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 where all 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forces of fluctuation – a company might invent a new product and its share value rocket or it might have a product superseded by a rival and plummet.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.
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