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!
Frost Futures – yes you read it right – you can buy futures in Frost and other weather phenomena! This is at the heart of trading futures as a hedge against the unexpected and though you might argue that frost itself is not a commodity, yet its impact on many grown commodities is potentially devastating and trading in weather futures is a way of insuring against loss… What I have not been able to find are any meaningful figures for the trade in Frost Futures since this is still a rather exotic trade!
Here are some quotes from the CME Group who specialise in Weather Futures:-
“The common cliché is that every conversation begins and ends with the weather. That’s probably because weather is the most common and pervasive risk factor for individuals or businesses. […] a decisive majority of senior finance and risk managers confirm that their businesses are significantly impacted by the weather and a stunning eight out of 10 warn of a new risk: that the emergence of global climate change and accompanying volatile weather patterns will require changes to their business models in the decades ahead. […] Weather cannot be controlled. But with the introduction of the products we offer, its blame for company losses is no longer justifiable. Weather, like any commodity, can be traded and its risks mitigated. Our Weather products offer the ability to manage volumetric risk or the risk due to variability in sales revenues, caused by weather-related fluctuation in levels of consumption.”
Forgive the corporate language but in essence – trading in futures is gambling and weather futures are a way of hedging your bets… That’s it – short and sweet, other commodities beginning with F include Feeder Cattle and Fish and if you are wondering what Feeder Cattle are – they are young cattle which are sold on (often a byproduct of dairy herds who need repeat pregnancies to maintain milk production) for fattening up before selling.
And so to the poem which today is Free Verse – a form which often seems to be the most ubiquitous among modern poets. Free Verse does not use meter or rhyme, but is still are recognisable as ‘poetry’ by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers can perceive to be part of a coherent whole. (Language is a Virus…)
A beautiful assassin calls at night you can never be sure when you may stand guard in your garden gazing at the glittering array in the heavens revealed by a clear sky and feel in your bones she is lurking but she will wait till cold has driven you to your warm bed and in the early hours she will grip plants squeezing them to death by freezing the life blood in their very veins
You will awaken to a white wonderland of sparkling crystals coating the world and await the sun’s sufficient elevation to melt the assassin’s work and reveal the extent of the damage the body-count the wilting and the dying the seedlings cut down in their infancy and even as you curse the late and unpredictable frost’s devastation counting the cost planning the re-planting you cannot help but admire the beauty…
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 Ethanol 2022 $83.5 Billion
As a commodity, Ethanol is alcohol made on an industrial scale, from various grains – in the US for example – it is corn which is either dry or wet milled. Wet milling is the same process that has been used for millennia to make alcoholic beverages such as beer, first soaking the grain to convert the seed’s stored starches into sugars which are then boiled out of the “mash” and fermented. If your town has a “Maltings” – that is what it was for… Further distillation at the artisan scale rather than the industrial, produces spirits such as Whisky and in the distillation – another type of alcohol which has formed during fermentation, is separated out – Methyl alcohol which due to its lower boiling point, is the first product to emerge during distillation and is discarded. Methyl alcohol would do you no good to drink – wood alcohol as it used to be known, will send you blind as “Meths” drinkers and drinkers of Absinth found until that drink was outlawed…
Ethyl alcohol is used for medicinal products such as moisturisers or bath salts, and in the car manufacturing process for the production of plastics for dashboards and seats and in a lot of personal care products. Ethanol is also added to petrol making it marginally more carbon friendly but any move to switch over to all ethanol would not work due to the extra land and other resources needed. Methyl alcohol on the other hand, is manufactured from fossil fuels and is used not only as a solvent for many products, but is also further processed to make many other chemical products.
The value of Ethanol worldwide production in 2020 was 98.6 billion litres, the value of alcoholic beverages in the US alone was US$1,055 bn in 2024 so both alcohols for drinks and industrial alcohols are big commodity business! The beverage side is made up of many sources and producers, vineyards, many distilleries, and breweries from very large down to craft beer small. There are also many drinks manufacturers of liqueurs, for example, who use industrially produced ethanol as their product base and ethanol is also used to extract many flavourings for the food industry. I once worked in a factory which created ginger flavouring for Gripe Water by steeping dried kibbled (raked apart) ginger in pure alcohol at this concentration, the liquid would do you serious damage however, after the quality control samples had been kept for the relevant number of years, instead of throwing them away we added water and sugar to produce a ginger liqueur (for our own consumption I hasten to add and naming no names). You may not be surprised to learn that the alcohol is no longer permitted in the gripe water and the warming, soothing ginger flavour has to be extracted in other ways. But this is mere extraction and addition of a flavour, the really interesting thing about the production of some alcoholic drinks, is how the flavours come about inherent to the process.
A bodega in Jerez – the city for which Sherry is named…
Take for example Sherry. In Spain and Portugal, only certain parts of the grape harvest are considered “dry” enough to make sherry and that which is too sweet is sent to the UK where the apparently unrefined taste of maiden aunts and secret drinkers, is for sweet sherry drunk from tiny glasses – a product that would never pass the lips of a true Iberian! So having made wine from the suitably “fino” grapes, the sherry is then subjected to something which every other winemaker desperately seeks to avoid – oxidation – albeit in a very limited and controlled way. Bodegas are places where the nascent sherry is put into huge barrels to age but which have an airspace at the top separated from the liquid below by a blanket of yeast known as “flor”. It is critical that the flor is not broken and so as sherry is drawn off from the barrel, it must be replaced with fresh wine at an equal rate so that the flor doesn’t sag and split. Whilst in the barrel, the air penetrates the flor and gently oxidises the wine producing the complex flavours of sherry. The Bodega is thus a dynamic blending process in which no batch of sherry will ever be quite the same an another. Some bodegas have a brew which is hundreds of years old and the process of moving sherry through several bodegas produces a beverage of immense complexity and of gradually elevating price. This is different from the blending of whisky where various single-malt whiskies, not all of which would be considered palatable on their own, are mixed to achieve a consistent blended flavour. There is a link between whisky and sherry however, because traditionally, the whisky industry used empty sherry casks to age their whisky and since the refined spirit is excellent at dissolving flavour, it must be supposed that the whisky picks up some subtle notes from the sherry barrels. “Isca” is a Gaelic word for water and whisky is considered “the water of life” in Ireland – as long as you don’t drink too much to often that is…
And so to today’s poem which is an Erasure poem in which you take another poem or piece of prose and cross out words and lines until you are left with a new poem. The text I took is a poem by Hristo Botev a brilliant Bulgarian poet and revolutionary. Born in Kalofer on January 6, 1848. Died a heroic death in the western part of the Bulgarian Range on June 1, 1876, as part of a voivode of 200 rebels who had set out to die for the liberation of their enslaved Fatherland. The inscription chiselled on the granite rock by which he was killed reads: “Your prophecy has come true – you live on!” The poem he wrote is about drinking to forget the dire situation of kin and country and my erasure poem does not substantially change the meaning of it but condenses it into a somewhat more modern form. This can be a good method for editing and sharpening one’s own poems but since I hadn’t written anything alcohol related…
Ethanol
Give me wine so I can forget glory and disgrace forget my birth my father dear and souls never curbed fighting their bequest forget my family my father grave my mother’s tears
The rich man with his aristocratic airs the merchant his plunder the priest reciting holy mass rob people who must hunger rob them, you wanton band
We drink, we sing every hand holds a glass snarl against the tyrant taverns too small for us we shout… but sober… we forget pledges, phrases say no more, roar with laughter at the people’s sacrifices
While the tyrant rages ravages our home slaughters, hangs, flogs then fines the people tamed
Fill the glass let me drink bring my soul its soothing kill the sober way I think let my hand grow soft I’ll drink despite despite you patriots – nothing near and dear and you? Idiots…
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!
Hang on I hear you say – that’s a “D” poem form but Copper is a “C” commodity – what gives? Well I simply couldn’t find a commodity beginning with D – I looked at Dates but whilst in one sense, everything that is grown and traded is a “commodity”, but this A to Z is looking at commodities in the stricter sense of things that are traded in certain special markets – often as “futures”. A future is something that is bought ahead of time on the gamble that it might have gone up in price come harvest or delivery time. Seemingly Dates are not traded as futures in the way that Cocoa is. So no “D’s” but there are so many “C’s” to choose from hence Copper but with a Duplex poem. Other contenders were Cheese, Coffee, Corn, Cotton, and Crude Oil…
We often refer, often disparagingly, to the Stone Age and somewhat more respectfully to the Iron Age as if that is where the real technology that defines our human race, really began. It’s true that the Stone Age went on for a long time with certain tools remaining unchanged for many thousands of years but there were three great “metal ages” of which Iron was the third – before that, metallurgists cut their teeth during the Copper Age and then the Bronze Age, from which we can say that Copper is one of the oldest important commodities. Even when the second metal age – the Bronze Age began, bronze is mainly copper – an alloy of copper with a small amount of Tin added together (alloyed), the properties are different and better than either on their own – that’s the magic of Metallurgy! To smelt Copper, you have to reach 1,085 °C but this is still less than the Iron of the Third Metal Age would require (1,538 °C) however copper and more so bronze tools were an improvement on the stone tools that preceded them – in fact, it is thought that a shortage of good material for making stone tools in Mesopotamia, was the driving force behind the development of Copper smelting – this is the same area where Barley had been part of an agricultural revolution. Agriculture produced a surplus of food liberating man to develop trading leading to the Urban revolution and this in turn, was a pre-requisite for the research and development of metallurgy.
There is a fascinating timeline of the development and importance of Copper here. Initially, Copper was cold-worked because unlike Aluminium, copper occurs as a native (pure metal form) metal in nature and it is both soft and malleable to work into objects. However, as people experimented with smelting, they discovered that the addition of sometimes small amounts of other metals could improve the qualities of the resultant alloy – qualities like stiffness or the ability to take and hold a sharp edge (necessary for weapons – sadly a driver of technology through the ages). And so the Copper Age gave way to the more significant Bronze Age. Nowadays, this alloy is still used, famously for casting statues, whilst Copper in its pure form has expanded to many more uses – especially in the age of electricity due to its electrical conductivity – electrical wires, telecommunication cables and digital devices. Copper pipes replaced the water poisoning Lead pipes and although other metals (including Aluminium) are used for electrical wiring, copper is the most widely used – even so the cost of copper is high enough to that its scrap value makes recycling a profitable enterprise and ripping copper pipes out of empty buildings a crime of the desperate or unscrupulous… Copper is also important in the medical field due to its anti-microbial properties and has been shown to increase agricultural yields.
As a Commodity – Copper was the third-most-consumed industrial metal in the world, after iron and aluminium, with an estimated 22m metric tons mined in 2022 rising from 16m metric tons in 2010 and in spite of this increased demand, there is more of the metal available today than at any other time in history according to the Copper Alliance.
Makes you wonder what the Swiss are doing with all that copper – but that is the kind of unexpected fact you discover when you start to look behind the scenes of all the Commodities we take for granted…
And so to the poem – a Duplex is the invention of Jericho Brown and is known as a gutted sonnet—that is, part ghazal, part blues poem. The duplex is comprised of fourteen lines arranged in couplets, wherein each line is between nine and eleven syllables, the second line of the first couplet is echoed in the first line of the second couplet, and so on, and the first line of the poem is also it’s last. This repetition drives the poem along at a pace, I find…
Copper
What price the copper of a redheaded girl… Before Bronze, or Iron was the Copper Age
Do copper bracelets ward off old age arthritis? No copper can catch the thief of time…
Cops were known for wearing a copper badge Good luck catching thieves of pipes from buildings
The price of copper makes the theft worthwhile Pipes carry water – wires electricity
Wires construct the web of our digital age The internet monitors the price of Copper
The price of raw ore and refined metal Cuprite, Digenite, Malachite, Azurite
The prettiest of these – green Malachite but What price the copper of a redheaded girl…
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 Cocoa 2022 $46.4 Billion
Cocoa perhaps above all others, exemplifies the aspect of commodities whereby they are the raw materials for other things that we consume and in the case of cocoa, from which we get chocolate – literally consume! And yet, how many of us know where our chocolate comes from, how it’s raw ingredient is grown or by whom and how it turns into our favourite sweet treat?
If you want the full facts I suggest you go to the Fair Trade Organisation commodity briefing because they are tireless campaigners for better prices for cocoa producers since of the 4 million tonnes of Cocoa produced each year around the equatorial globe, worth 20.3 billion dollars, 90% of it is grown by 5-6 million small farmers whereby close to 50 million people depend on cocoa production for a living. From them, the product is mainly concentrated into the hands of just 9 companies. But I am going to take a more personal look at the world of Cocoa.
The world of Cocoa production is in crisis at present
Processing plants cannot afford to buy beans
Consumers around the world will have to pay more for chocolate
The market could be heading for a fourth year of deficit
You can read more about it here, but here is the essence – and you might want to stock your cupboards with the sweet stuff…
In normal times, the market is heavily regulated – traders and processors purchase beans from local dealers up to a year in advance at pre-agreed prices. Local regulators then set lower farmgate prices that farmers can charge for beans. However, in times of shortage like this year, the system breaks down – local dealers often pay farmers a premium to the farmgate price to secure beans. The dealers then sell the beans on the spot market at higher prices instead of delivering them at pre-agreed prices. As global traders rush to purchase those beans at any price to meet their obligations with the chocolate firms, local processors are often left short of beans. Ivorian and Ghanian authorities normally try to protect local plants by issuing them with cheap loans or by limiting volumes of beans that global traders can purchase. This year, however, plants are not getting the cocoa they pre-ordered and cannot afford to buy at higher spot prices. Already, chocolate-makers have raised prices. U.S. retail stores charged 11.6% more for chocolate products last year compared with 2022, data from market research firm Circana shows. The International Cocoa Organisation (ICCO) expects global cocoa production will fall by 10.9% to 4.45 million metric tons this season.
Talk about ignorance – I can’t remember how old I was before I finally pinned down the relationship between cocoa and chocolate – and it was drinking cocoa and drinking chocolate that forced me to look it up – drinking cocoa is just powdered cocoa and you can make it into a drink or use it as an ingredient in cakes, savoury and other dishes. Drinking chocolate might variously contain. sugar and milk powder to make a sweet chocolate drink.
As a child, in a Western, first-world country, my sisters and I had plenty of chocolate – especially at Easter with Easter eggs. We had white chocolate courtesy of The Milky Bar Kid and we gradually became aware not only of Milk and Dark Chocolate – gradually acquiring a preference for the latter with its more bitter taste – or not. We also started to notice the difference between cheap chocolate that melts in your hand, and the crisper snap of better quality chocolate such as Lindt cast chocolate Easter Bunnies. But it is only in recent years that I have come to understand the whys and wherefores of these different aspects of chocolate.
In 1968, en route back home to England from Australia by ship, we called into Trinidad where a taxi driver took us to a tropical beach with picture postcard palm trees leaning down across the sands and he also stopped at a roadside stall to buy a Cocoa pod. Breaking open the pointy-ended yellow oval pod, he revealed the cocoa beans inside coated in a white flesh which he broke out and gave us to suck. The white flesh was pleasant and slightly like lychee if I recall correctly but bite into the beans and it was a bitter disappointment! Could this be where chocolate came from? The answer is yes but only after considerable processing.
Cocoa pods broken open to show white flesh covered cocoa beans
Jump ahead some 50 years when I worked and still work for a factory that makes a lot of sweet chocolatey cakes and puddings, and I was lucky enough to spend a day at the UK plant of Barry Callebaut AG – the top processer in the world of cocoa yet like all the big processors, with the exception of Nestlé who also make finished chocolate goods, most people in Britain and probably any of the countries where they have plants, will say Barry who? In the UK, the best-known chocolate sweet manufacturer is Cadbury (Bourneville) and in America, the names Hershey, Nestlé and Mars dominate the chocolate market, but I discovered on my day at Barry Callebaut’s that it is they who provide the chocolate to Cadbury – BY THE TANKERFULL!!!!!
Ruby, Dark and White chocolate
Huge 1-ton blocks of cocoa have already been processed by taking the farmer-dried beans, crushing them and melting them slightly into giant blocks. Callebaut then refine the cocoa further into chocolate solids (the principal ingredient of dark chocolate) and cocoa-butter (the principal ingredient of white chocolate) and by mixing in milk solids and sugar, they produce milk chocolate. Most of Callebaut’s output is in the form of tiny pellets of chocolate or the aforementioned tankers of liquid chocolate. They also sell a small amount of “cocoa nibs” – a health supplement and occasional food ingredient and they sell pink chocolate – the product of years of selective breeding.
I also learned why cheap chocolate melts in your hands and expensive doesn’t – it’s all down to the tempering – something I knew of in relation to metals but not chocolate. It costs money to repeatedly heat and cool chocolate until it is tempered hence the greater cost of tempered chocolate, but if you want to cast fine detail and not have it melt in your hand and get a snap when you break it – then temper it you must…
I left Barry Callebaut with a secret yen to become a Chocolatier but I fear that sampling the goods would not be good for my diabetes!
One more personal connection with chocolate – as a student I lived in Birmingham – not far from Bournville the model village set up for its workers by its Quaker founders. Bournville sells chocolate products under the name Cadbury…
Part of Bournville Village showing the Cadbury factory in the background.
And so to the poem which is a kind of “found” poem where I searched for lots of poems referencing cocoa and took lines from them to make a new poem known as a Cento.
Cocoa Poems
To attract you to the front of the store Chocolate candies abound In a cocoa river palate tales abound What a rich flavour with hints of cocoa
Make hot cocoa Black confection triple thick triple chocolate I was a Christmas drink almost to sweet to sup A chocolate star lay at my helm, scrumptiously tasty
Or when it’s cold enjoy warm cocoa Our fireside chat to hot cocoa With one thought in mind… We enjoy winter, the more we enjoy cocoa!
In this mug, memories steep hot chocolate whispers, soft and deep Carnation instant hot cocoa… my Mom’s treat with a kick of nutrition. Each morning for one mug, I visit with Mom. Like a little fur in my Mexican cocoa said my old grandma… Saw a furry creature sitting in her cocoa cup!
He ordered a cocoa, not expecting anything extra the smiley face at the top almost changed his mood Tentative brush of a cheek in a cocoa crush Knocking back the sepia potion, Cocoa coursing through their veins. I miss my cocoa butter kisses, hope you smile when you listen
This Cento poem incorporates lines from poems by Ilene Bauer, M.L. Kiser, Anne-Lise Andresen, Caren Krutsinger, Heidi Sands, Albert, C. J. Krieger, Billy Ros III, Sara Etgen-Baker, Gwendolyn.Queenofself, Lucia Heffernan, John Betjeman, Stanley J. Sharpless, Keke Davis.
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 there 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 Barley 2022 $10.4 Billion
Barley is the oldest cultivated grain and still the forth most cultivated after maize, wheat, and rice. Bere was the Old English word for Barley and the word Barley comes from the Old English bærlic. The Old English bere-aern meaning “barley-store” gives us the modern word barn and showing the importance of this ancient grain. Grinding stones near the Sea of Galilee reveal traces of barley starch from 23,000years ago and by 9,000 years ago, domesticated barley (unable to reproduce without human assistance) is found throughout the Fertile Crescent including Mesopotamia, sometimes thought to be the original Garden of Eden.
Botanical illustration of leafy stem with roots, flowers, and 2- and 6-row ears
In 2022, 155 million tonnes of barley were grown worldwide with Russia in the lead at 15% followed by France Germany and Canada. You can read more details about all aspects of Barley here. However, the thing to be concerned about over barley as a commodity is that it is threatened by Climate Change. Modern barley ideally likes a cool climate without too much rain which is perhaps why it enjoys northern continental interiors but even these areas are threatened by the rising temperatures of global warming and the unpredictable extremes of weather events that bring heavy rain to unaccustomed areas…
Seventy percent of barley goes to animal feed which vegetarians would answer is a wasteful way for humans to raise protein, but the other thirty percent is eaten (or drunk) by humans but if climate change disrupts the crop, will animal feed be the first to succumb to unpredictability with humans feeding directly on whatever has managed to be grown?
With barley being eaten in such a wide range of countries, there are many varieties of soups, stews, gruels and porridges not to mention bread made from barley flour. But barley is also fermented to produce malt which is the sugar basis of both many beers and of whisky and these liquids are ascribed as the gifts to mankind of John Barleycorn who was the subject of many ballads variously personifying the harvest and transformation of barley into booze…
John Barleycorn (image by Midjourney)
Healthwise, a 100-gram portion of barley can provide 10% of the required Daily value of some essential nutrients – fibre, the B vitamin niacin, and dietary minerals, including iron and manganese. It does however contain gluten so it is not suitable for those who are gluten-intolerant. It can aid in the regulation of both blood sugar and blood pressure.
Barley is not the only crop which is and will increasingly suffer from climate change, but it illustrates clearly the coming doom scenario if we fail to act to halt the slide into global warming.
And so to today’s poem – a recently coined form – a Bop poem! The Bop was created by Afaa Michael Weaver during a summer retreat of the African American poetry organization, Cave Canem. The Poets.org defines the Bop as “The first stanza (six lines long) states the problem, and the second stanza (eight lines long) explores or expands upon the problem. If there is a resolution to the problem, the third stanza (six lines long) finds it. If a substantive resolution cannot be made, then this final stanza documents the attempt and failure to succeed.” So here goes…
Barley
Barley enjoys a cool climate but not too much rain but global warming also means increased precipitation, we may have to eschew John Barleycorn’s barley malt but losing liquor is the least of it if climate change can’t halt. this oldest of grains is still the fourth most cultivated crop so food for animals and people around the world might stop.
Animals eat seventy percent of the barley. Some know only soup with Pearl Barley but bred to lose its hull is Hull-less Barley which pre-cooked and dried is Quick Cooking Barley, longer to cook is only lightly polished Pot Barley, similar to steel-cut oats are Barley Grits, and like rolled oats, Barley Flakes are flattened bits of a grain that’s eaten in so many places its crop loss with hunger will over-face us.
The third stanza of a Bop poem seeks resolution but I see no solution to this sad situation, those traders in stocks and shares who seek to hedge their bets with grown wares will find Soft Commodities have and make bad Futures if we’ve tipped the climate past the point of rupture…
Other Commodities beginning with B include Beef and Bitumen. Beef, as is discussed with Barley above, is the least efficient way of producing protein of all animals since you have to put masses of other protein in to get there and as well, cattle are accused of contributing to greenhouse gasses and thus global warming with all their farting and burping methane. There are some minor measures which are beginning to alleviate those things but more significant is that the demand for beef continues to grow and that means bringing more land into agriculture including forestry. Just because people in developed countries want to eat more meat and don’t directly see the Amazon rainforest being cut down to make way for ranching, does not mean it is not affecting them through climate change. You can read a good article by the World Resources Institute weighing up the factors around beef and the environment here.
Bitumen is a byproduct of refining crude oil – the very last item to come out of fractional distillation and it is of course, the binder in tarmac or asphalt which makes the roads that the petrol-driven motor cars drive on. If bitumen was not used up in this way then it would be a horrendous waste product to be disposed of. So the growth of the motor car and the spreading of roads were pretty much synchronised and conversely, if – and it is a big if – we transition fully to electric vehicles, then the cessation of oil refining will mean a cessation of bitumen availability and considering that electric vehicles will still need roads… As a commodity, bitumen is pretty closely allied to the cost of crude oil and the price of that is a whole other can of worms!
Other poetry forms I might have chosen beginning with B include the Ballad, the Blazon (though it might be difficult to frame Barley as the beloved), Blank Verse, and the Ballat.
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 – will there 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 Aluminium 2022 $280Billion
Happy Bi-Centenary Aluminium!
Yes, Aluminium, or Aluminum as the Americans choose to call it, was first discovered as a metal and element, in 1824, which for the element third most abundant in the earth’s crust after Silicon and Oxygen, is remarkable! Today Aluminium is ubiquitous in industry and domestically, wiring, aeroplane construction, building construction and tin cans are just a few of the obvious uses and because it can be recycled perfectly, it is estimated that so it is estimated that 75% of all the aluminium ever produced is still in use today.
Aluminium is mainly produced from the ore Bauxite which comes primarily from Australia, China and Guinea and China accounts for nearly 60 percent of global aluminium output. On average 4-5 tons of bauxite are needed to produce 1 ton of aluminium. It takes a lot of electricity to separate out the metal – about 15 MWH per tonne of output. That’s approximately as much as a 100-apartment block consumes in a month. This is why recycling is very desirable – 1 kg of recycled aluminium cans can save up to 8 kg of bauxite, 4 kg of various fluorides and up to 15 KWH of electricity.
Newly refined, Aluminium is a highly reflective silvery metal but one of its useful properties is that it quickly reacts with oxygen to produce a greyish layer of oxide which then protects the metal from further oxidation.
Aluminium is light – one-third the density of steel and so it is ideal for building flying machines – the first great example being the great airships of the 1920s but continuing to this day with most aircraft containing large amounts of aluminium – so as one ad for recycling points out, your drink can today may be your holiday jet tomorrow…
In the first years following its discovery, aluminium was hard to produce and so an expensive commodity, two examples of its use are as the cap of The Washington Monument completed in 1895 (due to its electrical conductivity it makes a great lightning conductor) and the statue in London’s Piccadilly Circus is the first to be cast in aluminium – often misnamed as Eros, it is in fact the Greek god of Requited Love – Anteros.
The placing of an aluminium pyramid atop the Washington Monument back when Aluminium was considered a “precious” metal.
On a commercial trading note, the price of Aluminium has been affected by President Biden’s announcement of further sanctions against Russia including trading in metals such as aluminium some of which is produced there, following the death of opposition leader Alexey Navalny so even hard commodities can be affected by unexpected events.
Aluminium Alloy car wheels
Aluminium readily combines with other metals to produce alloys – if your car has alloy wheels for example they are principally aluminium with a small amount of property-altering magnesium. Only one isotope of aluminium is stable – the one we mostly find on Earth, but all other isotopes are radioactive and it is thought that heat from decaying aluminium isotopes helped melt comets in the outer solar system. Aluminium compounds result in the jewels ruby, sapphire, aquamarine and emerald as well as the very hard mineral corundum used for abrasion.
And so to the poem – there are a plethora of poetic forms beginning with A to choose from, Acatalectic, Abecadarian, Aisling, and Aubade, to name but a few. I have chosen an Acrostic where the first letter of each line spells out a word – from the Greek for ‘at the tip of the verse’.
Aluminium
Aluminium your shining Light was hiding Under a bushel of chemistry Mixed so thoroughly In precious jewels and common sulphates Never a native metal, but wait In 1824 your secret was Unlocked and ever since has Made our world a lighter brighter place…
I could not leave the letter A without mentioning Amber, once called “the gold of the North” and traded from its main source The Baltic, all the way to the Mediterranean. So one of the earliest forms of international commodity trading!
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? These things are Commodities – Soft Commodities in fact – which means they are commodities which are grown as opposed to Hard Commodities like metals which are mined. So this year, I am going to explore the world of Commodities!
Of course, to some people, Commodities as a term, means a form of investment and apparently, if you belong to the stocks and share-owning class, you should, apparently, diversify your share portfolio with commodities for greater stability – though this is well above my pay grade so don’t be expecting any tips! But the essential difference between gambling on stocks and shares and gambling on commodities is that they are subject to different forces of fluctuation – a company might invent a new product and its share value rocket or it might have a product superseded by a rival and plummet. Commodities also go up and down – soft commodities are susceptible to the weather, even shellac – the product of the Lac Fly has good and bad years whilst hard commodities are more predictable.
In case you think that commodities sound rather dry, I am going to include a poem – also with an A to Z progression about each commodity as the last nine months, I have taken to writing poetry in a big way – so a double whammy! A few commodities are missing in the Abercadarian and I will double up on one of the letters and poetry forms.
A Commodity Trader and a Poet contemplating commodities in their own ways…
Whether you come for the poems or the commodities, trust me, there will be amazing facts about gold, amber, pork bellies and yes shellac…
This is my 5th A -Z Challenge and you can find the previous years via the Menu at the top of the page – starting in the fateful year of Covid 2020… 2020 – personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis 2021 – I was trying to complete a sci-fi novel and it advanced me greatly and I finished it shortly afterwards 2022 – I wrote about foods which can be used as an ingredient 2023 – I wrote about phrases we know the meaning of but often, not the origin of – and a s a bonus Cant languages
Over at dVerse Poets PubLaura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft is our host and has asked us to write Ghazal using at least one of the lines by Pablo Neruda from his book of poetry – “The Book of Questions” in which he poses 320 questions and answers in couplet form, and she has asked us to use at least one of the six question lines she has selected. I found all six questions stimulating and linked them in this poem.
Why was I not born mysterious? – Sorrowful Then nations would smite down my enemy furious – angry
Why did I grow up without companions – lonely compadres and friends in this world so curious? – and unloved
And do unshed tears wait in little lakes – weeping lurking to ambush we unwary and drown us? – vulnerable
And Why does Spring once again offer its green clothes – landless springing up in the rubble of our homes mocking us? – homeless
How long do others speak if we have already spoken – quashed one hundred years, pleading, crying and dying in the dust? – and denied
Even hope itself may eventually die – we should be hopeless Isn’t it better never than too late for us? – flattened too.
How long do others speak if we have already spoken? – We still As long as it takes for you to hear us – cry out
And Why does Spring once again offer its green clothes? – bear children Because life must triumph, improbable, delirious – all we can
And do unshed tears wait in little lakes? – don’t hold back Yes but cry them, use them, water the dust – start again
Why did I grow up without companions? – seek new friends Because the world heard only another victim’s fuss – in a world of oppressed
Why was I not born mysterious? – we find other victims in common See the wonderful in the ordinary which is us – our voices raised together
There are no especially deserving winners – give us all our due no one deserves our land over us – “Equality now!”
Equal status and our own statehood – “Never Again!” with nobody ruling over us – “Give us Our Due!”
Borrowing these six Neruda questions – “Now!” the poet, Andrew, seeks to give voice to us…
Dublin to Manchester Once on a plane I found a pair of sunglasses a polarising pair with circular lenses of Matrix cool left by the last occupant missed between flights by the cabin clean up crew I have those glasses still more than twenty years later I’m a keeper.
Teneriffe to Gatwick Once on a plane I had the last moments with my first great love then she asked me to hang back at the checkout because her husband was meeting her and thought she was holidaying alone.
Stanstead to Dublin Once on a plane I contemplated flying to meet a woman I had known only for one chaste night of intimations who then sent me a ticket for a weekend in County Leitrim
Manchester to Heraklion Once on a plane fleeing the pandemic one step ahead of lockdown I looked down on the Alps a wilderness of mountains as far as the eye could see from thirty-five thousand feet and saw not a trace of human life, no villages no roads, no smoke as if already we never existed
A Flight to Anywhere More than once on a plane I wonder about the lives of Air Hostesses or Hosts or Stewards as they are now called whether they joined to see the world and whether they did whether it’s true about the crew parties the god-like officers marriage material or just better advantaged the ordinariness of Ryanair crew the haughty select of Air Aegean each one as from the pages of a 50’s fashion magazine do the ordinary despise the haughty meeting en passant in some airport corridor or do they share a common bond of brother and sisterhood is it just another flight from one take off to another landing once on a plane…
Six Degrees of Separation is an excuse to peruse six favourite books linked to an initial offering by our host KateW and eventually link them back to the beginning. Kate W offers us big themes in her choices and since I have been participating, these have included – being adrift in Time, Friendship, Memory, and Romance. This month we have the autobiographical exposé of the world of chefs, restaurants and bad boys generally – Anthony Bourdin’s Kitchen Confidential…
Full disclosure – I once, briefly but gloriously, ran my own restaurant so this month’s 6 Degrees starter book was one I could really get my teeth into! (There will be lots of food metaphors!) Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” is a Chef’s story from a writer who self evidently writes, but counts himself first, foremost, and still practising – as a Chef. As he puts it – “If I need a favour at four o’clock in the morning, whether it’s a quick loan, a shoulder to cry on, a sleeping pill, bail money, or just someone to pick me up in a car in a bad neighbourhood in the driving rain, I’m definitely not calling up a fellow writer. I’m calling my sous-chef, or my saucier, someone I have worked with over the last twenty-plus years…” He writes about how a fairly obnoxious youth found his way into a profession where eccentricity, excess and general misdemeaning is mixed with skill, sweat and long hours in kitchens that come in many varieties, much like the seven circles of hell. He has a chapter in which he asks what possesses a man in mid-life to want to open a restaurant and whilst I was not quite as ignorant, inexperienced and deluded as the dentist Bourdin gives as an example, there were things I could identify with, although I enjoyed every minute of it and I now know, as Bourdin puts it “what it feels like to attain a childhood dream of running one’s own pirate crew…”. Anthony Bourdin writes clearly and entertainingly and for once I would agree with the blurb on the cover which states “More gripping than a Stephen King novel”
So in this month’s 6 Degrees, I am linking the books that made me a cook, a foodie and eventually, however briefly, a chef… When I left home to go to university, my parents bought me a Sabatier, high carbon-steel, flexible boning knife- something which Bourdin talks about in his chapter on essential equipment. They also bought me two paperback cookery books “The Pauper’s Cookbook” by Jocasta Innes, and “Cooking in a Bedsit” by the journalist Katherine Whitehorn.
Not one of my six but I had to sneak it in…
I should say, that heretofore, my mother had always refused to teach me to cook – unlike my sisters, who “would one day be married and therefore need to cook for their husbands” from which you may deduce that I grew up in the pre-liberation 1970’s – or at least Women’s Lib had not then reached our house! Not that I hadn’t kept my eyes and ears open and picked up some culinary skills just from watching my mother – and not just cooking meals, but bottling fruit, freezing vegetables and making jam. Nevertheless – the two books of recipes (or for any Americans – receipts) were intended to fill the gap in my education and fit the kind of cooking which my parents imagined would be the limit of what my student lifestyle would require. Incidentally, of myself and my two sisters, I was the only one who cooked professionally… What I chiefly remember about “Cooking in a Bedsit”, was not the recipes themselves which were sensible culinary cheats for the impecunious, but the structure of the book whose first section was entitled “Cooking on One Ring” followed by two rings and lastly, for those lucky enough to have access to one – cooking on a stove. There were also, entertainingly, short pieces on “For him Asking Her Round to Eat” and vice versa – the latter including the sage advice to make sure and remove all your drying knickers from the radiators before he gets there… This gave a hint as to the fact that food is not merely fuel, but a part of life and culture and this is also strongly themed in Kitchen Confidential. Jocasta Innes would return in a completely different field, later in my life, with her book Paint Magic which diverted me slightly from my career as a Signwriter to specialist paint finishes such as wood graining and marbling. And as for the Sabatier, well I have used it almost every day of my life since, including at least four food businesses and it has been worn down accordingly…
The thing is, I was slightly insulted by my parent’s offerings, implying that my culinary horizons would rise no higher than pauperdom and that once I had left bedsitter land, I would find a nice wife to do the cooking for me! So I set about building my now extensive collection of cookery and food books (three shelves in the bookcase now) by adding first Elizabeth David’s seminal “Mediterranean Food” closely followed by “The Joy of Chinese Cooking” by Doreen Yen Hung Feng and for international variety – the Penguin book of “Indian Cookery” by Dharamjit Singh. I did practise recipes from all these books, but I soon realised that on my cookery journey, reading recipe books and imbibing the essence of their method, ingredients and presentation, is more important than becoming an Indian, Chinese or Mediterranean cook per se – I was an early adopter of Fusion!
The beautiful Elizabeth David…
Elizabeth David was credited with revitalising British cuisine after the Second World War by both drawing attention to foreign food traditions but also, then researching and drawing out the best of British food traditions, subjects which had been, respectively, ignored and forgotten. She was also, a bit of a gal – as Wikipedia informs us “Born to an upper-class family, David rebelled against social norms of the day. In the 1930s she studied art in Paris, became an actress, and ran off with a married man with whom she sailed in a small boat to Italy, where their boat was confiscated.” I can only urge you to delve into Elizabeth David, both her books and her life story. Below is an example of her recipe for Tapenade and you will see that this is grownup recipe writing – she gives quantities for the main ingredients – capers and anchovies, but there is no spoon-feeding by detailing everything precisely – if you are a cook, you will understand and use your judgement. Also on these pages, is the recipe for Skordaliá which has remained my go-to dish when catering for mixed vegetarian and carnivores where I want to demonstrate that vegetarian food is far tastier and more interesting than a piece of meat and two veg…
“The Joy of Chinese Cooking” taught me how to think about putting dishes together in a considered way – the uninitiated way many groups at a Chinese restaurant assemble their order by each picking a favourite dish, whilst familiar to Chinese chefs and waiters the world over, must nevertheless fill them with horror every time. A Chinese meal should contain some whole elements such as a fish perhaps, some chopped and stir-fried and some dishes which are “assembled” – meaning elements cooked by different methods and then brought together in one dish. There should be a balance in red and white meat, fish and vegetable dishes – the whole meal being a balanced and considered effort. This book, first published I think, in 1950 (I am writing away from home so I can’t check my copy) has taught many people to cook Chinese home-style food and whilst some might find the recipes a little heavy by today’s standards and health consciousness, that is perhaps the nature of home cooking everywhere… Below is an example of the cultural differences expounded in the book.
If Elizabeth David paints evocative word pictures of the dishes she encountered on her travels, Doreen Yen Hung Feng gives us a description of a whole food culture, sometimes anecdotally, as above, but also with some simple line drawings. Compared to today’s full-page colour photographs which present the recipes in impossible-to-equal perfection (no doubt with the aid of a food stylist and expert food photographer) Doreen’s illustrations are sparse, but her descriptions more than compensate and you will never be left feeling a failure when comparing your attempt with that in the photograph. The Penguin book of “Indian Cookery” is much the same – no pictures but a solid recipe book which has lasted through many editions as you would expect from Penguin the publisher
With “Indian Cookery” by Dharamjit Singh, I entered the pungent world of spices with their complex history and usage. Despite going to university in Birmingham (the city that gave us the diaspora invented Balti – a dish as unknown in India as Chop suey is unknown in China), I did not really go out for Indian meals until I lived in London, post-university and now I live and work in Bradford – Curry Capital of England! However, I did begin to dip my wooden spoon into yet another food culture and my ingredient shelf blossomed with yet more exotic substances. This is a source of friction between my partner and myself, as she is over-faced by the multiplicity of items she has no idea about in our kitchen and it is also a problem because unless you constantly use up your spices, they will stale.
My love affair with ingredients was developed by my next book choice – Tom Stobart’s “Herbs, Spices and Flavourings” which graced my bedside table for many years after university and many’s the time I read a few items of this splendid encyclopaedia of flavour before going to sleep. What I admired was that the author did not merely list the spices and herbs themselves, but delved into the nature of taste itself, the basic areas of taste detected by the tongue before the high notes which are detected in the nose (which is why food tastes of nothing much when our nose is blocked by a cold).
Tom Stobart also includes flavoursome items such as Marmite – that British food item which people famously “love or hate” – and in doing so, he legitimises the use of anything which has flavour for use as an ingredient which for a fusion foodie, encouraged cross-fertilisation of flavours from the different food cultures represented on my compendious ingredient shelf… In the extract above, you can see that below Marmite, Mastic the original chewing gum, is given its botanical name as well as the names by which it is known in various languages – what more could you ask for from an encyclopaedia?
I was torn about my final choice of book because one of the weightiest tomes on my culinary bookshelves is also an encyclopaedia of enormous import which my partner bought for me one Christmas “McGee on Food and Cooking”. It is the bible of the scientific approach to cookery and is credited with inspiring so-called “molecular” chefs such as Heston Blumenthal. For me though, it is simply the go-to book when you need to understand why something works the way it does in cooking, such as how “No Knead” bread works when everyone knows that kneading bread is what develops the gluten that traps bubbles of carbon dioxide (given off by the yeast) and causes bread to rise. Cookery may be an Art or as the Greeks would have it, a Craft but understanding the Science does not destroy the Art anymore than understanding the science of why a sunset is red should take away our appreciation of the beauty of a sunset – quite the opposite! However, if this has not counted as sneaking in a seventh book, I eventually chose Nigel Slater’s “Toast” as my sixth link since it better closes the circle back to “Kitchen Confidential”.
Nigel Slater recounts in a manner so entertaining that the book was dramatized for TV and the stage, how he became a chef – hence the link back to Anthony Bourdin. His mother was (now) famously, a terrible cook – so terrible that her long-suffering husband and only son, had, often, to ditch her burnt offerings in the bin and resort to the titular toast… After his mother died early, Nigel’s father remarried his cleaning lady, played, fruitily, in the TV drama by Helena Bonham-Carter who was at school in a class between my two sisters – how’s that for degrees of separation! The stepmother was a most excellent cook – in fact, that was part of the attraction for Nigel’s father and it meant that in Nigel’s perception, he found himself in a battle to win his father’s love and attention. The site of the battle was the kitchen as Nigel forced his way into domestic science (cookery) classes which in those days were usually reserved for girls and battle commenced – eventually equipping Nigel Slater to become not only a chef, but a celebrity chef, and like Anthony Bourdin, a chef who writes – both recipe books and his autobiography… So there you have my six (and a bit) choices all of which made me the reasonable cook/ sometime chef/ failed restauranteur I am today. My restaurant was not the first restaurant in which I cooked (I will not say Chef-ed) – that would be The Good Food Shop formerly of Lambs Conduit Street, London, where I blagged my way into cooking at weekends, became a manager/cook and learned a great deal about cooking, business and life – so I was not completely inexperienced when many years later, I opened my own restaurant “Frewin’s” (my middle name). Why did it fail? The obvious answer – not enough customers – was it the food, or the concept ( Café in the daytime, Bistro at night) – I like to think not. That summer it rained non-stop, so no walkers, no tourists and the people of the village went to the big newly revamped gastro pub (with café and massive umbrellas outside) and with copious car parking (of which I had none) and these things cannot always be seen in advance and so I lost my inheritance but as I said before, I enjoyed every moment of it. I hope you can also see why I enjoyed “Kitchen Confidential” so much…
