When food is readily available at your grocery store, it’s easy to forget about how it got there. That’s a lesson much of North America is learning the hard way with limes, currently hard to come by after Mexico—the world’s top producer—produced a smaller crop than expected this year.

Food analysts have wrung their hands over the Great Lime Shortage of 2014. Output is a quarter of what’s normal during the peak spring season. Fortunately people don’t depend on limes like they do corn or potatoes. No one ever died from not drinking enough mojitos. But the fruit points to the complex equation that needs to balance for food to make its way to your stomach.

For limes, that equation has variables