As a globally traded commodity, oil has always been monitored, fought over, and shared by people who have little in common beyond their mutual need for black gold.

The same is true for food, and now that many of our staple crops are becoming prohibitively expensive due to drought, hoarding, and free market trade policies, we're on the cusp of an era marked by the same kind of violence and terror that's all-too-common in the world of oil.

This month's Atlantic offers these alarming facts:

Since 2007, riots and protests over food prices have broken out in 30 countries.

The American supermarkets Costco and Sam's Club limited the amount of rice each shopper could buy in a single trip.

Haiti's prime minister was ejected from office because of the spike in food prices, and Malaysia's government is equally unstable for the same reason.

Last year, the US government reduced soybean acreage by 16 percent to avail more space for corn and ethanol production, causing the price of soy oil to rise by 40 percent and a subsequent domino effect: other vegetable oils quickly became more expensive because of simple supply-and-demand economics, the price of tofu skyrocketed, and a senior Indonesian official expressed publicly his concern that such a pattern could result in a government overthrow in that country.

In the Philippines, the government created an Anti-Rice Hoarding Task Force to find hoarders of the grain and punish them with life sentences for "economic sabotage" and "plunder."

The upshot is simple: While there once was plenty, but not shared equally around the world, now there's lack. And as the world becomes more and more desperate for simple food, it will inevitably become more fraught with violence and political upheaval.

If this scares you, it should. We're at a crisis point, and the least we can do is live and eat with prudence and a conscientious mind to all of mankind. We're in this together, after all.

[Image Credit: Herr Stahlhoefer]