Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Grace in OpenLinkNight has been asking for a poem of our own choosing. A week or so ago, one of my grandsons – an F2 Junior Doctor, fainted whilst working on his hospital ward. He has fainted once before for much the same reasons as this poem explores… Junior Doctors as they are called, have been on a cycle of strikes for months now, here in England!
Fainting is not a feminine attribute Nor yet a signal effect of fear When the wave comes upon you like Canute You cannot command the tide “Disappear!” Long hours, small meals, emotional turmoil These will do the trick of draining blood Effects of low blood pressure you cannot foil And you will fall right where you stood Causing alarm to staff and patients But quickly picked up, handled with patience Nurses have seen these faints before and told The management of overworked young doctors Who, stress-loaded, sleep and food-deprived, folded Nurses cannot be the Doctor’s Proctors Can’t change the way the system’s moulded So Junior Doctors do the very best you can Demand more pay, less hours Take every chance to stick it to “the Man” For by your bedside we can’t bring now banned flowers…
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
The Worldwide Trade in Wheat 2022 was $73.3Billion and it was the 49th most traded product…
Wheat Adobe Stock)
“Give us our daily bread…” says the Lord’s Prayer although the making of bread from wheat is by no means limited to the Christian West and I am sure there are similar lines in prayers of other religions (do please say if you know any…) but it indicates the huge importance of wheat and the bread, pasta, and cake that it is used to make, among other things. “Wheats are a part of Cereals. They include Wheat except durum wheat, and meslin and Durum wheat.” says the OEC website on Commodities. I confess I had not heard of Meslin (which turns out to be a planting of Wheat and Rye together) though I can disambiguate the other main types of Wheat which largely fall into two categories hard and soft wheat – this is not to do with physical hardness – in fact Durum wheat is physically harder, takes more milling, which damages some of the starches, has less gluten and is therefore has higher extensibility. This means they are more easily stretched into long pieces without breaking, making them ideal to use in pasta. Common Wheat on the other hand has a higher elasticity, which helps them bounce back when kneaded. This makes common wheat a better choice when making bread (the elasticity is what allows the bread to trap bubbles of carbon dioxide allowing the bread to rise). So Red Winter Wheat as grown in Canada for example, is a “hard” high-gluten bread-making flour whilst the Spring Wheats grown in say, France, are “soft” (less gluten) wheats and more suitable for cake making. Durum wheat (“soft” in gluten terms but physically hard) is used for pasta making. Below is a chart showing the gluten content of Common Wheat, Durum Wheat and two of the ancient grains from which our modern wheats are descended Emmer and Spelt… Oh and Meslin – is grown mainly for animal feeds these days but was big in breadmaking from Medieval times and its use in baking died out after the Second World War.
With Wheat as a commodity, we once encounter the geopolitical importance of markets and once again the unwarranted war by Putin on the Ukraine comes to the fore. Once described as the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has not been well treated by Russia – under Stalin, whose collectivist farming policies were so efficient, that even in a land so blessed in soil and climate as Ukraine – they caused collective failure. Stalin punished Ukraine by taking all the grain including the next year’s seed grain which of course only exacerbated the problem the following year and led to a famine in the Ukraine so severe that people resorted to eating the dead to survive. This little-known atrocity was depicted in the film Mr Jones in which a determined Welsh journalist goes to Ukraine and sees for himself the devastation. This is one of the reasons why Putin, hubristically primed by his revisionist book to regard Russia as the “mother” of Ukraine (and not the other way round as is the real truth) was surprised to find that the people of Ukraine did not welcome him in to take Ukraine back into his dream of a re-unified Soviet state but instead continue to fight tooth and nail to stay free. Ukraine has become the bread bowl to a wider market supplying vital grain to many African countries who in turn, were pushed nearer to famine by Putin’s war. Fortunately, some grain is now getting out…
To understand who Exports and who Imports wheat and the value of those transactions – go to https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/wheat where they have some amazing interactive infographics but unless you are a commodity trader (and I suspect most of you are not!) then I am going to close the factual part of this post with a word about roller milling and stoneground wheat. The wheat kernel consists of a husk – the bran – inside which are two halves of flour joined together with a little proto-plant – the wheatgerm. In the old days of windmills turning great round grindstones, the grain was fed in between the stones and crushed into pieces but this included the wheatgerm which is a living plant and so if the stoneground flour was not used fairly quickly, the crushed wheatgerm would turn the flour rancid. The modern roller mills consist of heavy metal rollers that can be adjusted so precisely, that they first, delicately crack off the bran which is separated and perhaps further chopped up. Then the rollers gently break the two haves of the kernel apart so that the wheatgerm falls out and is taken away to be roasted – this kills the plant and makes a tasty product in its own right. Lastly, the rollers can grind the flour kernels down with such precision that different grades of flour are obtainable from the outside to the middle. Now if the mill wants to offer 100% Wholemeal Flour, then it can mix the bran, the toasted wheatgerm and all the flour back together and this flour will keep much longer than Stoneground – so what is the difference? Well stoneground flour contains a mish-mash of different-sized particles from pure flour to fragments of the kernel still in its bran and this means that when baked, the flour releases its carbohydrate slowly. Roller-milled flour is essentially white flour with the bran and wheatgerm added back in and that makes it a fast-release carbohydrate – in other words, you might as well be eating white flour in terms of carbohydrate release…
And so to today’s poem a WaltMarie. The Writers Digest University offers this definition:- This week, a Poetic Asides member shared a poetic form she created. While I don’t usually share nonce forms, I’ve tried this one myself, and I think it’s a lot of fun. So without further ado, I’m introducing Candace Kubinec’s form, the Waltmarie (which is itself a nod to PA members and Poetic Bloomings hosts, Marie Elena Good and Walter J. Wojtanik). Here are the guidelines for writing the Waltmarie:
10 lines
Even lines are two syllables in length, odd lines are longer (but no specific syllable count)
Even lines make their own mini-poem if read separately
No other rules for subject or rhymes.
Wheat
Give us our daily bread or just the flour and we will scavenge fire-wood to bake the staff of life flat bread or leavened if we can manage for life keeping body and soul together…
(Dedicated to the refugees in their own land Palestine but also to refugees or those afflicted by famine whether caused by war or climate change anywhere in the world… You can donate here Oxfam)
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
Worldwide trade in Vanadium 2022 was $38970 million and growing…
When starting to research each of the commodities in this A-Z Challenge, I have only had some preconceived idea of the stories or interesting facts about a few of the items – for the most part – a trip to Wikipedia is good starting point or seeking the answer to the above question on World Trading – but with Vanadium, I have been faced with a wall of chemistry. yes there is a discovery timeline – of course there is – and there is a naming story involving an ancient goddess but more than any other element, my overwhelming first impression is that we are going to have to talk some chemistry…
The first discovery in the Vanadium story was in Mexico, in 1801 Andrés Manuel del Río extracted the element from a sample of Mexican “brown lead” ore, later named vanadinite. So like the “bad copper ore” in Nickel and the ouro podre, ‘worthless gold,’ we encountered in Palladium, the Vanadium story starts off being an impurity or mistaken identity in the mining of some other substance. Because the salts of Vanadium displayed so many different colours, del Rio initially named the substance panchromium (Greek: παγχρώμιο “all colours” but later renamed it erythronium (Greek: ερυθρός “red”) because most of the salts turned red upon heating. Swedish chemist Nils Gabriel Sefström rediscovered the element in a new oxide he found while working with iron ores. Later that year, Friedrich Wöhler confirmed that this element was identical to that found by del Río and he called the element vanadium after Old Norse Vanadís (another name for the Norse Vanir goddess Freyja, whose attributes include beauty and fertility and from whom we get Friday and less salubriously – frigging!).
Below is a science experiment demonstrating the reason for the many colours of different chemical states of Vanadium plus if this guy does not look like the original mad scientist I don’t know who would…
Of all the hard commodity metals we have encountered, Vanadium, though rarely occurring as a native metal, has one of the most varied occurrences being present in about 65 different minerals and so it has many and varied methods of extraction. More chemistry required. As well as ores such as patrónite and Vanadinite, Uranium ores such as carnotite, vanadium can be found in bauxite and deposits of crude oil, coal, oil shale, and tar sands, in sea water and in volcanic mineral springs. You can read more about the technical aspects of Vanadium here.
When such oil products are burned, traces of vanadium may cause corrosion in engines and boilers.[62] An estimated 110,000 tons of vanadium per year are released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels
Once again, we find a metal which has become vital as an alloy ingredient – about 85% of it is used in ferrovanadium or as a steel additive where it significantly increases the strength of the steel making it suitable for many tools as well as specialist engineering applications like the turbine blades in jet engines (mixed with Aluminium and Titanium) and closer to home, if you can afford dental implants – you may have some in your mouth. Vanadium is used as a catalyst in the production of Sulphuric Acid and thence in many industrial chemical processes whilst the vanadium redox battery is a vital part of grid energy storage and may be important in the development of future battery technologies.
With the cosmic abundance of vanadium being around 0.0001%, it is hardly surprising that this chemical of complex possibilities has found its role in living creatures – more in marine environments than on land – but even on land vanadium occurs in some fungi including the iconic Fly Agaric.
The jury is out as to the utility or otherwise, of Vanadium in the human body – deficiency in rats has been linked to poor growth and some inconclusive experiments suggest it might help with type 2 diabetes, but neither minimum recommended doses of Vanadium as a supplement nor its threshold as a poison have been properly established. Another reflection of the complex chemistry of Vanadium…
As a trading commodity, Vanadium may be less than $Billion which is small compared to some of the commodities we have looked at, but it is a very vital ingredient in the modern world and a little of it goes a long way. But as the quote below shows – looked at in geopolitical terms – two of the top producer countries are problematic to Western interests – especially in the light of sanctions against Putin’s Russia and America’s problems squaring up to China, so these potential instabilities stoke the kind of opportunities that markets like to speculate on…
Vanadium is mined mostly in China, South Africa and eastern Russia. In 2022 these three countries mined more than 96% of the 100,000 tons of produced vanadium, with China providing 70%
And so to today’s poem which as we are at “V” – is a Verbless Poem.
The poets.org, has this to say about Verbless Poetry in turn a quote from the definition by Edward Hirsch in his A Poet’s Glossary:- Poems without verbs. On one hand, the verbless poem can create a static quality, a sense of the arrested moment, which is why it has appealed to poets who write haiku and other types of imagist poems. […] On the other hand, the verbless construction can give, as the linguist Otto Jespersen points out in “The Role of the Verb (1911),” “a very definite impression of motion.” That’s why verbless constructions especially appealed to the futurists, such as F. T. Marinetti (1876–1944), who eliminated verbs in order to create a sense of telegraphic communication in a furiously changing world. – Seems an appropriate form for Vanadium…
Vanadium – a Verbless Poem
From a multitude of sources through a cascade of chemical processes to a plethora of purposes vital to our modern world Vanadium our alloy ally…
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
Worlwide trade in Uranium – 2022 – $951.586 Million – 29.32 Metric Tons
What do you think of first when you hear the word Uranium – perhaps you saw last year’s blockbuster Oppenheimer about the moral agonising of that man over the detonating of the first atomic (Uranium) bomb over Hiroshima, perhaps you think of that bomb itself, or perhaps you think of the peaceful use of nuclear power that followed on from that awful event. Perhaps you think of the pressure on Iran to stop it from accumulating enough nuclear material to make a bomb of its own. Science, politics, history and remarkable individuals – all are involved in the nexus which is Uranium.
Compounds of Uranium had been used as colouring agents since Roman times and even from the 1830’s glass like the examples above were being made with no idea of the dangers of radiation that they posed – for though Uranium was “discovered” by Martin Heinrich Klaproth in 1789, the idea of radioactivity was not put forward until 1896 when Henri Becquerel determined that a form of invisible light or rays emitted by uranium had exposed a photographic plate on which a sample of a uranium salt had been placed. It was to take even longer for the deleterious effects of radiation to become apparent and Becquerel and his collaborators Pierre and Marie Curie probably all suffered some effects of being exposed to radioactivity throughout their work.
Uranium is the highest numbered element on the Periodic Table to be found in significant amounts on Earth almost always combined with other elements yet it is now thought vital, along with thorium, and potassium-40, in providing the heat – through atomic decay – that keeps the Earth’s mantle hot and the outer core of the Earth liquid – without which there would be no currents in the Mantle , no plate tectonics and no magnetic field protecting us from Solar radiation. We literally owe our existence to Uranium as well as the shape of our continents, vulcanicity and their attendant earthquakes… In the Earth’s crust, Uranium is found in concentrations of 2 to 4 parts per million, or about 40 times as abundant as silver. It can be recovered commercially from sources with as little as 0.1% uranium.
Pierre Curie, Marie Curie, and Henri Becquerel became co-researchers into radioactive elements and Marie Curie in particular, noted that Pitchblende – an ore of Uranium, was more “active” than could be accounted for by Uranium alone and this eventually led to isolating and identifying Polonium and Radium. Marie Curie was nearly not included in the Nobel Prize in 1903 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences until an advocate for women scientists insisted on her inclusion – throughout her early career Marie had worked against the non-inclusion of women in science and so she stands out as one of the great pioneers not just in the work on radioactivity, but as a woman scientist. These three scientists could little have imagined the direction that science would take radioactivity – driven by the impetus of war to unlock the theoretical idea that nuclear fission could be used to develop a bomb of unimaginable strength. Technology is often driven by unfortunate things, the development of home cine-cameras and later the rapid growth of the internet owe a great deal to pornography and the atomic bomb, fuelled by war, came before the peaceful application of nuclear power – an unpallatable truth… Oppenheimer, the movie, unfolds the story of the transformation from scientific theory to a functioning bomb and the soul-ache it brought to Oppenheimer.
The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima after the detonation of Little Boy on 6 August 1945. A separation between the upper mushroom head and the stem is visible. This photograph and its vaguely question mark appearance was used as the inspiration for the insignia of the Manhattan Engineer District, and was widely reprinted globally within days of the attack. Wikipedia.
Production from world uranium mines has in recent years supplied 90% of the requirements of power utilities. Primary production from mines is supplemented by secondary supplies, formerly most from ex-military material but now the products of recycling and stockpiles built up in times of reduced demand.
Okay so here’s the commodity trading bit about Uranium – “All mineral commodity markets tend to be cyclical (i.e. prices rise and fall substantially over the years) but these fluctuations tend to be superimposed on a long-term trend decline in real prices, as technological progress reduces production cost at mines. In the uranium market, however, high prices in the late 1970s gave way to depressed prices in the whole of the period of the 1980s and 1990s, with spot prices below the cost of production for all but the lowest-cost mines. Spot prices recovered from 2003 to 2009, but have been weak since then.” (Source Uranium Markets).
And so to today’s poem for which there is no form beginning with “U” however, the Ghazal is one form of Urdu Poetry and so that is what I am going with. In poetry (and as the lyrics in songs), the ghazal (Arabic: غزل; Turkish gazel) is a poetic form consisting of couplets which share a rhyme and a refrain. Numerous scholars and poets have attempted to translate ghazals from their original language to English. The task is daunting, as keeping the literal meaning of each poem while respecting the rhyme, refrain, and length of lines is difficult, if not impossible.It was the poet Agha Shahid Ali who introduced it, in its classical form, to Americans and the English-speaking world. Ghazal in Arabic literally means “speaking with women”. The ghazal not only has a specific form, but traditionally deals with just one subject: Love. And not any kind of love, but specifically, an illicit, and unattainable love. I have taken some minor liberties with the form but I hope I have written to the spirit of the Ghazal… Marie Curie was groundbreaking not only for her work on radioactivity, but also because of the struggle she faced as a woman to have her work taken notice of and even to have obtained an education in science. So there you have it – a love poem… I have taken a few liberties with the repeating chorus element and I am not sure that the couplets are thematically independent but it is what it is!
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
Worldwide Trade in Tea 2022 – $8.13 Billion – 426th most traded product – representing 0.034% of total world trade…
After water – tea is the second most drunk liquid in the world! In America, the lingering effect of the anti-imperialist sentiment of the Boston tea Party means that to this day, 79% of Americans drink coffee while only 75% drink tea. You can find more fun statistics about tea drinking here. But you can definitely say that a plant which grows in quite particular climatic conditions has been spread by acts of Empire from its original sources and from its original drinkers, to become the world’s favourite beverage – Americans notwithstanding. Originating in China – the name of the species is “Camellia sinensis” (Chinese Camellia) – agents of the British Empire stole plants (remember Rubber) and created plantations in India, Sri Lanka and Kenya. Actually, most of the plants stolen by the British did not survive in the foothills of the Himalayas but they discovered another variety of tea growing in Assam and Assam tea is just one of the many variants of tea available from across the world today. Beyond the different varieties that are picked, there are also many ways of processing the picked leaves and so increasing even further the choice of finished product.
White: wilted and unoxidized; Yellow: unwilted and unoxidized but allowed to yellow; Green: unwilted and unoxidized; Oolong: wilted, bruised, and partially oxidized; Black: wilted, sometimes crushed, and fully oxidized (called 紅茶 [hóngchá], “red tea” in Chinese and other East Asian tea culture); Post-fermented (Dark): green tea that has been allowed to ferment/compost (called Pu’er if from the Yunnan district of South-Western China or 黑茶 [hēichá] “black tea” in Chinese tea culture).
Tea leaves contain enzymes that immediately cause an oxidation to take place after picking and darken the leaves unless quickly dried or in the case of black tea, dried and heated at the same time. heating and drying de-activate the enzyme. Green teas keep least well but black teas can keep up to two years in a sealed dark container.
Teas are often blended to combine the characteristics of the component varieties – Englis Breakfast Tea is an example mixing East African, Ceylon and Assam grown tea to form a strong tea suitable to wake you up at breakfast – although black tea has about half the caffeine of coffee, it has the benefit of releasing the caffeine more slowly. Various additions can be made both to tea proper to create blends like Earl Grey Tea – said to be the most addictive tea of all due to the Bergamot Oil it is flavoured with. And then there are brews which are not strictly teas at all but occupy the same beverage niche like Yerba-maté and so-called Herbal Teas. These spill over into herbalism and naturopathy where aggressive legislation lobbied for by big-pharma have outlawed the medicinal claims of herbal remedies unless they can demonstrate efficacy with double-blind tests – however the teas have promulgated in part due to our insatiable appetite for novelty and customisation and part due to our belief that these herbal hangovers from the past are “natural” and therefore must be good for something… Fruity teas are popular and if they are red, examine the label and you will find that the main ingredient is Hibiscus – a little of which goes a long way.
Brooke Bond Dividend Tea showing the stamps and an Advert citing the “True” dividend…
I remember as a child, both my Grandmother and Mother buying loose-leaf Brooke-Bond Dividend tea which came in a green paper packet with an orange seal from which you could detach a savings stamp inside to collect on a special sheet and also find a collectable card – but most of all I remember the smell of the tea when you poured it into the tea caddy – rich, sweet and like nothing else…
My favourite collection of Brooke Bond Dividend cards – aircraft!
The company I work for has a chain of Chaii (Chai= Tea) cafés and at the factory we make up the mixtures for the two varieties we serve – Karak Chaii and Kashmiri Chaii – both very sweet, milky and with spices such as Cardamon and Cinnamon added and in the case of Kashmiri Tea – a characteristic pink colour – further options such as Saffron can be added at the point of serving. Every household, café and restaurant originating in the sub-continent of India/Pakistan, claims its own special recipe to be the best…
Let’s make Kashmiri chai together, a floral tea made from green tea leaves that’s extremely popular in South Asia. #ad I’ve been making pink chai for years, and over time, I’ve finally perfected the perfect pink color. To show it off, I found the perfect glass teapot and mugs from @HomeGoods. Our local store has a great selection of kitchenware, no matter what your aesthetic you’ll surely find something you love! My saucepan, ladle, milk jug, strainer, nearly everything is from @homegoods – providing necessities alongside beautiful and functional homeware items. Recipe Cinnamon stick (1) Star anise (1-2) Cardamom pods (handful) Loose green tea leaves (half cup) Milk (2 cups) Sugar (per your liking) Salt (dash) Baking soda (1.5 teaspoons) Place cinnamon stick, star anise, cardamom and green tea leaves in 3 cups of water. Bring to boil approximately 2-3 times. Aerate/whisk the liquid so much that it evaporates and reduces to one cup, then add ice cold water to replace the evaporated water. Add baking soda, and a pinch of salt. Allow that to boil for approximately 15-25 mins on medium heat, if water reduces, keep adding more cold water to replenish. After a while, the liquid should start changing color toward a dark red/burgundy! Strain the tea leaves. Separately warm up milk, mix the tea with milk. Add sugar to your liking and top with pistachios or almonds! Enjoy! #HGFinders
And so to today’s poem which is a Terza Rima form: Terza rima is a rhymingversestanza form that was first used by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri.
Terza rima is a three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d. There is no limit to the number of lines, but poems or sections of poems written in terza rima end with either a single line or couplet repeating the rhyme of the middle line of the final tercet. The two possible endings for the example above are d-e-d, e or d-e-d, e-e. There is no set rhythm for terza rima, but in English, iambic pentameters are generally preferred. (Poetry Guide – Language is a Virus)
Tea
Who made and sipped the first cup of tea took boiling water and infused some leaf from stress and toil set mind and body free for stress and toil are of your life a thief but time for a tea is never wasted but a meditation that brings relief through a ceremony, you have waited for fresh or dried leave in the cup to steep and perfect draught of tea created
They needed fire, cups, and a vessel to heat the water drawn from pool or flowing stream before experimenting with which leaf soothed, stimulated or made one dream what to pick, how to store, when to use it what to add – lemon, milk but never cream
Just leaves from your herb patch if the mood fits each cup unique and never repeated whether with friend or with a stranger – sit dissolve the tension of times too heated recall times past and friendships history moments recalled and moments secreted
See whether, in your mind’s eye, you can see who made and sipped the first cup of tea …
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
Worldwide Trade in Soybeans in 2022 whether or not broken” exceeded $93 billion
If you have any doubt that Soya Beans (Soybeans) ar the most important of all the beans – just take a look at the table below – note how many bolded figures (Top value of the comparisons) fall to Soy Beans! Just on this nutritional guide alone (Courtesy of Wikipedia) you would know that this bean was important before even considering it’s history, it’s culinary story and the confirmation of it’s value as revealed in the International Trade Figures… However, there is a dark side to the Soya story and one which commands our attention – more of that later.
A raw yellow dent corn B raw unenriched long-grain white rice C raw hard red winter wheat D raw potato with flesh and skin E raw cassava F raw green soybeans G raw sweet potato H raw sorghum Y raw yam Z raw plantains /* unofficial
Evidence for the domestication of Soya Beans predates writing but has been found in China from between 7-6,500 years ago. Because, like many legumes, they fix nitrogen from the air and send it to the soil, the plant was quickly recognised as helpful in crop rotation and yet even as recently as World War 2, that benefit was being “rediscovered” in America when fertiliser supplies were compromised. If Soya Beans were discovered today they would be touted as a Superfood if not a “Miracle” food
One of the interesting aspects of Soya is just how many ways it is processed into other products beyond just eating the beans direct – they are the world’s largest source of animal feed (creating protein which humans then eat), the second largest source of vegetable oil and these two uses consume 85% of the soya crop leaving just 15% to be sold as whole beans. Out of that we then get soya milk, from which is made bean curd and tempeh (from the leftover of soy milk production), then Soy Sauce and various forms of Miso – these latter being fermented soya products without which both Chinese and Japanese cuisine would be unimaginable. I have to declare an interest here since among the many jobs I have done, I worked briefly for one of England’s leading Tofu (bean curd) producers creating and making new products out of tofu – previously he made only a plain and a peanut burger and I added two flavours of pastie, tofu quiches and a tofu “eggless” custard to his range. So this feels like a good place to offer two tips that I picked up in that job. Many Western people never take to tofu because they find it tasteless and unfortunately we don’t have access to some of the specialist variations available in the East such as deep-fryable pouching tofu whose crisped casing can be stuffed with tasty things – but there are a couple of ways to make tofu tasty… First you can buy (hard) tofu in a tub of it’s own whey and carefully peel back the lid, spread a layer of Miso (another soya product) on the top surface of the Tofu, cover and leave it floating in the whey in the fridge for a few days. The Miso is a live culture, fermented product so the quite strong taste will not simply permeate the Tofu, but will interact biologically to create a new flavour. Secondly, take an unopened packet of Tofu and freeze it – upon defrosting, the frozen crystals of whey which will have formed – compressing the Tofu – will melt and leave a network of holes in the now tougher, compressed Tofu so that it will hold together better when added to say, a stew and each chunk will act like a little sponge holding the gravy so that you can even use the mixture as a pie filling! If you have only encountered one or two kinds of Miso, the map below shows some of the many regional variations in Miso.
Where does it all come from – this vital, amazing Soya Bean crop – well for something that originated in China – these babies have roamed far from home as the diagram below shows – 34% from America and add in Brazil 29% and Argentina 18%, that’s 81% of the world production comes from the Americas and China’s demand for Soya has increased beyond their capacity to grow it – not least because with growing affluence – the Chinese demand for pork grew and soya beans were needed to feed pigs – anybody see a problem…? Actually there are several problems – during the Trump administration – that genius of Foreign Policy decided to play to his base by launching a Trade War on China – the US already had a 25% tariff on $250 billion of Beijing goods and Trump threatened a further 10% tariff on $300 billion of Chinese imports. Naturally, China responded by slashing its U.S. farm purchases by 53% to $9.2 billion from 2017. Soybeans (American name) purchases took a huge hit, falling nearly 75% to $3.1 billion. Trump had to pay out a lot of money to support the farmers and the stockpile of Soybeans mounted… This in turn put pressure on other areas like South America (mainly Southern Brasil and Argentina) to increase their growing of Soya and this led to increased deforestation – agriculture drove up to 88% of forest loss in Latin America and up to 81% in Southeast Asia between 2000-2015. So once again we see how geopolitical issues can have a huge impact on the commodities market not to mention the environment…
Just a couple of other fun facts about Soya beans – Soya is one of the fourteen notifiable allergens – that is it must be highlighted in bold in any ingredient list and as we have seen, soya can turn up in many guises – about 0.3% of the general population of adults and children are allergic to Soya. Another factor requiring labelling of Soya is that Soya was one of the first crops to “suffer” from Genetic Modification (GM) and the backlash against such “Frankenstein” food has been damaging in addition to the highly industrialised style of farming and the ecological effects of the crop worldwide. The expression “Full of Beans!” refers to horses who behaved with varying energy depending on which fuel they were fed – Grass – Ordinary – Oats – Friskier – Beans – Full of It and I wonder if it was Soya Beans that they used…? And lastly a film quote – Rick saying to Ilsa at the end of Casablanca, “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” A rare example of an anti-romance ending – the plight of the world is more important than a soppy ending…
That is my quite cursory glance at Soya (considering the importance of this crop) – other commodities I might have considered for “S” include Sugar and gold’s poor relation – Silver. And so to today’s poem which is a Solage:
Solage is a specific form of humorous verse with the following properties:
It has three lines (called the hook, the line and the sinker) of irregular length.
The rhyming structure is AAB.
The third line is a pun based on the previous two lines.
The form was invented by the Sydney-based performance poet Cameron M. Semmens.
Soybeans
To know where the wind is seen Be sure to eat more beans Windy bottom…
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
Worldwide Trade in Rubber 2022 – $18.4B – 239th most traded product representing 0.078% of total world trade.
Gentle Reader – this post should probably carry a warning – for it contains true tales of Theft, Violence and Depravity on an Imperial scale – it will visit a city 900 miles up a river, surrounded by jungle that nevertheless afford to build an opera house with imported marble and talent, it will visit both the geographical and metaphorical setting of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and reflect, not for the first time in this A-Z Challenge, on the evils done in the name of Imperialism. You have been warned…
The story of rubber begins innocently enough with a ballgame – archaeological evidence shows that the Olmec people of Mesoamerica played a game with a rubber ball made from the sap of the Hevea tree which grew extensively in the Amazon rainforest and which could be tapped to allow its white sap to be collected – this is called latex rubber.
Vintage illustrated collectible tobacco card from the Products of the World series published in 1909 by John Player and Sons Cigarettes, depicting agricultural exports and natural resources of world cultures and countries, here with two Indian workers tapping sap from a rubber tree, the first step in the mass production of rubber (Photo by Nextrecord Archives/Getty Images).
The English polymath Joseph Priestly received a small sample of latex and noted that it was very good at rubbing out (erasing) pencil marks and thus coined the name “Rubber”. In the nineteenth century, the development of first the bicycle and later the motor car, created a demand for rubber that far outstripped the sources of natural rubber and drove the discovery of synthetic elastomers – the technical name for rubberlike substances. The initial problem with developing rubber as a commodity, was that the Brasilian rainforest was the only source of Pará rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) and Brasil had a stranglehold on the market and one thing that commodity markets don’t like is a monopoly. There was no specific law banning the export of rubber plants or seeds from Brasil but nevertheless it was a closely policed prohibition – and no wonder – the wealth generated by the monopoly of the supply of rubber paid for that lavishly marbled opera house in Manaus, far up the Amazon, and for a stream of European opera divas to grace its stage. It took until 1870 for the seeds to be smuggled out and the monopoly broken…
I well remember this story of derring-do smuggling from my geography class at school in the 1960’s but looking back, there was no hint of a question as to the ethics of this act of theft and the geopolitical shift that it meant for the British empire – it seemed that was just the way of things. An even more heinous crime was happening across the Atlantic in a similar river whose basin held a hard-to-penetrate tropical rainforest – the Congo. From 1885 to 1908, while the development of British rubber plantations in the Far-East were still being developed, the Belgian Congo, operated as a private estate – the Congo Free State (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo) under the absolute rule of King Leopold II of Belgium – was another source of latex rubber. Congo rubber comes from vines and the wives and children of a village were held hostage whilst their menfolk were sent off to fulfil their quota of vine rubber. The depravity did not end there, with a bureaucracy that would have been the envy of the Nazis, every bullet used by Belgian soldiers had to be accounted for and justified, so if soldiers went hunting for meat or even sport – they would go into a village and chop off as many hands as required to justify their bullet allocation – claiming a police action as justification. No wonder Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece “Heart of Darkness” is set far up the Congo River where a European trader has gone rogue… So many people died under these imperial rules that though the exact figures are indeterminable, estimates range from 1.5 million to 13 million and the story of this genocide can be read here.
This is not to say that there were not many deaths of native Amazonian Indians as a result of rubber tapping in the Amazon but they have been overshadowed by the obscenity of Leopold’s genocide. It may be considered a boon then, that the theft of rubber tree seeds from Brazil and the subsequent establishment of rubber plantations in the Far Eastern countries of the British Empire, brought to an end the depradations in Brazil and the Congo… However, life on the remote plantations of the Far-East was at the very least a lonely station for the young men and women of the “Empire on Which the Sun Never Sets” as the globe encircling British Empire was sometimes called. Somerset Maugham (whom my mother “specialled”, or nursed one-to-one as a young nurse and who she described as a bitter old man) chronicled life on the plantations which we later watched dramatised on TV and if I can distil a typical story of his into one sentence it would be “Young planter comes back to England to wed from amongst the surfeit of girls following the First World War and returns to Malaya with his bride who later discovers he has a second family living at the bottom of the garden with a native wife – bitterness ensues…”
Let us leave the sordid world of the early sourcing of rubber and move back to the uses of Rubber as a commodity. We have already seen one source of the name rubber, but another product that became synonymous was the “Rubber” or Rubber Johnny – prophylactic to who knows how many unborn babies… there are car tyres, cushioning and shock-absorbing devices, and still there are Rubber Balls and many more uses besides. Eventually, as demand for rubber exceeded production of natural rubber, Synthetic Rubber was invented and American dominance in the market was advanced by the Second World War, when the Allies, with their access to Far-Eastern natural rubber, stifled Axis efforts by bombing synthetic rubber factories in Germany, Italy and Poland.
Natural Rubber is still an important commodity despite synthetic products which have burgeoned over the years – styrene-butadiene rubbers , polyisoprene, neoprene, nitrile rubber and last but by no means least Silicone rubber. Even without being a chemist, that list may have conjured for you, wetsuits, surgical rubber gloves not to mention heatproof cookwear… More than 28 million tons of rubber were produced in 2017, of which approximately 47% was natural. Natural rubber still goes into tyres and to dothat, the process of Vulcanisation had to be invented – a method of hardening the Latex or “India Rubber” (yes – the “stolen” rubber plantations of India gave their name to the raw material too) and this was eventually perfected by Charles Goodyear as a process involving heat and the addition of Sulphur.
Many other plants other than the Hevea Tree produce latex but have never been successfully been exploited and the price of rubber is volatile – for example, during the Covid crisis, the price of rubber spiked because of the demand for rubber gloves yet many small family-run plantations had rubbed up their crop to grow more profitable lines at the time such as palm-oil. Now plant diseases (which especially affect monocultures) and climate change are threatening the supply of natural rubber further…
Before proceeding to my own poetic offering, I cannot leave rubber without referencing A.A. Milne’s wonderful poem “King John’s Christmas” which takes us back to the very first discovered use of rubber and if you were unlucky enough not to have been brought up with his poems or only know of Winneie the Pooh – let this extract introduce you to a Wold of joy…
King John was not a good man, He lived his live aloof; Alone he thought a message out While climbing up the roof. He wrote it down and propped it Against the chimney stack: “TO ALL AND SUNDRY – NEAR AND FAR – F. Christmas in particular.” And signed it not “Johannes R.” But very humbly, “Jack.” “I want some crackers, And I want some candy; I think a box of chocolates Would come in handy; I don’t mind oranges, I do like nuts! And I SHOULD like a pocket-knife That really cuts. And, oh! Father Christmas, if you love me at all, Bring me a big, red, india-rubber ball!”
Which brings us to today’s poem for which I have chosen the poetry form Rhyme Royal:
The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-c. In practice, the stanza can be constructed either as a tercet and two couplets (a-b-a, b-b, c-c) or a quatrain and a tercet (a-b-a-b, b-c-c). This allows for a good deal of variety, especially when the form is used for longer narrative poems. (source Language is a Virus – Poetry Guide)
Rubber
Has ever extraction so cruel been visited on poor people our industrial needs to fuel our market trade coffers kept full wealth from the Third World, First World pulls stolen plants new plantations bring relief to tropical sons
The smooth ride of the motor car or even humble bicycle wrote a trail of blood from afar ignorance of the genocide no excuse for the denial when now we know how goods are wrought with blood, sweat and tears they’re still bought
Blood diamonds the savage crop from where bloodied rubber once grew blood from Congo’s gold and coltan drop tin and tungsten to name but a few not just the Congo to give it’s due children of seventy-eight lands make goods never mind adult hands…
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
I could find no Commodity beginning with “Q” so I am looking at another important “P” – Pepper as a commodity however the poetry form is a “Q” – the Quatorzain Poem…
Woldwide Trade in Pepper in 2022 $5.13B – 548th most traded product – 0.022% of total world trade
It is axiomatic that the Spice Trade from the Far East to Europe was important because without refrigeration, foodstuffs, especially meat, sometimes needed a little disguising and spices not only hid any dubious smells but in some cases, had antimicrobial properties that made meals safer. Of course, if curry spices were all that effective then there would be no such thing as Delhi Belly, but there is sufficient antimicrobial action that scientists are now looking seriously at spices from a medical standpoint. Of all the spices, Black Pepper is the oldest and most widely used – what restaurant table does not have a pepper pot? Turmeric, clove, nutmeg, cumin, and cinnamon are also contenders for medical research but Black Pepper has been such an important spice, traded for so long that it was used as currency in its own right – sometimes referred to as “black gold”. The legacy of this trade remains in some Western legal systems that recognize the term “peppercorn rent” as a token payment for something that is, essentially, a gift.
Black, White and Green Pepper are all true peppers from the plant Piper Nigrum (part of the Piperaceae family). This vine is native to India but grows in most tropical areas. Pink Peppercorns are from the Peruvian Pepper Tree, members of the cashew family Sichuan Peppercorns: also not peppercorns but rather “Chinese coriander”.
Black pepper is produced from the still-green, unripe drupe of the pepper plant. The drupes are cooked briefly in hot water, both to clean them and to prepare them for drying.[9] The heat ruptures cell walls in the pepper, speeding the work of browningenzymes during drying.[9] The drupes dry in the sun or by machine for several days, during which the pepper skin around the seed shrinks and darkens into a thin, wrinkled black layer. Once dry, the spice is called black peppercorn.
White pepper consists solely of the seed of the ripe fruit of the pepper plant, with the thin darker-coloured skin (flesh) of the fruit removed. This is usually accomplished by a process known as retting, where fully ripe red pepper berries are soaked in water for about a week so the flesh of the peppercorn softens and decomposes; rubbing then removes what remains of the fruit, and the naked seed is dried.
Green pepper, like black pepper, is made from unripe drupes. Dried green peppercorns are treated in a way that retains the green colour, such as with sulfur dioxide, canning, or freeze-drying. Pickled peppercorns, also green, are unripe drupes preserved in brine or vinegar.
All these treatments of the pepper drupes result in slightly different flavours as well as colours so for example, you might use white pepper in mashed potato in order that it doesn’t show as black pieces. For many years, I had by my bedside as nighttime reading, a book which I would still recommend as the definitive encyclopedia “Herbs, spices and Flavourings” by Tom Stobart and from the large section on pepper I learnt this – the single most important thing to know about pepper in relation to cooking – piperine is the flavour element of pepper and is easily evaporated during cooking whereas the resin that gives the heat remains – and so rather than adding pepper to say, a casserole before cooking, pepper should always be freshly ground at the table – even ground pepper loses its piperine by evaporation over time.
Perhaps because of its historical role as the source of pepper, and although the majority of pepper today comes from Vietnam, India is a hub for both importing pepper from around the world and then processing and re-exporting it. India imports large quantities of pepper from Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka. Usually, the majority of the pepper is just sent once again as whole black pepper to different areas. A lesser amount of the imported pepper is utilised in the production of different goods. Pepper trade makes up one-third of the net volume of spices traded globally.
The quote below shows how Pepper futures typify the role of all futures in the trading world…
Farmers use commodity exchanges as a buffer against price volatility, but a pepper trading platform and speculators complicate pepper trading even more. Commodity markets’ speculative character draws people and organisations looking to make money off of price changes. To place well-informed wagers on the future course of pepper prices, speculators examine economic statistics, market patterns, and other variables. Their involvement gives the market more liquidity but also creates a degree of uncertainty. On the other hand, traders and investors use pepper trading for a variety of purposes, including risk control and portfolio diversification. They may engage in the spice market without physically handling the product, thanks to the Indian stock market.
Whilst on the subject of a food-related future – Pork Bellies were once almost the icon of futures trading even being mentioned in the film “Trading Places” which we encountered under Orange Juice – but icons come and they can go too. Pork bellies have yielded in popularity at the table to bacon year by year until they have fallen below the threshold at which Futures Traders find it worth investing in and Pork Bellies have been dropped from Futures Trading…
And so to today’s poetry form which is a quatorzain (from Frenchquatorze, fourteen) is a form of sonnet. It consists of 14 lines and is, like a sonnet, divided into two tercets and two quatrains. According to my favourite source for poetry forms, Language is a Virus:-
The term is used in English literature, as opposed to sonnet, for a poem in fourteen rhymed iambic lines closing (as a sonnet strictly never does) with a couplet. The distinction was long neglected because the English poets of the 16th century had failed to apprehend the true form of the sonnet, and called Petrarch’s and other Italian poets’ sonnets quatorzains, and their own incorrect quatorzains sonnets. Almost all the so-called sonnets of the Elizabethan cycles, including those of William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and Samuel Daniel, are really quatorzains. They consist of three quatrains of alternate rhyme, not repeated in the successive quatlains, and the whole closes with a couplet.
Was Shakespeare wrong – this sounds like an academic storm in a tea pot, but whatever, this will be a quatorzain or as Shakespeare thought of it, a sonnet…
Pepper
Pepper you were known as “black gold” precious drupes of Piper Nigrum grown and processed in far India sought for heat and taste, your role was to fuel world exploration you drove many a man’s career searching for the better shortcut they found instead America then sought to go North-West but cruel ice and snow crushed dreams there dreams of spice isles and quick richness so gaps filled in the atlas bought only fame and stories told of their futile quests for “black gold”…
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
Worldwide Trade in Palladium in 2022 – $29.4 Billion
To be a Commodity, a substance has to be both important and tradeable on a sufficiently large scale and so most of the commodities are easily recognisable items such as iron, cocoa and orange juice – but in Palladium, we come to an element, for such it is, that most people will, if they even know the name, have no idea as to what it is or why it is sufficiently important as to be a tradeable commodity. Yet if you drive a car with a catalytic converter, are fond of white gold or are diabetic and use testing strips, you are (like rats) closer than you know to a small amount of Palladium.
You may not have heard of Palladium, but its sibling is Platinum and grouped together in the Periodic Table, the members of the Platinum Family (platinoids, platinides, platidises, platinum group, platinum metals, platinum family or platinum-group elements) consist of ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum. As is often the case with elements found close together in the Periodic Table, they have similar properties – their main characteristic has determined their greatest utility – they have many catalytic properties and so the major driver of Palladium as a commodity is the demand for Catalytic Converters in car exhaust systems. Incidentally, palladium recycles well and so there is a trade in used catalytic converters which sadly also drives the theft of them too…
As early as 1700, miners in Brazil were aware of a metal they called ouro podre, ‘worthless gold,’ this demonstrates that alloys can occur in nature – and ouro podre is a native alloy of palladium and gold and today, Palladium is one of the metals alloyed with gold to make “white” gold for those who don’t want the gold colour but want jewellery that is stronger and less tarnishing than silver. However, these native metal sources are not where Palladium is commercially extracted from – the ores are limited to four main sites in the world and 37% of the Palladium sold comes from Russia. So once again, Putin’s unwarranted war on Ukraine and the sanctions that followed it, have been a major lever in the trading prices of Palladium just as we have noted they were in oil and gas prices. Incidentally, every commodity has a Trading Identity Number and for Palladium it is HS Code 71102900.
Lastly, Palladium was named by its discoverer (as an element) William Hyde Wollaston in 1802 after the asteroid 2 Pallas, which had been discovered two months earlier. The nymph Pallas was killed by her childhood friend – Athena – daughter of Zeus who – seeing Athena and Pallas sparring, wanted Athena to win and distracted Pallas who was then accidentally impaled by Athena’s spear and Athena was thenceforth known as Athena Pallas. As recompense for killing her friend, she created a STATUE that looked like Pallas and she named it the Palladium which was later housed in the city of Troy. Pallas Athena had many responsibilities as Goddess of War, Wisdom and Health which is a rather mixed job description…
Athena and Pallas sparring whilst Zeus watches from the sidelines – in the style of Titian generated by Midjourney
And so to the “P” poem for today. I had a choice of a Pantoum – a form with a lot of repeating lines giving an incantatory feel which didn’t feel right and so I am going to go with another poetry movement, this one before the Second World War. The Pylon Poets made reference to, if not celebrating, modern technology – taking their name from a poem by Stephen Spender called The Pylons. Other Pylon Poets included W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice. Most famously was perhaps W.H. Auden’s Night Mail which was also made into the soundtrack to a short film. I have chosen the Duplex form which is one of my favourites for the way each couplet passes a theme on to the next one creating a great sense of progress.
Palladium
Palladium which celebrates poor Pallas Was first a statue made by her killer
The wooden statue was protector of Troy A job not done so well so history tells
Her story languished for many decades Later her name graced a minor planet
When telescopes revealed the heavens Then science paid yet another tribute
When Wollaston found another element With minor use named for a minor body
But now we crave the miner’s hard-won produce for catalysis, jewellery and more
At last we found purposes for “useless gold” Palladium which celebrates poor Pallas
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
For those of you who read my a-z Challenge Theme Reveal, you will know that the choice of Commodities as this year’s theme (plus poems), began with a wondering about whether there could really be enough oranges in the world to supply our desire to have orange juice on hand wherever we go – in case you missed it I reproduce the wondering below.
The Wondering…
Consider this – you go to your local supermarket to buy, among other things, some orange juice. You find the right section where there are several brands to choose from, fresh in the chiller and long-life too – perhaps a hundred-litre packets all told. That’s just your local shop, imagine how many shops there are in your town or city each with a hundred litres of orange juice on sale at any particular time – and remember, this stock is turning over all the time – being bought and then replaced with stock from the store room. Multiply by the number of cities in your country and then by the number of orange juice-drinking countries in the world and you have imagined an ocean of orange juice! Where does it all come from – especially considering it takes eight oranges to make a litre of juice? Are there enough orange trees in the world to account for all this juice?
Of course, if you believe in Solipsism – then you will think that the world only exists because you imagine it into being and of course, you want to have plenty of orange juice wherever you go, so you imagine it into being present in all those thousands of shops worldwide. I am more of a realist and so I know that there must be enough orange trees to provide the juice – I just have no idea where!
Most people have no idea whereall that orange juice comes from either and what about dried mint in all those expensive little jars – you may have holidayed in some sunny spot and seen oranges growing, but when did you ever see a mint farm?
The Answers!
Before giving those answers, you will know by now that I like to tease out some unusual facts about each Commodity and for today it is legislation nicknamed the “Eddie Murphy rule”. At the end of the 1983 movie Trading Places, Eddie Murphy jumps into Dan Aykroyd’s arms, the pair shouting in delight because they have just gamed the orange juice futures market bandstand to make a fortune. In the film, Murphy and Aykroyd created a fake crop report to scam the market as a result of which Wall Street eventually made it illegal to trade on inside information obtained from the government and immortalised Eddie Murphy (as if he needed it) in the hallowed halls of financial investment.
For years, the trade in Orange Juice Futures was something of a backwater in the Commodity Trading world, but in 2023, all that changed – the price of OJ futures surged by 92% and it is what that tells us about both the perils and profits to be made from soft commodity futures which is interesting.
Although the US is only number 3 among the world’s orange producers behind Brazil and China by a country mile, a disastrous crop of oranges in Florida, which grows 90% of US orange crops annually, led to the dramatic rise in prices. Once the prices started to spiral in the US, then investors started buying futures from outside the US and so the spiral, like a tropical storm passing over warm seas, was fuelled. In fact actual tropical storms were part of the problem – hurricanes Ian and Nicole, in the Autumn of 2022 autumn, which destroyed 10% of the orange trees, followed by freezing conditions were compounded by the third factor in a triple whammy – an incurable citrus greening disease that has been ravaging trees for years. The disease, also known as Huanglongbing or yellow dragon disease, typically kills off crops within five years. So the harvest in Florida was the lowest in 2023 for a century. But all this turmoil is what thrust OJ futures into the trading limelight – as long as a commodity “future” remains stable, there is nothing to gamble on – and that is what all trading in stocks, shares and commodities is – gambling. As soon as the prices of OJ futures started to climb, then the possibility of making a killing by getting in whilst the prices were lower and cashing in when they were highest became irresistible to traders.
A 1950’s ad for Florida Orange Juice…
So now for the answers to where the oranges come from to gratify our needs worldwide…
Why orange juice? Well because the demand is for juice more than for whole fruit and its cheaper to transport the frozen, concentrated juice without all that skin and pith. Hence Orange juice futures. And what about those little jars of dried mint – are they a commodity? They are not – the sector is too small and diversified around the world – to be a commodity, you have to be big – in the case of orange juice – $6 Billion big!
And so to the poem whose “O” form today is Ottavo Rima (I imagine meaning eight/rhymes) and consists of eight iambic lines, usually iambic pentameters. Each stanza consists of three rhymes following the rhyme scheme a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c.
Orange Juice – an Ottavo Rima
When I grew up, the orange was a treat Compared to the apple, fruit of England The orange came from far away to meet Our post-war need for vitamin C and Exotic fruit from far-off lands of heat In a world our parents had fought for, and Too, beside the fresh and juicy fruit we Also had a glass of orange juice for tea.
Orange drink made from concentrated juice Which tasted all the better when we were Allowed to make it stronger, rules loose Or a blind eye turned by him or her For indeed they loved it just like us Post rationing is it any wonder That orange juice was the prize of their life For family and for husband and wife.
