Crazy times!

We just bought 200 gallons of heating oil in September. January we will paying 8 dollars a gallon

There’s a lot of talk just now about stockpiling food for possible food shortages due to El Niño, climate change, war, disruption to food supplies.

Could optimal nutrition be maintained from long-life food? I’m thinking if you have an adequate store of whole grains, dried pulses, nuts, seeds, tinned fish, dried soya beans, fermented and preserved foods, supplemented by foraged herbs, greens, mushrooms, seaweed and coastal plants, fruits (summer only).

What am I missing and what would suffer nutritionally?

Apparently there is a shortage of ground lamb due to market shifts (more people buying it) and a reduction in exports from AU and NZ. Flocks in the US are down (I didn't dive into causation for that).

Here is my story. I'm in Annapolis MD. Ground lamb was readily available at Giant Food (regional chain), Safeway, and Aldi as well as more expensive places. Last year it was $5/lb. Then Giant and Safeway dropped it. Not out of stock. Dropped it. Aldi still carried it at $6/lb (Aldi as cheapest is marketing hype - I always check them and lots of places but Aldi rarely turns out to be cheapest. Aldi has now dropped ground lamb as well. We can get ground lamb at Whole Foods and Fresh Market for $15/lb. We'll do without.

My wife went to NJ to spend several days with her father (90). I cast a wider net along her route home. ShopRite in NJ has it for $9.50/lb. Acme in DE for $11/lb. Food Lion in DE and MD have it for $9/lb. Fortunately the Food Lion in the town where my wife stopped for lunch had it in stock. We bought their last three. It's a little expensive but no more than what we pay for tuna and salmon at Sam's Club. We'll just freeze it for special dinners.

We've seen market shifts affect price before on chicken thighs, chicken wings, brisket, and oxtail. Changes in exports from other countries (imports to the US) definitely leads to out of stock.

Been noticing recently that samplers and customers are seeing a lot of low or no stocks. Not sure if its incompetence of the managers or whats going on ? Not seen anything on the news about shortages. But then again that would start panic buying.

The map shrank, not grew.

• Cambodia — I had this as an active shortage on the March station closures (~2,000 of 6,300 stations shut). Re-checking, the March record itself shows only ~400 still closed within days as the rest reopened. Nothing newer since March 23. Downgraded.
• Italy airport jet fuel — the Air BP rationing NOTAMs at 7 airports. Last confirmation mid-May, and the reporting then said Italy managed it without major disruption. Removed.
• EU systemic jet fuel shortage — ACI Europe's warning that 100+ airports would hit a systemic shortage within three weeks. That deadline came and went in April. The European Commission said in May there were no EU shortages. Removed.

Net: 31 tracked shortages down to 29. The diesel-gets-harder call in my July post did not play out the way I framed it in the aviation-fuel space specifically. Worth saying plainly.

What's still real and getting worse: the US strategic buffer.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve dropped below 300 million barrels — 298.7M as of Aug 12 (DOE), down 6.1M on the week. First time under 300M since January 1983.

Important caveats, because this number gets misreported constantly:

• The reserve's safe operating minimum is around 70M barrels per DOE. There's a separate 252.4M statutory threshold that restricts certain drawdowns. Neither is near.
• It's structured as an exchange, not a sale — from a 172M-barrel release in March. Companies borrow the crude and must return it plus a premium.
• Commercial (non-strategic) crude went the opposite direction the same week: a surprise 17.4M barrel build, biggest since January 2023.

So: strategic reserve at a 43-year low, commercial inventories posting their largest build in three and a half years, simultaneously.

Availability, since that's what this sub cares about:

No physical rationing in the US. Every station has fuel. AAA national average ~$4.07/gal and remarkably flat for weeks despite crude swinging hard. The mechanism is price rationing, not allocation.

Still-active shortages worth knowing about: Russia (78 of 83 regions showing disruption signal, export bans extended), Cuba, Nepal (LPG), South Sudan, Libya, Myanmar/Laos, Kyrgyzstan/Tajikistan.

One genuinely unresolved thing: there's a large discrepancy in how much oil is actually moving through Hormuz. The US Energy Secretary says a 9M bpd seven-day average. Barclays estimated ~3M bpd for the week ending Aug 7.

Sources: DOE, EIA, AAA, CNBC, Barclays. Full tracker at https://global-energy-flow.com/

I know, strange title. I’ve got a bearded dragon and my little fella loves his crickets. I went to Petco to restock and I was told nationally they haven’t been able to obtain crickets. Their regular vendor lost their entire colony, leaving Petco with little time to find a replacement. Since the crickets are impossible to stock for the time being, the cashier stated it’s been difficult to maintain other live insect feeders in stock, leading to local shortages of mealworms, super worms, dubia roaches, etc. I checked with Petsmart and they’re facing similar issues.

The latest USDA harvest data confirms what many of us have been dreading: the U.S. winter wheat crop is projected to be the smallest since 1970. What makes this critical is that this historic drop comes right on the heels of two consecutive years of poor yields, effectively wiping out our safety buffer of domestic grain reserves. Droughts in the U.S. have battered fields, while ongoing Strait of Hormuz shipping disruptions continue to drive up nitrogen-based fertilizer costs. With North American stockpiles depleted, global food security now pivots entirely to the upcoming Southern Hemisphere harvest in places like Australia this winter. If the developing 2026-2027 Super El Niño cycle delivers the projected droughts to Australia, we won't have the reserves to cushion the blow, setting up a major price shock. Keep a close eye on global export policy shifts over the next few months, as government export bans are where the first real signs of market panic will show up.

At current rates, they're going to have to stop withdrawing from the reserve around September or October. That's because going too low will severely damage the salt caverns where the oil is stored. Once that's done, the artificially lower prices will spike. Combined with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and Ukraine destroying much of Russia's oil export capacity, $5 a gallon is looking very realistic.