“When he touched a piece of bread, it grew stiff and had: if he hungrily tried to bite into the meat, a sheet of gold encased the food, as soon as his teeth came into contact with it. He took some wine, itself the discovery of the god who had endowed him with his power, and adding clear water, mixed himself a drink: the liquid could be seen turning to molten gold as it passed his lips.
Wretched in spite of his riches, dismayed by the strange disaster which had befallen him he cried “Forgive me, father Bacchus, and save me speedily from the disaster that promised so fair!” When Midas confessed his fault, Bacchus restored him to his former state. “To rid yourself of the remaining traces of gold which you so foolishly desired, go to the river and wash away your crime.”
-Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Food was the first surplus good, thus the first form of wealth and the first form of capital. It was only natural that when food reached a critical mass it would enter into the symbolic realm as a form of currency. But this also represents a crime of sorts, one wich Midas must wash his hands of. Freud advanced the notion of the primal crime which founds a given society. The transaction of food into wealth and then into money is a founding crime which founded socio-economic capitalism.
In the first place food has a universal intrinsic, substantial and existential value, as opposed to money’s extrinsic and symbolic value with no existential value at all. When food explodes into a surplus, it undergoes a phenomenal splitting: it leads two lives. Once it accumulates as wealth and acquires a critical mass, it becomes a defacto currency, the common object of trade. It enters into the symbolic and acquires an extrinsic, symbolic value (i.e. a trade value). Thus food becomes both intrinsically and extrinsically valuable, both substantial and symbolic.
Next, money is invented and subjected to various food standards. Cultures that did not have a food standard often fixed the price of grain, effectively stabilizing the cost of agricultural labor and establishing a de facto grain standard. An ancient coin is often worth so much rice, cattle or wheat, and thus money is a fetishistic replacement for food, a symbol imbued with the value of some other object. Much of our currency still bears the symbolic remnants of money’s emergence from food.
Eventually money was taken off the food standards and put on the gold standard. Here the fetishistic disavowal of food is complete. Gold which once signified a measure of food, now is both signifier and signified, both the value of the object and the object of value. Money has the audacity to pretend an intrinsic value, that it is the object of value and not what it represents. As evidenced by the various food standards for early currency, money is the fetish object that comes to symbolize the true object of the desire. Food is money’s repressed real.
This, even while food loses its existential value in the explosion of a surplus. It is a fact that ecological disasters do not cause famines unless they are economic disasters as well. One does cannot any longer starve from lack of food, which we produce in surplus; one starves from lack of money. Money has no intrinsic existential value of its own, only the one it borrows from food and then reimposes upon it as the prime determinate. Money thus gains a mortal limit, borrowing from food not only its universal intrinsic value, but its existential value as well.
The Journal of Magnus Opium 