SUNDAY, MAY 8 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD B3
someone opens a delivery, a faucet running,
the clanging of cookware. Parents stare at their
mobiles while their children long for atten-
tion. At Trader Joe’s, shoppers throw items in
the cart while carrying on an animated conver-
sation with someone invisible to the rest of us.
I am no different, my attention inevitably
divided. But this is not how my mother ap-
proaches life.
To connect with her in the most meaningful
way, “in the moment” is where I need to be.
This is evident when I am not in a hurry or
juggling work emails and Slack messages
while tending to her. By listening carefully to
the timbre of her voice, or observing the look
on her face, I can often tell whether she needs
to be disarmed or calmed, reassured or direct-
ed. She imparts the virtues of patience and
compassion, and the value of a single focus by
requiring it of me. I can then appreciate
something else: how my fading mother has
unknowingly become my teacher.
Even something as simple as turning off the
TV should be carried out with purpose and
without undue haste. She helps me remember
to walk her through tasks as if she is experienc-
ing them for the first time, because according
to her memory, she is. If she does not know
which button to press, even though she has
pressed it a hundred times, I must reassure her
that she is not dumb, that the remote control’s
assemblage, with all its buttons, arrows andpleasant and respectful with others, never
trivializing her interactions with them, even if
the content of the exchanges was trivial.
These days my mom can’t remember where
her purse is and forgets that she wears the key
to her door around her neck. Her most com-
mon refrains, often mumbled through tears: “I
am useless!” “I am an idiot” and “Stop wasting
your time on me.” Though I vehemently pro-
test, it has little impact.
I am haunted by regret that I was not more
helpful to her growing up. In the fourth grade,
I should have humiliated the kids at the pool
who called her “fat Chinese.” As a teen, I should
have taken the dog out more or assisted with
dishes and laundry so she didn’t have to stay
up so late. And in my early 20s, when we
commuted to New York together, I should have
berated the men in suits on the crowded trains
for not giving up their seats for her.
I can’t change the past, but I can make up for
it in the present, partly by being available to
her now.
In real life, outside of yoga or meditation
classes where we’re encouraged to be “in the
moment,” few things get our undivided atten-
tion. Increasingly, we are emboldened to mul-
titask. Colleagues attend Zoom meetings from
their cars; some even while driving. Others
turn off cameras, attending only as names on
the screen. Are they really there? During phone
calls, I hear the rustling of packaging asTaking care of a
loved one can mean
slowing down and
focusing on them,
in contrast to the
multitasking rush
of daily life.numbers, is absurdly confusing — to anyone.
It helps if I slow down my pace to half or
quarter time. Instead of snapping at her, I can
say: “Tell me what you see,” and then wait,
thereby meeting her where she is. I can remind
her that it’s okay if she forgets and remind
myself that the work email isn’t all that crucial
either. I can put my work on pause. This is
mindfulness in practice, is it not?
The reward when I’m patient: She smiles
and says, “I did it!” Rather than feeling inept,
she feels successful. And I feel a gust of
pleasure.
Toggling between her slower world and my
other one, of do-everything-as-fast-as-you-
can, I slip all the time. But some small adjust-
ments have helped. If I have only a minute
before a video call, or I’m in the middle of a
complicated spreadsheet, or I’m starving, it’s
not the right time to take a call from her. If my
mom can’t figure out how to change the TV
channel, it’s not a crisis. And if I take better
care of myself — put on my own oxygen mask
first — it’s easier to be kind.
The extent of my mother’s multitasking was
listening to Peabo Bryson while she cooked or
folded laundry. If we’d had today’s technology
back when she was at her fullest self, would
she have shouted commands at Alexa, texted,
made phone calls and read her email all at the
same time, as I do? Of course, I will never
know. But given her nature, I doubt it.
Visiting her now, I notice how irritated her
skin is. Normally, I’d view this as yet another
thing I must take care of for her, and so I would
briskly slather her hands and arms with lotion,
wanting to get it over with. But lately I go
slowly, turning it into a mini-massage. First, I
tell her to sit in her comfy chair and prop her
feet up on the ottoman. Then I roll up her shirt
sleeves to her biceps and tell her that I am
going to apply a cooling lotion that will soothe
her itch. “You don’t have to do that,” she says,
helping me lift her sleeves as high as they go. I
work her soft, fleshy arms with gentle pres-
sure, smoothing the lotion into her skin, and
she says “Kimochii!” (“Feels good!”) These are
the hands that held mine as a child; these are
the forearms that accomplished everything.
By taking my time, she relaxes into the ex-
change. But still, she playfully protests — that
unworthy thing again.
“I am not a king!” she says.
Oh but you are, I want to say. A king and a
queen and so much more.W
hen I heard the crickets chirping, my
heart clenched. It was the sound I
have assigned to my 85-year-old
mother’s calls. Had she fallen? Had my father,
whom she looks after, taken a turn for the
worse? Or was she calling to say, for the third
time, that she’s almost out of toothpaste?
Even though I was busy in the middle of a
workday, I answered: “Hi, Ma.”
“How do you turn off the TV?”
This would be quick. I swiped my phone for
the photo of her remote. “See the button with
the gold star sticker?” I said, in broken Japa-
nese.
“Star sticker?”
“Yeah, I put a sticker on the button, remem-
ber? Press that button.”
Silence.
“Ma?” My eyes toggled back to the work
email that I’d abandoned, mid-sentence, while
three new messages populated my inbox. I
searched for something I could hurl against
the wall.
“Just press it!” I flared. “Any button! See
what happens!”
In the background, I could hear the tinny
voices from the TV and the pounding of my
heart. But nothing from her. I slammed my
phone down on the kitchen table.
“I am sorry,” she said, her voice breaking,
“that I am so stupid.”
“Ma, you’re not stupid.”
She is the person I love most in the world.
When I see her slumped on her bed, forlorn
as she often is these days, I daydream about
the smiling, dimpled mom of my childhood
years who once made a cover for my flute case
with my name, Erika, embroidered in cursive,
dotting the “i” with an exquisite heart. I
reminisce about the messages she included in
the bagged school lunches she made for my
brother and me: on the paper napkin, Have a
nice day!, her beautiful handwriting beside a
drawing of a smiling cat or, if it was October, a
pumpkin. Now, when I cut up apple slices for
her, I recall that when she did the same for me,
she made bunny ears with the skins.
She regularly baked coffee cakes for her
friends, wrapping them like presents. Shut-
tling daily to and from her office in Manhattan
from Princeton on standing-room-only
Amtrak trains, she was always moving, up
before anyone and last to bed, but she didn’t
race through things just to get them done.
When she got home, she never threw her purse
on the floor as I do, but systematically parked
it in a corner of the closet where it couldn’t get
stepped on or lost. Hardly the type to be
resentful or hold grudges, she was unfailingly
Caring for my aging mother has helped me live in the present
I can’t change
the past, but
I can make up
for it in the
present, partly
by being
available
t o h er now,
says Erika
ShimaharaISTOCKTwitter: @eshimaharaErika Shimahara is an educational administrator
with the Stanford University School of Medicine.For hungry countries, where the social con-
tract is shaky, high wheat prices have histori-
cally contributed to political uprisings. A short-
lived change in prices can set off long-simmer-
ing anger. And that’s why governments are
panicking. “When food security is threatened,”
said Bellemare, “then political order is threat-
ened.”
Sudan is a good example. In 2018, Sudan
imposed a series of austerity measures. Bread
prices tripled. By 2019, a wave of bread protests
had ousted the country’s military dictator,
longtime Russian client Omar Hassan al-
Bashir. “The symbol of the protesters when
they turned out on the street against Bashir
was bread,” said Alex de Waal, executive direc-
tor of the World Peace Foundation and a famine
expert. He quoted one of their slogans: “‘You
are stealing the wealth of the country, and we
can’t afford bread’ — which was largely true.”
In 2020, the Sudanese government spent
$916 million on wheat and flour, of which 79
percent was from Russia and 2 percent from
Ukraine. Sudan is now facing currency col-
lapse, massive inflation and a government that
lacks widespread popular support. “Sudan’s
economy is in free fall,” said Kholood Khair,
managing partner at Insight Strategy Partners,
a policy organization based in Khartoum. “For
me, it’s not a case of what does Russia/Ukraine
look like in two or three years. What does
Russia/Ukraine supply of wheat look like im-
mediately, and in the next two to three months,
when supply in Sudan is going to be running
out?”
The situation in Sudan is so bad, said de
Waal, that the inflation rate there actually went
down — not because food got cheaper but
because nobody could afford it: “There’s one
thing worse than hyperinflation, which is
when hyperinflation subsides because no one
has any money.”
Lebanon is in a similar predicament, reelingalready hungry. If well-fed nations panic and
keep prices high, food truly will be unafford-
able for the world’s hungriest people.
“The real concern is much poorer nations,
who cannot compete with the richer countries
in the world,” said Setzer. “We know that will
starve people. But that doesn’t matter in the
face of an inflation trade” — an often specula-
tive investment strategy that seeks to profit
from rising prices.
The combination of supply chain disrup-
tions and high prices is bad news for the
hungry world, which increasingly gets its
wheat from Ukraine and Russia. In 2017, when
Russia became the world’s largest wheat ex-
porter, Putin began to position himself as grain
merchant to some of the world’s hungriest
countries: Last fall, the Financial Times esti-
mated that Russia supplied as much as a third
of wheat imports for the Middle East and
Africa. Turkey, which is struggling with soaring
inflation and a plunging currency, got 85 per-
cent of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine in- The World Food Program, the planet’s
largest humanitarian organization, bought
half its wheat from the Black Sea region in 2021.
All this gives Putin — who never hesitates to
use food as a weapon against civilians —
disproportionate power over the world’s hun-
griest.
Wheat inflation hits lower-income countries
harder for two reasons: Diets there rely more
on carbohydrates, and food makes up a much
higher proportion of overall budgets. In many
low- and middle-income countries, food can
account for close to half of household budgets,
said Marc Bellemare, an agricultural econo-
mist at the University of Minnesota. In the
United States, by contrast, it’s between 7 and 10
percent. “In the U.S., we will feel it a little bit,”
said Bellemare. “People are going to bellyache
about it, but it’s not going to be what it’s like in
other countries.”
from an economic collapse that the World Bank
ranked among the worst of the past 170 years
and that has plunged three-quarters of the
population into poverty.
The Lebanese government, as is the case in
much of the Middle East, subsidizes bread. In
2020, Lebanon imported 66 percent of its
wheat from Ukraine and 12 percent from Rus-
sia. (Lebanon imports 80 percent of its overall
food supply.)
When prices rise past a certain point, gov-
ernments usually draw on grain reserves,
stored in massive silos, to avoid having to buy at
inflated prices. But when thousands of pounds
of ammonium nitrate stored at the Beirut port
exploded in 2020, killing more than 250 people
and damaging 6,000 buildings, the blast also
destroyed the silos holding the country’s only
grain stocks — small and privately held, since
Lebanon mostly relied on just-in-time order-
ing.
In late February, when Putin invaded
Ukraine, the Lebanese government claimed it
had enough reserves to last a month or two. But
Sami Halabi, director of policy at Triangle, a
Beirut-based research institute, didn’t buy it:
Ramadan started April 2, and general elections
are May 15. Political parties usually use elec-
tions and Ramadan as excuses to host lavish
dinners and pass out meals to people. Since the
invasion, the government has raised the price
of subsidized bread twice. Halabi suspects that
the government will keep bread prices more or
less stable until the elections are over — then let
them skyrocket. The worst-case scenario, and
probably the most likely one, is a repeat of what
happened last summer: blackouts, fuel short-
ages and runaway food inflation — fivefold
over two years, according to the World Food
Program — all compounding to create an un-
precedented hunger crisis.
The well-fed world can do a few things to stop
this inflationary cycle. The first is not to panic.
Price volatility might be bad for eaters — but it’s
good for agribusiness, investors, grain specula-
tors and the “ABCDs,” the four transnational
megacompanies that control the sourcing,
shipping and storage of food (Archer Daniels
Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus).
They like volatility. Inflation is also good for
Putin: High wheat prices help finance the war.
“The concern is real,” Setzer said. “It’s going
to be six to eight months before we really feel
comfortable. But as long as we stay calm, we
should be able to make sure that everyone has
enough to get through the situation at hand.” In
the meantime, Setzer recommended a few
simple things anyone can do to take pressure
off global markets and supply chains: Find
local food producers. See if there’s a farm near
you with a community-supported agriculture
project. Try to reduce food waste. “I’m not
saying you stop shopping at a grocery store,”
she said. “But try to get comfortable with your
local farm groups.”
The longer Putin can drag out a panic over
food, the more havoc he can wreak in develop-
ing countries, and the better his bargaining
position will be in Ukraine. “It would be a
pretty far-fetched scenario that global food
prices will go up so high that grain would
become a weapon of war,” said Halabi. “But in
many senses, it already is.”The question regarding wheat right now is
who gets it — and at what price. War, supply
chain bottlenecks, climate-change-related
weather shocks, production subsidies, trading
and shipping cartels, and speculation all deter-
mine the answer. Thanks to the coronavirus
pandemic, food prices were high even before
the war. Supply chains were in crisis. Putin
made things worse by invading Ukraine and
choking off its ability to export wheat.
But even with the war disrupting Ukraine’s
exports, the world has plenty. In 2021, Russian
and Ukrainian Black Sea crops made up about
28 percent of the world’s exported wheat. The
export market, however, is only about 30 per-
cent of total wheat production. Russia and
Ukraine together make up about 13 percent of
the world’s wheat crop. Ukrainian wheat alone
is only 3.7 percent. And that doesn’t account for
the wheat reserves in countries around the
world.
Meanwhile, farmers from Illinois to India
began planting more wheat when prices start-
ed going up. On April 8, the U.N. Food and
Agriculture Organization forecast a “relatively
comfortable supply level” of grain worldwide.
Global wheat production has increased. Rice
production is at an all-time high. “If everyone
remains calm, there’s enough to go around,”
said Angie Setzer, co-founder of Consus, a farm
and agriculture consulting group. “But right
now, we’re in freakout mode.”
The danger is that panic will inflate prices,
making bread unaffordable for those who can’t
pay market rates. “Everyone says the price has
to go higher because of inflation, people buy
because of the idea that it has to go higher, and
it goes higher,” said Setzer. “And then everyone
says: ‘See, we have inflation’ — and it’s the most
beautiful self-fulfilling prophecy in the world.”
That’s exactly what happened in early
March. After Russia invaded Ukraine, grain
prices hit an all-time high. So did the Food and
Agriculture Organization’s global food price
index. Headlines screamed about a worldwide
food shortage. Analysts warned of mass starva-
tion. Speculators had a field day, driving up
prices so high that Chicago exchanges, where
traders bet on future grain prices, hit their daily
limits and had to stop trading five days in a row.
In response, multiple countries imposed
restrictions on food exports — driving prices
even higher by creating an artificial scarcity,
thus generating what the World Bank warned
could be a “multiplier effect” on global prices.
By early April, prices had sunk from holy-
moly highs to merely historic ones. Heads were
cooling, but not entirely. Grain prices are still at
levels not seen since the panic of 2008-10, when
protests over food broke out in countries
around the world and eventually helped topple
governments across the Middle East.
On April 5, as prices began to sink, Putin
threatened global food production by hinting
that a shortage of fertilizers was “inevitable.”
Russia would have to carefully monitor exports
“to countries which are hostile to us,” he said.
For the past month, pundits, politicians and
grain traders have been parsing his threats.
Will he cut off Ukraine’s exports, a key part of
the world’s e xport market in corn, sunflower oil
and wheat? Will he withhold Russian wheat for
political gain, as experts have been warning for
years? And most important, can Putin really
cause a global food crisis?
Maybe — but only if we let him, only tempo-
rarily and mostly in places where people are
WHEAT FROM B1
There’s no shortage of wheat. But the hungriest won’t be able to pay for it.
Twitter: @anniaAnnia Ciezadlo is a journalist who writes about
food, politics and power in times of crisis. She is
the author of “Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food,
Love, and War.”EDUARD KORNIYENKO/REUTERSA combine harvests
wheat near the
village of
Suvorovskaya, in
southern Russia,
last summer. Russia
and Ukraine
together grow less
than 15 percent of
the world’s wheat,
but the war has
increased the risk
of a panic, which
would send prices
soaring.