During the first summer as an au pair in England, she faced a challenge she hadn’t anticipated: making paella. It happened after a casual visit to the village pub with her boss, with friends circling around, chatting warmly, and her not understanding a single word, answering yes to every question with a hopeful smile. Despite a cooking résumé that mainly consisted of eggs and tortillas, the plan for a backyard barbecue gained a definite date and time. A nearby bed-and-breakfast keeper lent them the paella pan, and a phone call to her mother provided a brief, improvised recipe to avoid an expensive, old-fashioned conference call. Finding ingredients turned into a quest, as her hosts brought packaged fish sticks and breaded calamari frozen from the market, which she awkwardly rejected. In the end, the essentials were gathered (no shrimp or mussels), and on the appointed day, a hungry neighborhood gathered, shouting, “Paella, paella!” The first step was to pour a good amount of olive oil into the pan, a product she had heard about, even though in nearly two months as a nanny the bottle had never appeared in their kitchen—only butter and sunflower oil, since the salads were dressed with jars of dressing and mayonnaise or eaten plain. When she asked for olive oil, her hosts exchanged uneasy glances, then led her to the living room. From a cabinet beside the minibar they fetched a perfume-like bottle, two fingers of green liquid, and offered it as a ritual of hospitality. There wasn’t enough to start, she thought, and the bottle vanished back onto its altar the moment she tipped a little into the pan. She cooked the paella with sunflower oil, and the result was far from ideal. Nevertheless, the crowd feasted, raised glasses in her honor, and promised a Spanish vacation to recreate the dish properly. The experience left her wondering how anyone could mistake it for the real thing. When she returned home, her mother, upon seeing her, expressed genuine concern: “Hija, what happened to you? It looks like you’ve been inflated by a bicycle pump.” When she recounted her diet of buttered toast and ready-made meals, along with the tale of the small perfume bottle containing olive oil, her mother, a widow of a long-standing routine with five-liter bottles for the family kitchen, sympathized with the confusion and sighed, “Poor people.”
Standing in a supermarket, facing rows of olive oil priced at 14.20 euros per liter, she recalled the English paella and heard, as if her mother were translating in her own style, a memory of the old country: “What a rip-off, more than 2,000 pesetas for a simple bottle of oil. We’ve been scammed by the Europeans.” White-label brands sat at around 10 euros, with little below that price point available. Shopping for oil felt like buying fuel for the week’s budget, a ritual that could easily exhaust the household’s available funds. The realization hit hard—fifty, then a hundred, then a hundred twenty euros per week wouldn’t suffice for this household’s needs. She pictured herself squeezing the precious oil into a spray bottle, hoping to make it last longer. It would be a miracle if they could withstand this price surge, a truth anyone would understand who had been accused of not eating healthily. The Mediterranean diet carried a price tag that might be unsustainable, and the family felt the sting. The prospect of maintaining a healthy pantry without breaking the bank weighed heavily on all of them, a quiet reminder that shortages sometimes shadow even the most basic meals.