Consider the commonly told story about the Inca, concerning chocolate being worth more than gold. It is usually recounted to show how the indigenous people didn’t understand the white man’s world, or how in their naiveté they did not realize the true value of things. Yet, the properties commonly cited as giving value to gold- its luster, its malleability- the Incas knew just as well as the Europeans. One should not conclude then that it was the abundance of gold and its trifling uselessness next to the rare and sensuously indulgent chocolate that gave chocolate such a high value. Simply consider that the cacao bean was used as a common form of currency among the Inca and the racist formulas fall away. Inherent value does not lead to something serving as money, rather it seem that serving as money is what gives something a value.
Yet this answer is not entirely satisfactory, for in the course of history it is food that becomes the first surplus, the first form of wealth and thus the first form of capital. Note that “capital” comes to us from the Latin for head of cattle and “pecunia”, for “money”, is etymologically derived from the Latin for cattle. Nations that did not have a cattle standard for their coin often had a grain standard, wheat or rice. Look on the back of a Lincoln penny and one still finds the symbolic remnant of the food standards for coin.
Slavoj Zizek uses the term “vanishing mediator” to describe historical phenomenon which emerge as a necessary condition of some historical unfolding, but disappears just as necessarily. Food as capital is a vanishing mediator for the emergence of money. Reading histories of money, I am struck by how often authors appeal to the practicality of coin over food in pinpointing the reason for establishing a currency. An apple grower, for instance, can get no iron if the blacksmith does not like apples. Yet the emergence of money is not purely utilitarian and follows much more predictably economic and political contours. As it turns out, money was first invented for the purposes of taxation.
The consumption and perishability of the food would have outpaced the ability to trade or eat it, thus rendering the surplus useless. The very usefulness of food established a ceiling on wealth, representing a limit beyond which food would lose its value because of an increasingly unlimited supply and a consistently capped demand. Thus, while the utilitarian reason for the emergence of money from food was taxation, the economic cause of the emergence of money was inflation.
The Journal of Magnus Opium 