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A study released by the team under the direction of professor Yaneer Bar-Yam in September 2011 charted fluctuations in global food price since the financial crisis of 2007-8 and showed that, with each successive peak, citizens in food-importing countries reliably destabilize the political leadership. “When food prices go up,” Bar-Yam told me this spring, “when food becomes unavailable, people don’t have anything to lose. That’s when social order is itself affected.” The most recent such peak came in late 2010-early 2011 and yielded what is commonly called the Arab Spring.