Is the Iran war about to empty your supermarket shelves and cancel your summer holiday?

The most powerful military in the world just ran out of lunch. Photographs that spread across the internet showed soldiers aboard USS Tripoli and USS Abraham Lincoln eating near empty trays. A dry meat patty. A grey slab of processed meat. A small handful of boiled carrots. One tortilla. This was not a diet plan. This was a warning.

The father of a Marine stationed on the USS Tripoli described seeing a photo of his daughter’s meal tray, two thirds empty, carrying one small scoop of shredded meat and a single folded tortilla. His response cut through all the diplomatic noise: “We have the strongest military in the world. You shouldn’t be running out of food.”

He is right. And it does not stop there.

Sailors aboard these warships sent messages home describing a rationing system born out of desperation. Crew members ate when they could and divided portions among themselves. Supplies, they warned, were going to get “really low.” Morale was heading to an “all time low.” Families tried to send care packages, snacks, hygiene products, basic essentials, only to find that military mail services to 27 military zip codes in the region had been suspended entirely. The US Postal Service cited airspace closures and logistical chaos. The packages sat. The soldiers went hungry.

If America cannot feed its own troops at war, the question is not whether this shortage spreads. The question is how fast.

Britain already has the answer, and it is not a comfortable one. Senior government officials from No. 10, the Treasury and the Ministry of Defence quietly ran a war game called Exercise Turnstone. The scenario was set in June 2026, with the Strait of Hormuz still closed and no peace deal in sight. The conclusion was stark.

CO2 supplies could fall to just 18 per cent of normal levels. That sounds technical until you understand what CO2 actually does. It is used to slaughter nearly all pigs and more than two thirds of chickens in Britain. It preserves packaged meats, salads and baked goods. Without it, shelves do not just look sparse. They look post apocalyptic. Chicken, pork and a wide range of supermarket staples face genuine shortages by summer. Food inflation is forecast to reach nine per cent by December. The government restarted a mothballed bioethanol plant in Teesside to produce more CO2. That is not a plan. That is a patch on a burst pipe.

The food crisis is serious. The jet fuel crisis is arguably more immediate.

Europe gets 75 per cent of its jet fuel from the Middle East. The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which one fifth of the world’s oil and gas normally flows, effectively shut when Iran closed it following US and Israeli strikes. The head of the International Energy Agency delivered the number that silenced a room: Europe has roughly six weeks of jet fuel left.

The benchmark European jet fuel price doubled from 831 dollars per tonne before the war to an all time high of 1,838 dollars. KLM cancelled 160 flights. Lufthansa shut down an entire regional airline. EasyJet absorbed 25 million pounds in extra fuel costs in a single month. Smaller airports will feel the squeeze first. Then the bigger ones follow. Summer holidays, already booked and paid for, face real cancellation risk, not because of bad weather but because there is simply no fuel to burn.

The oil crisis underneath all of this shows no sign of easing. Two thousand vessels sit stranded. Rerouting ships around Africa adds weeks to delivery times and sends shipping costs soaring. Iran’s oil exports collapsed. Qatar’s LNG facility took damage that experts say will take three to five years to fully repair. Even optimistic analysts say full recovery from this supply shock takes 12 to 18 months at minimum.

The soldiers on those warships did not start this war. They are simply the first people the world watched go hungry because of it. The rest of us are standing in the same queue, just a few places further back.

The war needs to stop. Everything else depends on it.

– Ends

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