we hunt for deals, we stock the cupboard a little “just in case.” The famous extra packet of pasta.
So, comfort or restraint? The two live side by side, and that's what's disorienting. We deprive ourselves of the non-essential the better to reassure ourselves on the essential. We trim the going-out budget, but keep — or even increase — the little sugary treat that stands in for a security blanket. Fear doesn't make us eat less. It makes us eat differently, closer to home, closer to our memories, with one eye on the price and the other on the world.
“Who cares, let's eat”?
There is, of course, the third path, the one you hear at the counter: what if we simply didn't care? That indifference exists, but I think it's badly named. It isn't couldn't-care-less; it's exhaustion. After years of crises piling up — pandemic, Ukraine, inflation, now Iran — the brain ends up switching off the alarm just to stay sane. Eating normally, refusing to stockpile, still treating yourself to a good cut of meat, becomes almost an act of quiet resistance. A way of saying that life goes on. That's respectable. It's even fairly healthy, as long as the bill can keep up.
What's cooking on our plates
That leaves the question of what all this is making for tomorrow, and tomorrow is close. Three trends are already taking shape.
The first is the return to grace of the cupboard and the local. When the faraway becomes a synonym for risk — a strait that can be closed, a corridor that can be shelled — the short supply chain stops being a city-dweller's pose and becomes an insurance policy. We're going to see pulses, tinned goods and thrifty home cooking flourish again, and an agriculture that sells its proximity as an argument for security as much as for taste.
The second is protein under pressure. Meat depends on the price of cereals and energy; if fertiliser soars, livestock takes the hit, and the trade-off will be made by the wallet more than by the conscience. Plant-based alternatives, once carried by ecology, could find a second wind out of pure budgetary reason.
The third, quieter one, is the shift in pleasure. As purchasing power tightens, the small food luxury — the square of good chocolate, the cheese you love — becomes the last rampart against the greyness. We'll cut everywhere, except there. The brands that have understood this no longer sell a product; they sell consolation.
Eating has never been just a matter of calories. It's a barometer of our fears and our hopes, and right now it happens to be swinging a great deal. The good news, if we need one, is that none of these distant wars has emptied our shelves yet. The less good news is that the real shock — the one of fertiliser and harvests — isn't visible yet. It's ripening quietly, somewhere between a Ukrainian field and an Iranian strait, and it will end up like everything else: on our plate.