The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets

Front Cover
Columbia University Press, Dec 4, 2012 - Cooking - 208 pages

One morning while reading Barron's, Kara Newman took note of a casual bit of advice offered by famed commodities trader Jim Rogers. "Buy breakfast," he told investors, referring to the increasing value of pork belly and frozen orange juice futures. The statement inspired Newman to take a closer look at agricultural commodities, from the iconic pork belly to the obscure peppercorn and nutmeg. The results of her investigation, recorded in this fascinating history, show how contracts listed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange can read like a menu and how market behavior can dictate global economic and culinary practice.

The Secret Financial Life of Food reveals the economic pathways that connect food to consumer, unlocking the mysteries behind culinary trends, grocery pricing, and restaurant dining. Newman travels back to the markets of ancient Rome and medieval Europe, where vendors first distinguished between "spot sales" and "sales for delivery." She retraces the storied spice routes of Asia and recounts the spice craze that prompted Christopher Columbus's journey to North America, linking these developments to modern-day India's bustling peppercorn market.

Newman centers her history on the transformation of corn into a ubiquitous commodity and uses oats, wheat, and rye to recast America's westward expansion and the Industrial Revolution. She discusses the effects of such mega-corporations as Starbucks and McDonalds on futures markets and considers burgeoning markets, particularly "super soybeans," which could scramble the landscape of food finance. The ingredients of American power and culture, and the making of the modern world, can be found in the history of food commodities exchange, and Newman connects this unconventional story to the how and why of what we eat.

 

Contents

Buy Breakfast
1
1 How Does Commodities Trading Work?
5
2 The Spice Route
17
Corn Futures
27
4 Great Grains
43
5 ButterandEgg Men
63
Coffee Sugar and Cocoa
77
7 Cattle Call
91
Produce Futures
123
10 Super Soybeans
139
Contracts to Consider
153
Food Commodities Traded on NonUS Exchanges
159
Epilogue
163
Notes
167
Index
183
Copyright

The Rise and Fall of Pork Bellies
107

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2012)

Kara Newman is spirits editor for Wine Enthusiast magazine and the author of two cocktail books, Cocktails for a Crowd and Spice & Ice. She is the former vice president of strategic research at Thomson Reuters and a former board member of the Culinary Historians of New York. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Saveur, and CFO Magazine.

Bibliographic information