In India, a potentially huge economic and social crisis is in the making, involving extensive rewriting of recipe books to exclude a favourite ingredient beloved of everyone from Moghul emperors to humble villagers.
Onions are in short supply and their prices have risen by 80 per cent, too expensive for many Indians to afford as part of their daily diet. India's food inflation is 20 per cent.
So many places, from Algeria (food riots) to China (importing large quantities of wheat and corn), Russia (banning wheat exports because of drought and importing grain to keep its cattle fed through the winter), Australia, Brazil and Canada (crops damaged by floods), are facing food shortages or price rises. International organisations report that food prices globally have risen scarily close to or above the record levels of 2008. Prices of wheat, sugar, corn, soya beans, rice and barley, have all risen.
Other food production problems loom, including maverick weather patterns, rising population demands, use of grain to fuel motor vehicles, soil erosion, loss of farmland to industry and urban life, waste of water and drying up of aquifers. Some agronomists fear that without investment and brave political action the world will see the infamous Black Horse of the Apocalypse - famine - going out for a canter.
The immediate problem of food shortages and rising prices is wrapped inside a larger longer-term problem of how to increase global food production to match an increasing population and rising expectations of a better diet from richer people in rapidly developing countries.
What is signally lacking is the imagination, particularly by world political leaders, to understand the gravity of the situation, let alone the political will to get to grips with the underlying causes.
