Traditional Foods are rarely provided by nature in ready-to-eat form.

From learning to cook meat to mastering traditional preservation methods, our species has displayed great ingenuity when it comes to Food.

It’s been more than a million years since we mastered fire, which made a big difference. Without the nutrition unlocked by cooking, our brains and bodies could not have developed as they did over the ensuing millennia.

The average human brain was approximately 10-15% smaller by the First Agricultural Revolution. Yet, it was organizing itself in many new ways.

Pottery was another major milestone, enabling the boiling of liquids and storage of grains. The global spice trade, while undoubtedly about Money, was also a transmitter of flavor and preservation methods.

After the Second Agricultural Revolution brought Food into much closer relation with Money, our species further intervened to defend it from the passage of Time.

By inventing canning in 1810 and mechanical refrigeration several decades later, our species pioneered new ways for Food to overcome both Time and space.

Louis Pasteur then helped us overcome bacteria.

From here, our attention shifted from survival to efficiency.

In the 1870s, larger commercial flour mills began to replace traditional stone, and the first refrigerated railcars began to transport perishable Food items from America’s heartland to its coasts. Meat slaughtered in Chicago could now be sold in New York.

This was highly advantageous for a young nation with a growing population to feed — but it also hastened the disconnect between the production and consumption of our Food.

As new technologies were enhancing operational efficiency, new corporations were formed to pursue legal and economic efficiency.

One purpose of using a corporation to produce Food is to protect the human owners’ personal assets in the event their products are found by a court to have caused harm.

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There may be good reasons or intentions behind such a system, such as to facilitate the sharing of risk — but it can also be abused if profits are blindly pursued.

On a positive note, the Haber-Bosch Process was invented in 1909 by two German chemists and was arguably the most important innovation of the twentieth century. Synthetic fertilizer massively expanded the global productivity of agriculture.

For the rest of the century, however, most Food innovation happened within corporations, behind closed doors, strictly for the purpose of making Money.

From the owners’ and directors’ perspective, the corporate legal form was critically important because it shielded their personal assets from harsh legal judgments in the event that a court found their products or actions to have caused unreasonable harm.

This legal innovation is also what had enabled European merchants to pool resources when funding risky overseas trading ventures — while minimizing their personal financial exposure.

But by overcoming nature in this way, the stage was set for many new players to enter and expand the growing chasm between nature and our stomachs.

Corporations will be explained in more detail in Chapter 5 (Time & Money).

And their modern application of science and law to the production of Trade Foods will be further addressed in Chapter 6 (Food & Money).

But throughout our species’ history, long predating corporations, there have been many Food innovations that are absent from modern history books or grocery stores.

Traditional human cultures were practicing nutritional innovation long before the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution.

For example, the Gaelic communities of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides relied on the thatched roofs of their traditional “black houses” for more than just shelter — it became a powerful fertilizer for a region with harsh growing conditions.

By allowing smoke to slowly filter through their straw thatch roofs rather than a chimney, the chemicals released from burning locally abundant peat moss were absorbed by the straw over the course of a year.

The annual harvest and replacement of the thatched roof was an important part of their culture which served vital, biological purposes.

To the Scottish authorities in Edinburgh, however, this practice was neither efficient nor sanitary. Some officials even blamed the “black houses” for poor health outcomes.

But once modern building codes were introduced that made chimneys mandatory, the yields from traditional oat crops plummeted — these ancient Gaelic communities were then forced to rely on imported Trade Foods such as white flour and sugar.

Some elders has sensed the problem and continued to maintain their “black houses” alongside their government-sponsored modern homes, but the damage was done.

Despite costly government efforts to modernize these communities’ traditional living conditions, the result was a rapid deterioration of community health outcomes.

The traditional application of Human Time to secure local nourishment was displaced by centralized decision-making in London and Edinburgh’s government offices — where hired agents used their Human Time to pursue very different goals.

The prejudiced sanitation efforts of Scottish public health officials may have been well-intentioned, but they were also part of a larger imperial plan that had been formed in London.

By incentivizing Scottish landowners, the British State was aggressively pushing commercialization by dismantling traditional subsistence agriculture.

Their goal was to integrate the population into the industrial labor market — they needed human factory workers for their Industrial Revolution, and they succeeded.

After countless millennia of Traditional Food innovation, powerful merchants and landowners began using corporations to harness Human Time for the purpose of Trade Food innovation.

The traditional goal of Food production had been to promote healthy humans and communities — the modern goal was all about Money and healthy profits.

This pattern was exported and replicated around the world by the British Empire, but it was perfected by American corporations in the aftermath of World War II.

In the next post, we’ll explore how large Trade Food producers entered the market for Time by using science to sell convenience.

Previous post: The Meaning of “Food Safety,” Pt. 1

Food Safety can mean different things to different people — let alone to corporations or regulatory agencies.

But it ultimately has to do with how what we eat affects the quality of our Time.

By categorizing the known plants and animals as being safe or unsafe to eat, our species gradually developed foundational knowledge of what was possible.

Through experience and adaptation, we began to understand which Foods were best.

Early human cultures learned to select Foods based on their “life-giving properties” — items now understood to be nutrient-dense: containing a high ratio of nutrients to energy (calories).

Traditional preservation methods were vital to survival, particularly where long, dark winters had to be endured. It was crucial that Food stores remained safe to eat — they must continue to provide nourishment without causing illness.

Despite being fully biological, nature’s “grocery store” contains many toxins and other harmful substances that our species learned to contend with.

For example, although cassava and corn both became important staples in many traditional cultures, eating them raw or untreated causes serious health problems.

The traditional concept of Food Safety was centered on life.

Through countless millennia of empirical observation, trial-and-error, and the transmission of knowledge across generations, many traditional cultures came to master the process of safely extracting nutrients from their local ecosystems.

Once reliable nutrition was achieved, the concept of Food Safety was implicitly broadened to optimize long-term survival, life-giving properties, and social cohesion.

With the basics covered, our pattern recognition was directed towards these more advanced topics — all still centered on human life.

But in recent centuries, as the production of Trade Food came to dominate local geographies, displacing adherence to tradition and access to land, the concept of “Food Safety” began to change.

Food Safety has since become a burgeoning industry in its own right.

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For the large corporations whose business is the production of Trade Food, the idea of producing Foods that were safe to eat was eclipsed by the commercial imperative of producing Foods that were safe to sell.

The compatibility of our biological and legal systems is often minimal and always delayed, creating a subtle difference between “safe to eat” and “safe to sell” Foods.

This difference ultimately comes down to Money and corporate liability.

As a separate “legal person,” corporations may be held accountable for harm caused to others by their actions, or the actions of their employees or representatives.

This is the basic meaning of corporate liability.

Harm from Food is a matter of biology, but whether there is sufficient cause to award Money damages is a matter of law — this is where things get complicated.

As humans, we never want the Foods we eat to cause us harm — regardless of whether that harm manifests in the short, medium, or long-term.

The problem is that the further into the future you go, the harder it becomes to connect the harm to the Food. While not impossible, this is a major legal hurdle.

Four decades passed between the first consumer lawsuits against tobacco companies and the American legal system recognizing a link between smoking and lung cancer — the original plaintiffs died long before this shift, receiving no compensation.

This delay between the first cigarette smoked and the onset of noticeable harm is why it took so long for the connection between smoking and cancer to be legally accepted.

Where harm is immediate or measurable in the short-term, it’s much easier to hold corporations accountable through the legal system.

Losing expensive lawsuits and being forced to pay major legal damages may threaten corporate existence. Producing “safe to sell” Foods minimizes this risk.

And since legal causation is much easier to achieve for more immediate harms, the production of Trade Food is heavily biased toward short-term Food Safety.

This creates a double-edged sword.

The financial incentives to eliminate short-term, biological pathogens from Trade Foods have caused our Food supply to become highly stable and ultra-sanitized.

Food borne illness in the industrialized world was dramatically reduced during the first half of the twentieth century — this is undeniably positive.

But these advances have since leveled off, and the numbers are starting to go up again.

After a century of sanitizing our Foods from short-term risks, many long-term harms are coming home to roost.

In this prolonged battle against microorganisms and contamination, our species’ longer-term nutrition has unfortunately become a casualty.

Newer methods of corporate production both strip Foods of their nutrients (the good stuff), while adding many new, non-biological components (the bad stuff).

The result?

Suffering acute harm from our Foods has become rarer — but the rates of longer-term diet-linked health problems and chronic disease are rising for modern humans.

Corporations are making more Money from producing “safe to sell” Trade Foods than ever before, but our species’ collective health is in decline.

“Food Safety” was traditionally about human life — corporations have made it about shelf life.

Before turning to how these changes affect human health (our Time), we must further explore how the use of Human Time has affected our Food.

From applying ancestral knowledge to engineering corporate trade secrets, our species has demonstrated much ingenuity when it comes to Food — but the deciding actors have centralized, and the goals have changed.

Next post: How Human Time Affects Food

Previous post: How Measured Time Affects Food

Food spoils with Time.

Whether through invasive microorganisms like bacteria, mold, or yeasts; natural chemical breakdowns within the Food itself; or exposure to environmental factors like air, sun, or moisture — the passage of Time has long been an enemy of nutrition.

This is why humans save Money for retirement. Not Food.

The idea is to preserve our access to Food by using Money as a store of value.

Specialty items like wine or whiskey may appreciate over Time — their Money value increases as they age.

Taste may be affected, but this is also about status. Certain cheeses, vinegars, or dried meats require also aging periods to reach their desired states.

But Food is generally a poor store of value.

The various Food items that functioned as Money throughout our species’ history were all highly resistant to the damaging effects of Time.

For both the Mayans and Aztecs of Mexico, cacao beans functioned as local currency and were used as a medium of exchange.

During China’s Tang and Song dynasties, bricks of dried tea served this purpose.

From Africa to the Americas, many ancient civilizations used salt as Money.

Consumed for both flavor and health reasons, salt was also used to preserve meats and other natural Food, slowing the aging process by defending against microorganisms.

Despite popular misconceptions, salt played no formal role within the Roman Empire’s systems of Metallic Money. Apart from periods of shortage inherent to such systems, Roman soldiers were typically paid in metal coins.

But salt was a critical ration for Rome’s armies — which is why their allowance of coins for buying salt and other necessities became known as a “salarium.”

How the need to feed traveling armies shaped the history of Money will be explored in Chapter 6 (Food & Money).

Salt symbolizes the relationship between Time and Food better than any other substance. And unlike many newer preservatives, it is absolutely vital to our bodies.

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Chapter 2 introduced salt as the dietary mineral sodium — but its economic role as a Food preservative is no less significant than its biological role within our bodies.

Sugar was introduced as a harmful Food additive whose economic role as a low-cost, high-energy sweetener powered the rise of multiple European empires.

Interestingly, both white powders have been labelled “white gold” by humans.

But for very different reasons.

From the Roman Era through the Middle Ages, salt earned this label on account of its life-giving properties. Powerful city-states like Venice and Munich did monopolize its production to fund war — but this was only possible because human bodies needed it.

Sugar became “white gold” much later, during the Europeans’ seventeenth century colonization of the Caribbean — but for economic reasons instead of biological.

European merchants valued sugar for the Money it could be exchanged for.

By contrast, salt was valued by ancient human cultures for helping navigate Food’s passage through Time, thereby extending our own Human Time.

Every isolated culture studied by Dr. Price relied on traditional Food preservation methods. The Inuit possessed a natural freezer and maritime cultures had ready access to salt, but groups in other areas had to develop alternative methods.

The Swiss villagers and multiple African tribes fermented raw milk into cheeses and other products. Woodland Indians fermented grains and other starches, keeping them fresh for months.

Drying or dehydrating meats using sun and air was also widely practiced.

The purpose of these and other traditional preservation methods was always to keep Food safe to eat in the future. Based on experience, memory, and tradition, ancestral knowledge regarding Food safety was critically important and heavily relied on.

This knowledge base was slowly developed in isolation long before science, grocery stores, Food lobbyists, or government agencies entered the scene.

For traditional human cultures, the idea of Food safety was always about holistic survival, encompassing both the immediate and long-term health consequences for individuals, as well as the biological resilience of the community.

Methods for preserving Traditional Foods were slowly developed in tandem with biological feedback from our bodies and communities.

The standard was health.

Traditional Foods weren’t being preserved to expand the window of Time that they could be traded for Money (“shelf life”) — it was to expand the availability of nutrients to human bodies and communities.

Things are very different now.

As our species shifted toward Trade Food, science and technology were deployed by large corporations to make their Food products more profitable to sell.

Methods for preserving Trade Foods were rapidly developed in tandem with economic and legal feedback from shareholders and corporate directors.

The standard became Money — any connection to our biological systems would have to be established in a court of law, where science is often highly politicized.

This topic will appear again in Chapter 6 (Food & Money), but this difference between Traditional and Trade Food has major implications for the Time & Food dualism.

Humans have traditionally sought out methods for making Foods safe to eat.

Large corporations are concerned with producing Foods that will remain safe to sell.

These are, unfortunately, different goals.

To understand why, we must explore the meaning of “Food Safety.”

Next post: The Meaning of “Food Safety,” Pt. 1

Previous post: Hunger, Survival, & Nourishment

Chapter 4: Time & Food

I find that it is not accident but accumulated wisdom regarding foods that lies behind their physical excellence and freedom from our modern degenerative processes... on various sides of our world the primitive people know many of the things that are essential for life — things that our modern civilizations apparently do not know.

Weston A Price — “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects” (1939)

Time scarcity, the feeling of not having enough time, has been implicated in changes in food consumption patterns such as a decrease in food preparation at home and an increase in the consumption of fast foods... These food choices are associated with less healthful diets and may contribute to obesity and chronic health problems.

J. Jabs & C. Devine — “Time Scarcity & Food Choices: Overview” (2006)

Chrono-nutrition is an emerging field of nutritional science that aims to develop understanding of how when we eat may impact our health... it reflects the basic idea that, in addition to the amount and content, the time of ingestion is also critical for well-being.

Dr. R. Gibson — “Chrono-nutrition: a new dietary dimension” (2020)

One of the great triumphs of recent human history has been the... reduction in the percentage of the total working population involved in the production of food... The spectacular productivity gains... have, over time, allowed millions of people to focus their lives on other pursuits.

Matt Gurney — “Canadians won’t starve but we aren’t spoiled for choice in our domestic food supply”, The National Post (April 10, 2020)

You are what you eat.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin — French lawyer & politician (1826)

Without Food, our Time runs out.

This is the most fundamental relationship between Time and Food for all life forms.

Humans can survive for about three minutes without air, three days without water, and up to three weeks without Food — in its caloric and nutrient form.

But measuring the duration of these deprivations doesn’t even begin to capture how we experience them. Our first few seconds, hours, or days without air, water, and Food, respectively, would feel indescribably different from our last.

This speaks to the breadth of Human Time.

The first and twenty-first days without Food are completely different experiences.

Although uncomfortable, the former might actually improve our long-term health.

Voluntarily going without Food is called “fasting,” a religious practice that has gained secular popularity for its purported health benefits. Periodic fasting for between twelve hours to several days may actually help us to live longer and healthier lives.

The twenty-first day without Food, however — should you make it that long — would be excruciatingly painful and certainly would not not promote long-term health.

Subsequent life would generally be shorter.

Survival is at the core of the complex relationship between Time and Food.

Our species’ most primal interest in Food is how it serves our Time — especially when we are hungry or on the brink of starvation. We share this interest with all other life forms.

Time is used to acquire Food (usually indirectly), which provides us with more Time.

This is the “circle of life,” as we live it.

But although we share this basic need for Food with all other life forms, only humans may devise an additional Money-based interest in Food.

Beyond serving our biological needs, we may also acquire or produce Foods for the purpose of exchanging them for Money.

This uniquely human characteristic relative to other life forms is primarily carried out through corporations specializing at different stages — everything from extracting raw ingredients from nature to serving finished products.

Only in the most specialized field-to-table restaurants would a single group of collaborating humans oversee this entire process. For most people’s meals, there are many layers of corporations between nature and their stomachs.

From seed producers to corporate farms, and from multiple processing stages to the distribution networks serving our grocery stores and restaurants, Food has become a major industry in its own right.

But the goal of each corporate layer is to make Money — a radically different aim from providing nourishment, which was long the traditional basis of Food selection.

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At a chemical level, humans have more in common with plants and animals than with corporations or governments. More than any other life form, we’ve spent countless millennia mastering the safe and efficient consumption of Foods found in nature.

With far more Food choices than any other life form, the distinction between what is possible and which is best looms large for our species. Early efforts to answer these questions opened new frontiers of human consciousness that are still unfolding.

Remnants of these efforts can be found in the field reports of Dr. Weston Price, which detail the different Foods that indigenous groups had long-ago classified as possessing special life-giving properties.

These Foods offered more than just energy. They were prized for their nourishment.

Lacking refrigeration, the passage of Time became an enemy of nutrition for our early ancestors. For many of the isolated groups studied by Dr. Price, their survival depended on ancient techniques for preserving their Traditional Food.

Next, we will explore our species’ adaptations to the hazards that Time posed to their Food.

Next post: How Measured Time Affects Food

Previous post: What Happens When Concepts Collide?

Part II: Dualisms

“The quality or state of being dual or of having a dual nature”

“The division of something conceptually into two opposed or contrasted aspects, or the state of being so divided”

“A theory or system of thought that regards a domain of reality in terms of two independent principles”

“A theory that considers reality to consist of two irreducible elements or modes”

“The use of two irreducible, heterogeneous principles (sometimes in conflict, sometimes complementary) to analyze the knowing process”

“A view of human beings as constituted of two irreducible elements”

— Selected definitions

The word dualism is a combination of the Latin “duo,” or two, and the suffix “ismus,” meaning a system or theory.

Though often associated with René Descartes’ mind-body theory, it was the English linguist Thomas Hyde who first coined the term in 1700 while studying ancient Persian religion — he had used it to describe the cosmic battle between good and evil.

In theology, dualism stands for a reality that is divided into equal but opposite forces.

Persia’s Zoroastrian conception of eternal struggle was between Ahura Mazda, creator of truth and light, and Angra Mainyu, the force of chaos and darkness.

For its part, Christianity involves a dualistic framework of good and evil but rejects the idea of an eternal struggle between them. Instead, evil represents a temporal corruption of the good that will eventually be overcome.

In Ancient China, dualism meant the balancing act between two complementary forces rather than direct conflict. The Yin and Yang of Taoism did not represent good and evil, but the equilibrium produced by the interplay of light and dark forces.

Beginning with Plato in Ancient Greece, the idea that our minds and bodies are fundamentally distinct is known as substance dualism. It was later famously modified by Descartes, and is shared by many world religions.

Science has since proven many of Descartes’ beliefs wrong.

Living amidst the Scientific Revolution, Descartes was a pivotal figure in the histories of science, math, and philosophy. His Cartesian coordinate system revolutionized geometry, and he was among the first to mechanically model the physical world.

But his love of automation and mechanization led him to adopt many views that would be considered absurd by today’s standards.

For example, since they lacked human language and cognition, he believed animals to be unthinking machines, incapable of feeling pleasure or pain.

This was roundly mocked by Enlightenment thinkers including Voltaire, Bentham, Leibniz, Hume, and Rousseau — men perhaps more in touch with their inner worlds.

Everyone knew dogs had feelings.

But even Descartes himself had a pet dog that he loved dearly — his private actions did not accord with his public views.

As a man of science, his view of animals was likely an instrumental belief intended to absolve scientists from the moral quandaries surrounding animal experimentation — particularly where their treatment could be characterized as torture.

Instrumental beliefs are caused by incentives — the motives, rationale, or strategy behind our actions. These feature prominently in Part II.

When concepts collide, incentives are both a cause and effect. The strongest incentives are often the basis of great and lasting change.

This is the meaning of “dualism” within The Algebra of Life.

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Instead of dividing the world into balancing halves or opposing forces, the “dualisms” of Part II are the products of interplay within the respective pairings of concepts:

• Time & Food (Chapter 4)

• Time & Money (Chapter 5); and

• Food & Money (Chapter 6)

As rigidly independent concepts, the interactions between Time, Food, and Money cannot alter their core meanings to our species.

But these interactions have been highly consequential throughout our species’ history and development, shaping the trajectory of our civilization and culture.

Some Foods may have been temporarily used as Money, but Food and Money will always remain distinct concepts to our minds — and especially to our bodies.

Their dualistic interplay, however, produces many lasting effects.

The transition from Traditional Food to Trade Food, long underway, is a product of the Food & Money dualism. Our modern Food supply and grocery stores emerged out of repeated collisions between the concepts of Food and Money.

The phrase “Time is Money” was popularized by Ben Franklin, but what he really meant is that using one’s Time to acquire Money (legally) is better than sitting idle.

Jobs, banking, and business fall under this dualism, along with all public, private, and household financial matters. When Time and Money collide, you get salaries, taxes, insurance, mortgages, loans, retirement plans, and many other products and services.

Finally, the collisions between Time and Food, the oldest of Part II’s dualisms, have produced two separate agricultural revolutions, many millennia apart. Developments within our bodies and minds are also included here, in both the short- and long-term.

These primary dualisms form the basis of the next three Chapters, but there are also several important secondary dualisms that come into play in Part II.

The same two-way dynamics apply, but with narrower concepts or perspectives. For example, operating alongside Time & Money is the secondary dualism of humans & corporations — with its own complex interplay of psychology and incentives.

Other secondary dualisms are formed when Money is added to politics, law, science, medicine, or education. Or replace Money with “technology,” or “culture,” and you get two more sets of dynamic systems with dualistic properties.

Many of these secondary dualisms deserve their own books — particularly humans & corporations — but their role within Part II is to help us pinpoint the underlying mechanisms operating within the broader Algebra of Life framework.

Part I was about laying the foundation.

Part II is about building and scaling our understanding.

With the concepts clarified, we are ready to begin working with two variables.

Next post: Hunger, Survival, & Nourishment

Previous post: The Meaning of Money to Humans

This Chapter’s division of Money into “First,” Artifact, Metallic, and Fiat is only loosely chronological.

These categories were introduced to highlight Money’s complex origins, shifting nature, and how it evolves alongside our species and civilization.

To make sense of these changes, we must understand the difference between a Money’s form — the physical (or non-physical) representation — and its basis — the reasoning behind the system, or why the form should be trusted.

As a recap, the “First” Money lacked any physical form.

Its basis was human reciprocity and survival instinct — both short- and long-term.

Artifact Money has taken many different physical forms and was based on general acceptability. But as the West African bead holders would painfully learn, its scarcity was only temporary and not enduring.

Metallic Money has evolved considerably, affecting both its form and basis. It shifted from fragments of precious metals to standardized coins, where the form and basis were the same: metal.

But once paper receipts began circulating, the form and basis of Metallic Money began to diverge.

The new form was paper, and a layer of trust was added to the metallic basis — gold was no longer contained within the Money itself but stored with its issuer.

As issuers created more Money than could be supported by their gold reserves, the basis of trust gradually collapsed, culminating in our current era of “Fiat Money.”

It formally began with the Nixon Shock of 1971 but was set in motion by the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. More than any other institution, the United States Federal Reserve led the global transition away from Metallic Money and towards a fully fiat system.

Throughout these changes, the core meaning of Money to our species has remained the same: Money is how humans intermediate between Time and Food.

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This explanation is timeless, specifying neither the form nor basis, while capturing the long-enduring relationship between Money and human life.

This is more than an accurate description of Money — it’s an appropriate definition.

We all possess Time.

We all require Food.

These were the original “supply” and “demand” curves governing early human economics. And since we can no longer be hunter-gatherers, our nourishment can no longer be sourced directly from nature.

Our Time must be used to acquire Money, with which we can buy Food. We exchange our Time for Money in order to buy Food — these are the “trading pairs” of modern human life.

A medium of exchange is required to both receive value for our Time, and to regularly purchase Food.

We require a store of value because our need of Food will typically outlast our ability to receive Money for our Time — our Money must still “work” in the future.

Standardized units of account facilitate both purposes by enabling record keeping.

The meaning of Money to humans is not inconsistent with its meaning to corporations or professional economists — it’s just a different perspective.

But this perspective is rarely voiced in the halls of power.

Money means something different in the boardrooms of large corporations and war rooms of major governments, where profit and control take center stage, respectively.

But if our system of Money is repeatedly optimized for financing corporate takeovers and funding wars, this will interfere with our species’ intermediation between Time and Food.

Our Money has not yet “failed” — but we receive little for our Time, and the same Money cannot buy as much Food as it used to. Much of the world is now like this.

With Fiat Money, our species has grown accustomed to steadily rising prices.

The general increase in prices over Time is known as “inflation.”

This feature of Fiat Money is why national currencies function poorly as a long-term store of value, which causes many savers to seek alternatives.

Culture and politics influence these financial choices.

For example, households in India have been relying on physical gold for this purpose for more than five thousand years.

In the United States and Canada, however, only a small minority use gold to store value. Instead, the preferred long-term savings vehicles in these countries are corporate stocks and residential homes, respectively.

Despite ownership being concentrated at the top, a greater percentage of American citizens own corporate stocks than that of any other country, and by a wide margin.

Americans first began trading stocks in the late eighteenth century, but the expansion of public ownership is a more recent phenomenon that came with the United States government’s aggressive legislative push towards stock-based retirement plans.

These changes came in the late 1980s in response to the preceding “Great Inflation,” where the then-existing corporate pension system was essentially wiped out. From then on, the retirement plans of most Americans would depend on the stock market.

In Canada, mass-reliance on residential housing as a long-term store of value is an even newer phenomenon.

During the early 1990s, an economic downturn had similarly wiped out the prevailing pension system, but Canadians turned to housing for a number of reasons: favorable tax treatment and other incentives, cheap debt, and market deregulation.

These changes also made housing an attractive financial asset — more on that later.

India, the United States, and Canada each have their own national currencies, but their citizens’ respective uses of gold, stocks, and housing as long-term stores of value also make these things fall within the domain of Money.

Within The Algebra of Life, the concept of Money is not confined to currencies — it includes all the mechanisms by which value is stored, invested, or transferred.

Finally, to conclude Part I’s introduction to Time, Food, and Money as concepts:

Is something Money because we use it as Money?

Or do we use things as Money because they are Money?

Unlike with Food, the answer is the former.

Anything can become Money if humans begin to use it that way.

Money is defined by human behavior.

Food is not.

Next post: What Happens When Concepts Collide?

Previous post: Fiat Money

The United States entered the twentieth century as the only advanced nation that had adopted a gold standard without having its own central bank.

This changed when Congress passed the 1913 Federal Reserve Act to promote financial stability — this required centralizing the nation’s Money system, the public was told.

The creation of the Federal Reserve has clear parallels with how the Bank of England was formed more than two centuries earlier.

In both cases, agreements were made between governments and private lenders that involved the creation of a new institution with considerable power over the prevailing system of Money.

The difference was democracy.

Unlike the English experience, the United States Federal Reserve was being set up in a young, democratic nation whose citizens inherently distrusted centralized power.

It had been planned in secret three years earlier on Jekyll Island, Georgia — under the guise of a duck hunt, away from the prying eyes of city reporters.

In attendance were a small but powerful group of banking and government representatives who sought a mutually beneficial system.

And that is what they got.

The Federal Reserve was purportedly created to promote financial stability — but the subsequent three decades were among the most financially turbulent periods of American history.

A central bank also provided an ideal financing mechanism for the First World War.

Money’s connection to physical gold was officially maintained, in theory — but with the Federal Reserve serving as the nation’s gold vault, it would be many decades before the link would be tested.

In the meantime, the paper had to be trusted — that is the basis of Fiat Money.

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Once Metallic Money took paper form, control over the Money system was maintained by suspending redemptions of bank notes to physical gold or silver. This capability was especially important to governments when raising war funds.

The problem was restoring redemptions to gold once the war was over.

With redemptions suspended, the supply of Metallic Money in bank note form can grow much faster than the supply of physical metals held in reserve by the issuers.

Restoring redemptions without running out of physical gold meant that each dollar would be worth less gold.

Unlike the Roman system of Metallic Money, paper American dollars didn’t contain any physical gold — they represented it.

But the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 permitted America’s central bank to issue $50 of bank notes for every $20 of gold reserves, setting the stage for monetary expansion. America’s Roaring Twenties and subsequent Great Depression will be explored later.

For now, what matters is how Metallic Money evolved during this period, on its way to becoming a fully “fiat” system.

In 1931, during the Great Depression, England was forced to suspend redemptions to preserve their gold reserves. Two years later, the United States government shocked the public by making it illegal for U.S. citizens to own or trade physical gold.

After legally requiring all citizens to sell their physical gold to the Federal Reserve for 20.67 U.S. dollars per ounce, the Gold Act of 1934 transferred ownership of this metal directly to the U.S. Treasury, while legally fixing a new price: US$35 per ounce.

By all appearances, gold was becoming more valuable — in dollars.

But like the Romans before them, it was really the Money that was losing value — in gold — just as the West Africans’ beads had lost their value — in cattle.

Unlike the rapid monetary transitions that could happen with Artifact Money, our global transition from Metallic to Fiat Money took place over many decades.

The First World War had already taken a heavy toll on the British Empire. After the Second World War, the United States emerged as the decisive global superpower.

The 1944 Bretton Woods agreement enshrined the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. The rest of the world was now incentivized to swap their gold reserves for paper dollars, and the United States would collect and store the gold for safekeeping.

At least that was the plan.

By 1965, some countries were growing wary of this arrangement.

In a televised speech, French president Charles De Gaulle voiced the following concerns:

The fact that many countries accept, as a principle, dollars being as good as gold... this very fact leads Americans to get into debt, and to get into debt for free at the expense of other countries. Because what the United States owes them is paid, at least in part, with dollars they are the only ones allowed to emit.

France then repatriated much of its gold from the United States, effectively preventing many other nations from doing the same.

By 1971, with America’s gold reserves in rapid decline, and with vast sums of paper dollars still being held abroad, President Nixon had no choice but to unilaterally suspend redemptions of U.S. dollars to physical gold.

Also known as the “Nixon Shock,” this event marked the formal end of Metallic Money, thrusting the world into our brave new era of fully “Fiat” Money.

Ownership of physical gold became legal again for Americans in 1975 — but they would have to pay the market price. How markets “discover” prices will be explained in Part II, but the basic idea is that market prices change based on supply and demand.

Unlike the fixed prices of US$20.67 per ounce, which the American public had received for their gold in 1933, and US$35 per ounce, which the Bretton Woods agreement established in 1944, market prices fluctuated considerably.

But since the paper Money supply was growing much faster than gold reserves, prices tended to go in one direction. By the end of 1975, one ounce of gold cost US$141.

By the end of 1980, the price was approximately US$600.

Fiat Money had arrived, and this was a very different system from Metallic Money.

All that was left was trust, and this called into question the meaning of Money to humans.

Next post: The Meaning of Money to Humans

Previous post: Metallic Money

The Olympic Games awards gold, silver, and bronze “medals” to each event’s top three competitors, respectively.

This order happens to correspond with each metal’s value as Money.

Other metals have been used for small denominations, but our species’ principal forms of Metallic Money have been gold and silver.

Unlike aggry beads or other types of Artifact Money, gold or silver cannot be cheaply produced — no matter how advanced the civilization. The use of gold and silver coins with standardized weights facilitated transactions without the use of weighing scales.

Like enforceable debt, a central authority must regulate the “minting” of new coins. But rulers with power over Metallic Money systems are easier incentivized to “debase” the value of their coins by periodically lowering their metal content.

This is what happened in Rome:

Rome’s silver coin, the “Denarius,” retained only one-twentieth of its silver content.

With a system of standardized coins, the overall supply of Metallic Money is limited by the availability of physical gold and silver. Prices generally remain stable under such a system — but government spending is constrained.

And when nations go to war, this is a problem governments will not bare.

The history of Money has been shaped by the pursuit of war.

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The Roman Empire fell because it could no longer fund its defense, and this coincided with the fall of Roman Money. The torch of standardized Metallic Money was carried on by the Islamic world, whose gold “dinar” was introduced around 680 A.D.

The Italian Renaissance and preceding century brought major innovations to Metallic Money via breakthroughs in finance and banking.

The Florentine florin contained approximately 3.5 grams of gold and maintained this standard from 1252 until 1533. How Renaissance banking practices led to our global financial system will be considered in Chapter 5 (Time & Money).

For now, what matters is that Metallic Money began to take a paper form.

Standardized coins were preferable to fragments of precious metal, but paper bank notes offered many advantages over metallic coins — especially when transacting larger sums.

Why use and transport many dense coins if gold could be credibly represented with paper receipts? Physical metals were heavy, costly to store, and risky to transport. Gold-convertible bank notes facilitated more trade by addressing these challenges.

There was just one problem: who should store the gold?

This question has been a major theme of financial history.

After the Renaissance period, financial power shifted from the Italian city-states to the Dutch — where corporations were invented in 1602 — and then to England.

The British Empire combined Italian banking practices with Dutch capital markets to finance their Industrial Revolution, which ultimately powered their global ascent.

The economic engine of the British Empire was sugar, but the financial engine was the Bank of England — that’s who eventually came to store the nation’s gold.

The Bank of England became a state-owned “central bank” in 1946, serving ever since as the United Kingdom’s monetary authority. But it began as a private bank with special legal rights.

This brings us to an important asymmetry within the concept of Money.

For regular people, the prevailing system of Money marks the economic boundaries within which their lives must be conducted. Like gravity or weather, this is a fixed constraint. We may strive to earn more Money but we cannot change the system.

But centers of power may occasionally change the very system of Money to suit their own needs or goals.

In 1694, the Bank of England was created specifically to fund the Royal Navy in support of the King’s ongoing war with France. To induce participation from Money lenders, shares of the Bank were offered which included unprecedented legal rights.

Goldsmiths and private merchants were already issuing paper notes redeemable to gold, but the Bank of England was the first to combine this legal right with the limited liability status of a corporation, which was granted to them by Royal Charter.

This meant that should the Bank of England fail, the investors’ personal fortunes would be safeguarded.

This special status, combined with successive favorable government legislation, enabled the Bank of England to gradually secure a monopoly over the creation of paper Money in England and Wales.

In exchange for funding the King’s war, the Bank of England’s initial shareholders were granted considerable power over the nation’s system of Money.

Roman Emperors had to physically collect the circulating metal coins to debase their Money. But Metallic Money in paper form gave the Bank of England new mechanisms of control, while providing the British Empire with better financing.

For example, gold redemption in England was suspended from 1797 to 1821 to raise war funds. This was only possible because of the deal that had been struck a century earlier with the Money lenders.

The course of our civilization, both domestically and globally, has often been shaped by changes to the Money system.

America’s experience with Metallic Money was similar to the British, but the context of a young, democratic nation made it more turbulent.

History books may suggest that the American Revolution was fought over tea and taxes, but another major catalyst was the British prohibition on the colonial paper Money which the Americans had created for their own use.

Metallic Money was then written into the 1787 Constitution — only gold or silver-based Money could be legal tender.

Early American history saw the formation and dissolution of two central banks, each lasting twenty years, and political battles over “soft” Money — a freer creation of bank notes — and “hard” Money — limiting the supply based on metal reserves.

Lacking a central bank, America entered its “Free Banking” era. And despite victories for “hard” Money at the federal level, state banking regulators didn’t share this philosophy: State banks would not be required to maintain full gold reserves.

This practice, known as “fractional reserve banking,” ultimately caused our species to transition away from Metallic Money towards our current system of Fiat Money.

Many Americans learned hard lessons about “good” and “bad” Money during the Free Banking era, as their savings could disappear if they trusted the wrong bank. The pain wrought by dishonest banking practices culminated with new federal regulations.

Once the political debate over silver’s role as Money was settled in gold’s favor, America followed the rest of the world onto a “gold standard” in 1873.

Forty years later, the creation of America’s third central bank, the Federal Reserve, would sow the seeds of a global transition from Metallic to Fiat Money.

Next post: Fiat Money

Previous post: Artifact Money

Before debts were recorded, they were merely remembered and difficult to enforce.

Remembered debt is less objective than recorded debt, but reliable enforceability is the ultimate source of legitimacy. The previous post’s fictional agreement between Peter and Paul revealed how enforceable debt is a fundamentally different proposition.

Blindly trusting a stranger is different from trusting that the stranger will be punished by a powerful authority if they don’t meet their recorded obligations.

The emergence of enforceable debt records like the cuneiform script was a key milestone in both the history of Money and of our species. Money has become global, but its early development followed different paths in different places.

The story of Money did not unfold the same way everywhere.

Humans have used many different physical objects as Money throughout our history — sometimes to great advantage or disadvantage.

Before cuneiform script, three-dimensional clay tokens were used as Money in Mesopotamia, but they worked differently from modern currency. Each shape represented a different good that could be received in exchange.

These early forms of “Artifact” Money are less mysterious than the “First” Money, but we can only learn so much from their physical remains. The details are murky.

While Mesopotamian clay tokens represented specific goods, other systems of Artifact Money worked more like modern currency and could be used to purchase anything that was available for sale.

Wherever it first occurred, the shift from single-good to multi-purpose Artifact Money brought the concept closer to our modern understanding. Money was an “intermediary good” — its sole purpose was to be exchanged for other things.

And these “things” were often Time or Food.

But before our modern preoccupation with production and consumption — with making and spending Money — humans first had to decide what to use as Money.

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There are three fundamental Money questions:

1. What to use as Money?

2. How should you acquire it?

3. How should you use it?

The first question only seems strange because we’ve been relying on past generations’ answers for so long. And with question (1) seemingly already settled, it became rational to focus exclusively on questions (2) and (3).

Modern humans have done this to great material effect.

But since we never had to face question (1) ourselves, we are no longer familiar with the principles that would be relevant for answering it.

This is why our species’ collective understanding of Money as a human concept is broken.

We seem to have mastered our physical environment, but there are many ancient problems that most modern humans have simply never encountered — important questions have not yet been asked because we haven’t been forced out of necessity.

Chief among these is: “What is Money?” or “What to use as Money?”

Our species has largely forgotten how to even think about these questions, much less get the answers right.

There have been too many different forms of Artifact Money to review them all, but the following example provides an important lesson:

Glass “aggry” beads were used as Money in Western Africa for many centuries. The beads had been handed down from prior generations that had traded with traveling merchants, from whom they were originally acquired.

When contact with these merchants ended, the supply of aggry beads became locally scarce. The lack of local glass-making technology prevented the creation of new beads.

It was on this basis — scarcity — that aggry beads came to be used as Money in Western Africa.

They were the most suitable “intermediary good” for facilitating trade. And since the regional supply of these glass beads had remained stable for many generations, the rates of exchange for different Food products had also remained stable.

The beads represented purchasing power.

They served as a measure of economic output, playing a key role in coordinating the productive activity of the region’s inhabitants. Much effort was exerted obtaining these beads because of the value traditionally accorded to them.

At some quantity — say 500 — members of this culture could comfortably retire from their fields. The beads represented a sufficient “store of value” to purchase the Food they would need for the rest of their lives.

To the West Africans, the stable rates of exchange between the aggry beads and their Traditional Food products were a constant part of life.

These sacred ratios were treated as facts of nature. But the aggry beads’ scarcity was being implicitly taken for granted — this would cost the West Africans dearly.

When European explorers arrived and noticed the unusually high values being accorded to these simple glass beads, they could not believe their luck. Many cattle could be purchased from the West Africans for just a handful.

Recognizing their opportunity, the same Europeans soon returned with an abundance of identical glass beads which they had cheaply produced back home, where glass-making technology was already common.

They bought as much cattle and other physical property as could fit on their ships, before setting sail and returning home.

At first, the West Africans who had received these new beads from the Europeans had considered themselves extremely lucky. They had secured great fortunes — in beads — by selling their physical property to the Europeans.

Many retired early, believing they were set for life.

But those who retained their cattle and continued to produce Food from their land began to notice a problem. They could not possibly produce enough Food to keep up with local demand — at the prevailing prices in beads.

Once the West Africans began to realize that there were now many more beads, but much less Food, prices increased accordingly — and sharply. Those who had sold all of their physical property to the Europeans became severely impoverished.

Their beads could no longer buy the Food they needed. Their Money had failed.

The use of temporarily scarce Artifact Money has led to many such “monetary transitions:” the replacement of one Money system with another. While rare, these events are highly transformative and produce clear economic winners and losers.

To protect themselves against similar injustices, some human cultures had already begun to adopt a form of Money that was far more difficult to cheaply produce.

This was Metallic Money.

Next post: Metallic Money

Previous post: The “First” Money

The “first” Money cannot be explored with any level of certainty.

The first known writing was Money, but these early accounting records were not the first Money.

Systems of writing — alphabets and numbers — are how our species collects, stores, retrieves, manipulates and disseminates information. Humans have been artistically scraping cave walls since at least 30,000 BC, but it was another thousand generations before we developed systems of writing.

The Sumerian cuneiform script began in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) around 3400 BC and was initially used exclusively for accounting purposes. The earliest writings were debt records: accounts of who owed what to whom.

Food or Money is what was typically being accounted for, and the purpose of the debt record was to preserve this information over Time.

Recorded debts are different from recorded history because they explicitly connect past acts with promises of future acts. History books contain many facts, but they do not create future obligations, nor can their premises be legally validated or challenged.

Mesopotamian debt records were not merely written — they were highly enforceable.

The “first” enforceable debt records may have begun something like this:

Imagine an ancient human civilization where most men either grow olives or raise cattle, and all are ruled by the same King. Peter is a young olive grower, and Paul is an older, well-established cattle rancher.

They are strangers to each other, but one day Peter approaches Paul with an offer:

“If you give me two of your oxen today, I will give you ten barrels of olive oil in one year. I need the oxen to plough my fields.”

Paul considers this.

He knows that at the local trading market, two oxen can be exchanged for five barrels of olive oil. This was the longstanding rate of exchange. Peter was offering ten. But he would have to wait one year, and Peter might not deliver on his promise.

“This does sound like a good deal, but I cannot accept promises from strangers as payment for my oxen.”

“You mean you haven’t heard of the King’s new debt registry?” Peter responds.

“No” says Paul.

“The recent Food shortages have caused the King to make some changes,” Peter responds. “Rather than using his armies to force more production, he has decided to maintain and enforce debt records for use among his subjects. If I fail to make payment, I will be imprisoned.”

“I see” says Paul. “But what if the King changes the debt records?”

“It would not be in his interest,” Peter replies. “Since the King can tax the entire kingdom, his goal is to maximize Food production. He believes that an honest system of debits and credits is the best way to achieve this.”

“I see” says Paul. “The King wants more meat and oil, regardless of who produces it.”

“Exactly” says Peter. “This system best maximizes the whole.”

“Then we have a deal” says Paul.

They then proceeded to record their agreement at the debt registry.

In this fictional account, the Money was physically manifested in the King’s debt registry, while also living within the minds of Peter and Paul.

But this was not the first Money.

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Humans have been collaboratively intermediating between Time and Food long before the first enforceable debt records.

Non-enforceable debt records came before this, which lacked the oversight of a central authority. But some earlier human cultures may have been less averse to accepting promises from strangers as payment for goods.

Many North American indigenous cultures had their own systems of Money involving elaborate strings of seashells or beads, to keep track of their debts.

A credit system based on unenforceable promises might have worked for some earlier cultures, where notions of honor or the supernatural may have had a regulating effect. But the lack of enforceability could also have led to occasional breakdowns of trust.

Before enforceable or unenforceable recorded debts, there were unrecorded promises living only within the minds of creditors and debtors — and perhaps a tribal leader.

This was the “first” Money.

When humans lived in small nomadic groups, leaders could be aware of all internal agreements and could resolve any disputes.

But rival tribes may have transacted with each other implicitly. For example, imagine this scenario:

After a successful hunt, Tribe A has an abundance of meat.

Meanwhile, Tribe B, living on the other side of the mountain, was having their worst luck in years. After many days without animal protein, their hunters had become weak and were in poor physical condition — They were running out of Time.

Tribe B were severely disoriented when the scent of Food led them to Tribe A’s feast.

Not accustomed to sharing, Tribe A’s hunters aimed their weapons towards the disheveled intruders — until their own leader yelled “stop!”

Recognizing that they too may need help one day, Tribe A’s leader decides to share their meat with Tribe B’s hunters — despite protest from his own tribe.

Why give Food away to strangers?

Humans are deeply reciprocal creatures.

Being rescued from starvation leaves a lasting impression. Tribe B will feel compelled to return the favor — should the opportunity ever arise.

Our species’ survival instincts predate recorded debts or written laws.

This was a risk management decision.

Tribe A was exchanging some of their Food for an unwritten “credit:” the possibility of receiving similar help in the future.

Our species’ greater ability to integrate the past and future into our decision-making made it possible for Tribe A’s leader to decide to share with Tribe B in this situation.

Animals do not share their Food with strangers.

This is what it means to intermediate between Time and Food.

The “first” Money was an unwritten, unenforceable agreement existing within the minds of creditors (Tribe A) and debtors (Tribe B). There was no power to enforce debts — only a shared understanding based on short and long-term survival instincts.

The “first” Money was an adaptive human behavior. It was our response to the two timeless questions: What is possible? Which is best?

The concept of Money was born when humans began to intermediate between Time and Food.

Next post: Artifact Money

Previous post: When Money Fails

In the language of Money, a price is the measurable cost of buying something.

It is a certain amount of a specific currency that must be paid to receive the item.

But the word can also be used more generally, to describe what must be given up or endured to obtain a desired result.

Money prices involve finite amounts, while non-Money prices involve subjective experiences that can be neither measured nor observed.

The specific amount gained or lost (the Money price) is different from the human experience of gaining or losing the same amount of Money (non-Money price).

The exact same number of dollars will mean different things to different people, on different occasions and in different places. How gains or losses of Money make us feel (Human Time) cannot be measured in the same way as the gains or losses themselves.

Money is highly emotional for our species — perhaps more than ever.

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That Money prices may change, especially in the long-term, is why “medium of exchange” and “store of value” are distinct functions. But they are also closely related because prices are usually stable in the short term.

Any medium of exchange must also function as a store of value — at least for a brief period — otherwise sellers would not accept it. Conversely, any store of value must also — if only indirectly or to some extent — function as a medium of exchange.

Currencies are the most generally accepted mediums of exchange, but anything that can be easily exchanged for currency may also serve this function.

If Money prices could be relied on to stay the same many decades into the future, currencies would perform both functions equally well.

But Money prices change with Time, and often greatly.

Sometimes, the Money fails altogether.

What could this mean?

In his 1975 book “When Money Dies,” British journalist Adam Fergusson offered a strikingly cautionary account of what happened to Germany’s system of Money after the First World War.

Having borrowed heavily to fund a losing war effort, and then forced to pay steep reparations, the German “central bank” — an institution to be explained later — had little choice but to continuously print paper Money to meet its financial obligations.

This destroyed the value of their currency.

The number of German “marks” in circulation was rising so fast that at its peak, it took only four days for price levels to double. The effects of such large price changes went far beyond the inflation that many nations have experienced since Covid-19.

In similarly affected Austria, Fergusson noted that:

Even the most respectable of Austrian citizens now breaks the law, unless he is prepared to starve for the sake of obeying it.

During periods of “hyperinflation” — prices rising by at least 50% per month — demand for items which facilitate survival rise the fastest. But from the perspective of those selling these items — Food, medicine, and fuel — why accept a failing Money?

Why exchange highly coveted “life-giving” items for pieces of paper that would lose half of their value by the following week?

If a Money cannot be trusted to store value, at all, its use as a medium of exchange will quickly collapse.

As explained in Chapter 2, our bodies require Food throughout our lives regardless of whether we have any Money — and regardless of whether Food producers would even accept our Money.

When prices rise rapidly, this hard biological reality can force people into seemingly absurd transactions. For example, Fergusson recounted the following statements from an affected Austrian woman:

The wife of a doctor whom I know recently exchanged her beautiful piano for a sack of wheat flour. I, too, have exchanged my husband’s gold watch for four sacks of potatoes, which will at all events carry us through the winter.

Food producers and financiers were spared from this economic carnage — some made great fortunes — but large portions of society were wiped out completely. This period of hyperinflation left a legacy of starvation, mass malnutrition, and tuberculosis.

As the availability of Traditional Food staples collapsed, many Germans were forced to adopt cheaper, low-nutrient substitutes. These included natural Foods like turnips, but also Trade Foods like “margarine” — a vegetable fat-based alternative to butter.

Germany was among the most advanced modern societies before the war. It was the industrial powerhouse of Europe, had pioneered social welfare policies, and boasted high literacy rates and a thriving urban middle class.

And yet, after the war, large portions of the German middle class were reduced to lesser nutritional states than even the most impoverished indigenous groups studied by Dr. Price — where Trade Food had fully displaced Traditional Food.

Their Money had failed.

And if a “failed” Money can produce starvation and mass-malnutrition, the deepest meaning of this concept to our species — our intermediation between Time and Food — becomes undeniable.

But this is not a new idea.

And when money failed in the land of Egypt, and in the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians came unto Joseph, and said, Give us bread: for why should we die in thy presence? For the money faileth. (Genesis 47:15)

That a “failed” Money created the need for bread implies that Money was something to be exchanged for Food.

As a political leader, Joseph was overseeing both Egypt’s Money and Food production, which is why the people pled to him. The people were saved — but only after giving up all of their valuable property, land, and agreeing to new taxes.

Though evidently ancient, the close relationship between Money and political authority would persist through modern history and continues to this day.

The next four posts will briefly trace the history of Money through different phases: (1) The “First” Money, (2) Artifact Money, (3) Metallic Money, and (4) Fiat Money.

Next post: The “First” Money

Previous post: What is Money?

Chapter 3: Money

“An accepted or authorized medium of exchange”

“Coinage or negotiable paper issued as legal tender by a government”

“Assets or compensation in the form of, or readily convertible into cash”

“A current medium of exchange in the form of coins and banknotes; coins and bank notes collectively”

“The means of valuation and of payment, as both the unit of account and the generally acceptable medium of exchange”

“A generally accepted, recognized, and centralized medium of exchange in an economy that is used to facilitate transactional trade for goods and services”

“Any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts, such as taxes, in a particular country or socio-economic context”

“An economic unit that functions as a generally recognized medium of exchange for transactional purposes in an economy”

“Anything which is used as a medium of exchange and has legal sanction of the government”

“The coins or bank notes that you use to buy things, or the sum that you have in a bank account”

“What you earn by working or selling things, and use to buy things”

- Selected “definitions”

If you only skimmed the above descriptions, that’s part of the point.

Modern attempts to define Money have been vague and inconsistent.

A good definition would facilitate classification, but the above descriptions only serve to cause confusion. Can we derive a general meaning from these varied accounts?

“Medium of exchange” was used six times. Government authority or centralization, four times. Seven descriptions lack any physical specifications, while four list things like “coins,” “bank notes,”, or “cash.”

Phrases like “generally accepted,” “recognized,” or “current,” were used six times, and there were two references to “compensation,” or “what you earn.”

Questions remain.

Must the government be involved?

How “generally recognized” does Money have to be? For where and by whom?

Descriptions are sensitive to changing circumstances, but a good definition should remain stable. The only physical items mentioned were coins, bank notes, or cash — but these are still, despite their decline in our digital age, modern forms of Money.

We’ve also used feathers and seashells.

Bank accounts have only existed for about five hundred years, and most humans don’t have one. Coins are much older, but many other forms of Money came before this.

Academic attempts to define Money have emphasized functions.

“Medium of exchange” — an intermediary item that facilitates the sale, purchase, or trade of goods between parties — appears six times. This is undoubtedly a primary function.

When we exchange our Time for Money, and our Money for Food, “goods” are being traded. But professional economists place no special importance on these “trading pairs” of human life. Time and Food are treated as regular goods like any other.

Our species’ intermediation between Time and Food implies the use of Money as a medium of exchange.

But this function doesn’t capture everything.

Economists often cite two other functions when asked to define Money: “store of value” and “unit of account.”

Agricultural Food surpluses were the original “store of value,” but many Foods were best consumed fresh. And since fresh Foods could not literally be stored, Money became a means to preserve access. This was how the Romans fed their armies from a distance.

Our modern world is very different, but some things haven’t changed.

We require Food throughout our lives, but our ability to convert Time into Food (or today, Money) is concentrated within our middle, “working” years.

We begin eating Food well before our first “job” and often continue well past our last.

This mismatch between our continuous need for Food and our relatively limited window for exchanging our Time for Money is what makes the “store of value” function so important to modern human life.

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Unlike governments, corporations, or other legal entities, humans are constrained. Our hunger is experienced physically — it is not something just to be managed or exploited.

To secure access to Food throughout our lives, humans have long sought ways to store value.

The “unit of account” function is about keeping track of things.

As indicated by notions of “general acceptability” or “legal sanction of the government,” units of account are typically localized.

For example, the U.S. “dollar,” the Mexican “peso,” and the “euro” are the respective units of account for the United States, Mexico, and the European Union. It may seem like every country has its own Money, but this is not exactly how it works.

The U.S. dollar is transacted with globally, while many European countries share a single currency. Others, like Zimbabwe and El Salvador, rely on foreign currencies (USD) rather than issue their own. But things are slowly changing.

In 2021, El Salvador adopted “Bitcoin” — to be covered later — as an alternative legal currency to operate alongside the dollar within their country. Domestic transactions typically use local units of account, but international transactions may not.

Buying a tanker of oil is different from buying lunch. Dollars have long been the preferred currency for such purchases, but this is also slowly changing. The Chinese Yuan is starting to be used for this purpose and, in rare cases, even physical gold.

Before turning to the history of Money — where gold features prominently — we must briefly explore how these economic functions fit within The Algebra of Life.

Just as Time, Food, and Money must be understood together, so must Money’s three functions. They are similarly interrelated while remaining fundamentally distinct.

The difference has to do with Time.

Transactions of value happen in the present. This is the medium of exchange function. For the store of value function, the value is being stored for future use. The unit of account is critical for record-keeping of the past.

“Medium of exchange,” “store of value,” and “unit of account” are terms formerly reserved for academic specialists. Most humans used only one type of Money — their local currency — so there was little reason to question its characteristics.

But the emergence of alternatives like Bitcoin has caused many humans to begin asking questions about their Money.

• Medium of exchange where? And for what?

• Generally accepted by whom?

• Store of value for how long? And how well?

• What do dollars really account for?

• What’s the difference between Money and value? And how is value stored?

• Can Money “go bad” over Time, like Food?

• What is “good” Money?

More than ever before, modern humans are beginning to ask these questions.

The next post will explore what happens when Money fails.

Next post: When Money Fails

Previous post: What Goes Into Our Bodies?

Within The Algebra of Life, Food is what goes into our bodies.

Nutrition involves more than getting enough of the right nutrients.

Rather, it is the study of how Food interacts with our bodies, with the goal of producing healthy and balanced humans — in both body and mind.

Apart from facilitating the growth, maintenance, and repair of our bodies, nutrition is critical for disease prevention throughout the course of our lives. It also supports our mental health and cognitive functioning.

Our everyday choices usually play the greatest role in shaping our nutrition, but there are some things we can’t control. Our genetics — inherited characteristics from our parents — shape how our bodies will chemically process the substances we ingest.

You may be thinking of “digestion” — the bodily process of breaking down Food into absorbable nutrients — but only a small portion of the chemical reactions happening inside of our bodies when we eat Food fall into this category.

Our circulatory, respiratory, and nervous systems handle our blood, air, and feelings, respectively — each involve many complex chemical processes.

But when we eat Food, there is a separate category of chemical reactions operating alongside digestion. This is our metabolism or metabolic system — the chemical reactions our body uses to convert Food into energy and to heal damaged tissues.

Parental influence does not stop with our inherited traits.

The Foods our parents chose to feed us, including the diets of our pregnant mothers, play an outsized role in our longer-term health. Our early life nutrition may permanently alter — for better or worse — our susceptibility to adult-onset diseases.

But this is ancient knowledge.

From the Arctic to the South Pacific, and from the Amazon to the Andes, every single indigenous group studied by Dr. Price had special nutritional guidelines and sacred Foods reserved for pregnant women, babies, and even soon-to-be fathers.

The forms this nutrition took varied based on each group’s local environment, but the same principles were being applied:

Certain Foods were to be consumed before conception, during pregnancy, and to support infant development. These included things like fish eggs, specific organ meats, shellfish, and insects — items now understood to contain high concentrations of vitamins and minerals.

“Nutrient density” has a specific scientific meaning today — the ratio of nutrients to energy contained within our Foods — but our earliest ancestors were not selecting their special Foods on this basis.

“Life-giving properties” are what was being sought, and our species’ relentless pursuit of these characteristics has preceded science by countless millennia.

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These special Foods were, of course, “nutrient-dense,” but the early adopters couldn’t have known this. Dr. Price was applying this term long after these Foods were initially discovery and utilized by traditional human cultures.

Could this be the secret to achieving optimal health in our modern world?

Can we solve our metabolic problems by selecting Foods with high nutrient densities?

The answer is, unfortunately, not anymore.

For the traditional cultures encountered by Dr. Price, who still sourced their Foods exclusively from their natural environments in accordance with ancestral tradition, “nutrient density” would have been a near-perfect indicator of a Food’s healthiness.

This is because their Food was exclusively biological.

The modern commercial practice of mixing industrial chemicals with Food products to make them easier to sell for Money had not been invented yet.

In this context, “nutrient-dense” Foods were guaranteed to promote good health.

But the introduction of non-biological components to our Food has perverted the concept of nutrient density as it pertains to our actual health.

Nutrient density no longer captures everything that goes inside of our bodies.

Understanding what goes into our bodies, now, is fundamental to The Algebra of Life.

The following illustration offers a basic guide:

What Goes Into Our Bodies?

Eating a healthy diet involves more than just getting our required nutrients. We must also avoid harmful substances, particularly when the risk of damage is high.

Since our bodies require neither sugar nor alcohol, these are examples of “zero-nutrient calories.” On the other hand, water, vitamins, and minerals are examples of “zero-calorie nutrients” — our bodies require them, but they contain zero energy.

Both are captured by “nutrient density” because they are ultimately biological.

But modern Foods often contain many chemical substances which contain zero energy and cannot be classified as nutrients — these substances are non-biological.

And despite their potential to cause great harm within our bodies, they are not captured by modern measures of “nutrient density.”

The following table shows how many calories are contained within one gram of each source of Food energy:

But calories are not a measure of nutrition — for that, we must consider everything that goes into our bodies.

That is what “Food” means within The Algebra of Life.

How this concept relates to the others will be explored in Chapter 4 (Time & Food) and Chapter 6 (Food & Money) of Part II.

But first we must introduce Money — this is the subject of Chapter 3.

Next post: What is Money?

Previous post: Energy, Sugar, & Metabolic Syndrome

Modern humans often select their Foods based on two primary factors:

Taste — the sensation of flavor perceived upon contact with a substance; and

Price — the amount of Money that must be paid to receive the item.

As adults, we rarely have to determine whether something is Food.

Modern grocery stores handle this now.

Once inside, we take for granted that everything for sale counts as “Food,” and so we reasonably assume it is all safe to eat.

Nature offered no such safeguards to hunter-gatherers, who were forced to master the processes by which nutrition could be extracted from their local environments.

During the Second Agricultural Revolution, as Food was increasingly produced to be exchanged for Money (Trade Food), many European nations intensified their efforts to extract Money from the foreign lands under their control.

Our species has traditionally selected Foods based on whether they produce healthy and balanced individuals, but the European nobility and wealthy landowners were beginning to ask different questions.

What is the most profitable use of our land?

Which Food can be sold for the most Money?

The answer turned out to be sugar.

But this was not a new experiment.

The Caribbean “Sugar Revolution” of the late 17^th century came before Britain’s Second Agricultural Revolution, and under very different circumstances.

The 18^th century boom in European agricultural productivity was initially applied to many different local crops, making Food cheaper in general by lowering costs. The Sugar Revolution had nothing to do with feeding the Caribbean’s local inhabitants.

In fact, and without exception, the availability of local Traditional Foods was severely displaced wherever sugar plantations were introduced. These plantations were also the main drivers of human slavery during this era — both topics are for later Chapters.

There was so much Money to be made from selling this edible, “white gold,” that by the end of the 17^th century, many other European nations had followed the Portuguese and Spanish in establishing their own overseas sugar plantations.

What was once a rare, luxury spice had become a globally traded commodity.

But why were people buying it?

What was sugar being used for?

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The most widespread use was sweetening hot beverages — tea, coffee, chocolate — which were formerly much less palatable to Western Europeans. These caffeinated products had originally come from the East but were popularized by Caribbean sugar.

With bulk imports driving prices down, sugar became the main ingredient in candies, pastries, jams, and other preserves. Entirely new categories of Food products were made possible by sugar, which could apparently make Food last longer and taste better.

The term “confectionary” originated in medicine, to describe remedies utilizing sugar or honey to make certain medicinal substances more palatable.

But once bulk imports crashed sugar prices — making it a highly profitable Food additive — the term came to be associated with cheap, sugar-laden Food products.

Confectionary became another word for candy store.

Large-scale sugar production created a syrupy byproduct known as “molasses.” This substance retained a modest nutrient profile and could be used as a sweetener — but its most common and profitable use was to make rum.

Rum is an alcohol, a special category of Food that will be covered in the next post.

At a higher level, when it came to the “bigger picture” uses of sugar, European royalty and their merchant affiliates harbored a different perspective:

Sugar represented cheap energy for the industrial working class.

This edible commodity served as the financial engine of multiple European Empires by becoming cheap fuel for human bodies. It remains among the most widely traded physical substances in the world today.

The energy contained within our Food is measured in calories.

A “calorie” has a specific meaning within science — it is the approximate amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree. But our modern use of the term has taken on a life of its own.

Calories are the primary metric by which modern humans measure their Food.

We use Money to measure the price of our Foods. Calories are technically a measure of energy, but we have come to associate this measure with health.

Foods with “low” or “high” calorie contents have become cognitively linked to “healthy,” or “unhealthy,” respectively.

But calories cannot be used to measure nutritional value.

Understanding the distinction between the energy and nutrition contained within our Foods is fundamental to The Algebra of Life.

Calories are how we would measure the heat that would be produced if we set our Foods on fire, but that is not what is happening inside of our bodies.

The energy contained within our Food has very little to do with nutrition.

From the perspective of European royalty and their merchant affiliates, however, there was an Industrial Revolution to manage.

Their factories needed workers.

Sugar consumption exploded during this period (1760 —1840) because it was the cheapest way for many newly-disenfranchised factory workers to secure the energy their bodies required to make it through the grueling workday.

These workers often had to accept the cheapest available sources of calories just to ensure their families had enough to survive.

Today, our consumption of sugar looks very different.

Modern humans eat sugar because it tastes good and is cheap. Corporations add sugar to their products for the similar reasons, using science to maximize flavor and “shelf-life” while minimizing costs.

But since these new, sugar-laden Trade Foods offer more powerful sensations of flavor at lower prices — displacing many Traditional Foods in the process — our species’ consumption of sugar has skyrocketed.

We’ve eaten far too much sugar, for too long.

The result has been metabolic syndrome.

Capturing several related conditions that increase the risks of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, metabolic syndrome is our species’ primary chronic health problem.

Public health authorities regularly link metabolic syndrome to obesity and inactivity, but this energy-centric explanation does not tell the whole story.

The problem is more about a lack of nutrition than a lack of exercise. It has to do with our metabolism: how our bodies chemically process the things that go into them.

In the next post, to close Chapter 2, we’ll provide an overview of what goes into our bodies.

Next post: What Goes Into Our Bodies?

Previous post: The Meaning of Nutrition

Chemistry, physics, and biology are the sciences of matter, force, and life, respectively.

Our known elements can combine to form a seemingly infinite variety of molecules and compounds — “matter” — but many chemicals have nothing to do with life.

When we consider only the chemical processes within and relating to living organisms, we get biochemistry.

But there is also something called “Food chemistry,” which Wikipedia describes as:

The study of chemical processes and interactions of all biological and non-biological components of foods.

Organic and inorganic substances have been introduced, but the difference between “biological” and “non-biological” is a separate distinction. Inorganic dietary minerals play many roles within our bodies — non-biological must mean something different.

But why would ingredients with nothing to do with life ever be added to our Food?

What are the non-biological components of our Food?

Can we identify them from Wikipedia’s extended description?

The first sentence refers to the non-biological components of our Food, but the second and third sentences are a source of confusion.

By categorizing meat, poultry, lettuce, beer and milk as “biological substances,” and then grouping together water, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, food additives, flavors and colors as things that are “also included,” this description avoids directly naming the non-biological components of our Food.

Water, vitamins, dietary minerals, and enzymes are all “biological” — they perform vital functions within our bodies.

This leaves “food additives, flavors, and colors.”

But flavors and colors are among the most common substances added to our Food!

In general, the non-biological components of our Food are food additives. These substances are added to our Foods for reasons unrelated to our nourishment. If served alone, they would not be considered Food. But we eat them anyway.

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Categorizing meat, poultry, lettuce, beer and milk as “biological substances” isn’t wrong, but it’s unlikely to be the whole truth.

Each of these terms represents a Food item that should be composed of primarily biological substances, but it would be highly unusual for such complex groupings of atoms and molecules to be completely free of non-biological additives.

Biochemistry is all about life-related chemical processes and substances, but Food chemistry implies the use of non-biological components within our Foods — often for commercial reasons.

The subtle gap between biochemistry and Food chemistry is bridged by the concept of nutrition.

This word may sound scientific, but dictionaries offer a variety of descriptions:

• The biochemical and physiological process by which an organism uses Food to support its life;

• The process of providing or obtaining the Food necessary for health and growth;

• The branch of science that deals with nutrients, particularly in humans; and

• Nutrition is about eating a healthy and balanced diet.

The first description acknowledges that nutrition is not just biochemistry, but also physiology — the study of how our organs and other internal systems function.

Biochemistry is the foundation for our physiology, but we are far from understanding all the mechanisms by which the former can influence the latter. Balancing chemical equations on paper is different from mapping the chemical reactions in our bodies.

The problem with the second description is the inclusion of the word “necessary.” This implies that unnecessary Food items — such as candy and soft drinks — would fall outside the scope of “nutrition.”

That can’t be right.

The third description has a similar problem. While the Foods we eat generally contain nutrients, they also include physical substances which cannot be classified this way. And our bodies must process everything that goes inside of them.

It is also contradicted by Wikipedia’s description of nutritional science:

...the science that studies the physiological process of nutrition, interpreting the nutrients and other substances in Food in relation to the maintenance, growth, reproduction, health, and disease of an organism.

Ultimately, the fourth description would be the most accurate definition.

Nutrition is about eating a healthy and balanced diet.

But this is still vague.

Accuracy is different from precision, which is why the ‘devil’ is in the details.

The words “healthy” and “balanced” can be used scientifically — for example, to denote healthy levels of a certain vitamin, or a balanced intake of macro-nutrients. But they can also be used more subjectively.

Long before modern science, chemistry, or the dissemination of any government-prescribed “healthy and balanced diet” (e.g., “The Food Guide Pyramid”), our species had a different, more ancient conception of nutrition.

Humans have traditionally selected and consumed Foods that produce healthy and balanced individuals. There was no concept of a healthy and balanced “diet.”

As Dr. Price would come to appreciate, the selection of Traditional Foods had long ago been perfected — without the use of science.

And if our earliest ancestors had possessed the tools of science and applied them to Food selection, it would have been pure biochemistry rather than Food chemistry.

The Foods made available by nature may not have always been safe to eat, but they were always biological. They contained zero non-biological components such as artificial colors, flavors, or preservatives.

Adding non-Food substances to our Food is an exclusively human behavior that is rooted in our species’ use of Money.

This relatively new phenomenon is unfortunately driven by law and economics rather than nutritional science — more on that later.

The implications for human health have been dramatic.

Nutrition is not just about nutrients. Eating a healthy and balanced diet also means avoiding substances that can harm our bodies.

Next, we’ll explore some of the problems caused by sugar.

Next post: Energy, Sugar, & Metabolic Syndrome

Previous post: Names & Labels vs. Atoms & Molecules

Despite a strong correlation, Traditional Food and Trade Food do not automatically translate into “healthy” and “unhealthy.”

This is because whether a Food is more “Traditional” or “Trade” isn’t a question of science or matter, but of the incentives underlying the production.

Incentives can help us to understand which substances, good or bad, may be in the Foods we eat — but it’s the chemistry that ultimately matters to our bodies.

Names and labels may provide some useful information, but they do not explain how the atoms and molecules entering our bodies may affect our longer-term health.

What’s in a name?

That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

These famous Shakespeare lines can help us distinguish between how our minds interact with Food (names and labels), and how our bodies interact with Food (atoms and molecules).

Since their essence remains the same, the names and labels we ascribe to objects are unimportant. This was how Juliet understood her desire for Romeo, despite the longstanding feud between their respective families.

The fact that Romeo was a “Montague” could not affect how she felt towards him.

Juliet experienced Romeo through multiple senses — “Montague” was just a word that could be expressed as a sound or an image.

Her feelings came from the inside, from her own individual experience.

To Juliet’s family, however, the word “Montague” represented an external social reality that superseded Juliet’s feelings.

This reasoning is also applicable to Food.

The names and labels we ascribe to Foods have no bearing on how they affect our bodies and our health.

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Just as the word “Montague” could not alter Juliet’s feelings for Romeo, the words we use to describe our Foods are unrelated to how the Foods affect us — unless, of course, those words happen to be scientific.

Names and labels can enter our minds and influence our decisions, but they cannot enter our stomachs or change our bodies’ chemistry. When we eat Food, we are ingesting atoms and molecules, not names and labels.

Wikipedia describes Food as “any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for an organism,” and which is “usually of plant, animal, or fungal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals.”

These, plus water, are the six essential nutrients.

But even these words are broad categories.

For example, fiber is a carbohydrate that could be considered a seventh essential nutrient due to its vital roles in digestive health and disease prevention.

But there are other carbohydrates of a very different nature: harmful substances that are not required by our bodies and can cause harm.

For example, refined sugars are added to Foods to enhance their taste.

More on that later.

Water (H₂O) is present in all Foods and is the most abundant nutrient. Humans can survive weeks without solid Food, but only days without water.

Fats (lipids) have an oily texture and do not mix with water. These nutrients are found in both land and sea animals, vegetables, fruits like avocado and coconut, and nuts.

And as with carbohydrates, there are “good fats” (healthy) and “bad fats” (unhealthy).

Protein is what our bodies use to grow and repair themselves and can be sourced from both plants and animals.

Carbohydrates, fats, and proteins are the three primary types of macronutrients — they are the “fuel” sources which our bodies depend upon for energy.

Vitamins and minerals are micronutrients. These are required in smaller doses and are also vital to our bodily functions and development. Humans require thirteen essential vitamins which can be categorized as either fat-soluble (vitamins A, D, E, and K), or water-soluble (vitamins C, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12).

Fat soluble vitamins are absorbed by fats within our body, allowing storage for future use. They protect vision, strengthen the immune system, support blood clotting, and provide antioxidants to fight inflammation.

Water soluble vitamins are carried to the body’s tissues but generally cannot be stored. They support energy production, create red blood cells, and prevent cell damage from metabolic stress.

Both fat-soluble and water-soluble vitamins are organic substances: they always contain carbon and are produced exclusively by plants or animals.

Our bodies also require sufficient minerals. Unlike vitamins, our bodies only require some of the known minerals. Dietary minerals are inorganic, less structurally complex than vitamins, and are also categorized based on how large a dose we need.

We require seven “macro” minerals: calcium, chloride, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, and sulfur. The nine “micro” minerals we require are chromium, copper, fluoride, iodine, iron, manganese, molybdenum, selenium, and zinc.

Of the approximately four thousand known minerals on our planet, only sixteen are considered essential for human life.

All nutrients — micro and macro, organic and inorganic — are made of atoms, which can bond together to form molecules.

You may be familiar with the “periodic table of elements,” a single page document containing key elemental data that is used by chemistry students around the world.

Elements are comprised of one atom and are the simplest form of a substance. Since minerals may contain multiple elements, our four thousand known minerals are made up of different combinations of our one hundred and eighteen known elements.

Of these elements, however, only ninety-four are found naturally on earth.

This periodic table highlights the elements which are known to be essential to humans, as well as those which are suggested to be:

Given the scientific capabilities and achievements of our species, it is strange to encounter elements that are merely suggested to be essential to life.

We seem to have mastered our external world, but how much do we really know about human life and our physical bodies?

For this, we must explore the meaning of “nutrition.”

Next post: The Meaning of Nutrition

Previous post: Traditional Food vs. Trade Food

Eating to have good health is different from eating to survive.

As modern humans, we want to thrive.

This means avoiding illness or disease in the short, medium, and long-term.

During the 1930s, a Cleveland-based dentist embarked on an epic research adventure to better understand the cause of rampant tooth decay among his urban patients.

His findings are highly instructive.

Having immigrated from Canada to begin practicing dentistry in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1893, Dr. Weston A. Price (1870 — 1948) believed himself to be living in the beacon of human civilization.

This is why, over the ensuing decades, he became so alarmed.

This was not mild tooth decay.

He was encountering systemic bacterial infection of oral tissues, causing persistent mouth ulcers and swollen lymph nodes, often resulting in tuberculosis — a highly fatal disease if untreated, still responsible for over one million deaths annually.

Although his patients’ proximity to modern treatments meant their lives were not likely at risk, Dr. Price remained both shaken and intrigued by the rising prevalence of such severe tooth decay. He couldn’t help but wonder:

What could be causing such rampant chronic disease in a modern American city?

He spent the next decade searching for an answer.

To investigate the cause of dental deformities, Dr. Price visited a variety of distinct indigenous groups living in near-isolation from the industrial world — tooth decay was almost non-existent. So he set out to study their diets and health outcomes.

Some of these groups were very different from each other.

In North America, he visited the Arctic Inuit, the Dene and Cree tribes of Western and Central Canada, respectively, and the Seminole Indians of the Florida everglades.

In South America, he visited indigenous groups in both the Peruvian Highlands and the Amazon Jungle.

In Europe, he visited isolated Swiss villagers, as well as the Gaelic communities off the coast of Scotland who lived on the fringes of industrialized civilization.

In Africa, he visited cattle-keeping pastoral tribes (e.g., the Masai), agricultural tribes (e.g., the Kikuyu), the hunter-gatherer Pygmies, as well as groups inhabiting the Nile River Basin (e.g., the Dinka).

In Oceania, he visited the Australian Aborigines, the Māori of New Zealand, and several different groups of indigenous Pacific Islanders.

Within each of these groups, there were both members who had remained isolated, living in accordance with ancestral tradition, and members who had left their groups to live and work in modern settlements, only returning home periodically.

These were ideal conditions for a comparative study.

Port cities and mining towns were common destinations for indigenous youth and their families, but living here required adopting a very different type of diet.

For the most part, the only Foods that were available — or that could be afforded — were the colonists’ Trade Foods: items that could be preserved for an overseas journey.

Across all the groups visited by Dr. Price, the Trade Foods relied on by those living away from their traditional communities were largely the same: white flour, refined sugar, polished rice, vegetable fats, and canned goods.

Despite little access to modern medicine, every traditional culture had exhibited near total immunity to dental deformity — until Trade Food was introduced.

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From the Arctic to the Amazon, the local geographies and ecosystems of these groups varied considerably. They learned to adapt.

The Inuit, living in frozen conditions, relied exclusively on animals — caribou, wild fish, and especially seal and whale fat. The groups living in Canadian forests also relied on local animals, with a great emphasis on organ meat.

Moving south, the Seminole Indians hunted deer and wild birds, as well as turtles and alligators.

In addition to their dried guinea pig, llama, and wild alpaca, the Peruvian Highlands Indians planted many different types of potatoes, corn, and quinoa. Inhabitants of the Amazon Jungle ate birds, river fish, reptile eggs, and native crops like yuca (cassava).

The isolated Swiss villagers relied on high-fat dairy, whole-rye bread, bone broth, and limited summer vegetables. The coastal Gaelic communities utilized seafoods like shellfish and cod livers, along with their traditional oat products.

In Africa, pastoral tribes like the Masai relied exclusively on animals, emphasizing raw milk, high-fat cuts of meat, and even fresh blood.

Agricultural tribes planted sweet potatoes, corn, millet, and beans, supplementing their diets with smaller animals and insects.

The hunter-gatherer Pygmies lived nomadically, hunting wild jungle animals and foraging snails, insects, wild honey, fruits, and edible roots.

Nile River Basin inhabitants followed a hybrid diet consisting of fish, water plants, seeds, and milk from their herds.

The Australian Aborigines consumed a variety of plants and land animals including kangaroo, while the Māori of New Zealand supplemented their seafood-heavy diets with crops like taro and sweet potato.

The Torres Strait islanders relied exclusively on seafoods, while the South Sea islanders supplemented their seafood-rich diets with taro, sweet potatoes, coconut, and the occasional wild pig.

Without exception, these groups’ Traditional Foods included nutrient-dense animal fats and natural whole Foods — while containing zero refined sugar or white flour.

In all cases, whenever Traditional Food was displaced by Trade Food, the local indigenous populations rapidly lost their immunity to the aggressive tooth decay that Dr. Price had set out to investigate.

Their health declined rapidly.

These findings revealed the blunt, biological reality of the global dietary shift that followed the Second Agricultural Revolution: the displacement of traditional, locally sourced natural Foods with the production of complex, globally sourced Food products.

The former is acquired from nature to be eaten (to extend and enhance our Time).

The latter is produced to be exchanged (for Money).

This distinction between Traditional Food and Trade Food is fundamental to The Algebra of Life.

Next post: Names & Labels vs. Atoms & Molecules

Previous post: Modern Conceptions of Food

Within The Algebra of Life, the domain of “Food” includes much more than what we choose to eat and drink.

It includes everything that goes into our bodies.

But even the Foods we choose to eat can be conceived in different ways.

Humans and animals have broadly similar biological relations with Food — we require it to survive so we must work to acquire it, whether directly or indirectly.

But in addition to the wider range of Foods that humans eat, we also speak and think about Food with a richer knowledge base and vocabulary.

On one hand, there is Food as we know it, or the “colloquial conception” of Food.

This is the basic, everyday language we use to describe the things we choose to eat and drink.

These are words like breakfast, lunch, dinner, eggs, pizza, apple, hamburger, or Coca-Cola.

This is the most common way that modern humans think and speak about Food.

But there is also Food as nutrients or harmful substances: the “scientific conception.”

This language is more detailed, relating to the specific physical substances entering our bodies which may provide — or interfere with — the nourishment needed for growth and the maintenance of life.

With the scientific conception, we use words like proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, but even these are only starting points.

Although broadly compatible with science, these terms ultimately still represent categories of substances within which there is great variety.

For example, carbohydrates include both watermelon and watermelon-flavored candy. But our bodies will produce very different chemical reactions for each item.

Food “as a domain of life,” Food “as we know it,” and Food “as nutrients or harmful substances,” are not distinct categories of Food, but different ways that humans can conceive or think about Food.

Unlike animals, our species conceives Food not only biologically, but also through cultural, psychological, and economic lenses.

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While some animal species like the Koala or Giant Panda are limited to a single Food — eucalyptus and bamboo, respectively — for a purely biological purpose (survival), humans fall on the other end of the spectrum.

Food has taken many different physical forms throughout our species’ history, but the concept has also been imbued with different meanings:

• Food as medicine: In both India and China, ancient systems like Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine have long emphasized the role of diet in healing, disease prevention, and wellness.

• Food as art or entertainment: In the more expensive restaurants of modern cities, the act of eating has become a curated, multi-sensory experience, where meals are designed to create excitement.

• Food as culture or identity: Preparing local, customary Foods can be a vessel for heritage and belonging by preserving indigenous histories and celebrating religious holidays.

• Food as comfort: If we’re feeling sad or stressed, Food can be used for psychological soothing, particularly if the Food is associated with childhood or home cooking.

• Food as connection: The act of eating can be treated as an opportunity or catalyst for bonding, such as with business dinners, romantic dates, family barbecues, or holiday feasts.

• Food as politics: We’re the only species that uses Food choices to reflect our political or ethical values. For example, eating “vegan,” seeking out “fair-trade” products, or shopping locally to minimize our “carbon footprint.”

• Food as status symbol: Going beyond art or entertainment, the inclusion of rare or expensive ingredients and exclusive restaurant reservations have long been a signal of wealth or social standing.

Apart from the ancient conception of Food as medicine, these other conceptions of Food relate to the human mind.

But our minds and bodies relate to Food very differently. And since our minds don’t have to follow the same rules as our bodies, many of these varied conceptions of Food are relatively new to our species.

Food was much simpler for our early ancestors.

This difference is best captured by introducing two distinct conceptions of Food that are based on the purpose of their production.

Traditional Food is produced to be eaten. Trade Food is produced to be exchanged for Money.

Just as Time was broken down into “Measured” and “Human,” Food must be broken down into “Traditional” and “Trade.”

This distinction goes beyond modern conceptions and is fundamental to The Algebra of Life.

Next post: Traditional Food vs. Trade Food

Previous post: What Makes Something Food?

Chapter 2: Food

“Whatever supplies nourishment to organisms”

“Any nourishing substance that is eaten, drunk, or otherwise taken into the body to sustain life, provide energy, promote growth, etc.”

“Material consisting essentially of protein, carbohydrates, and fat used in the body of an organism to sustain growth, repair, vital processes, and to furnish energy”

“Something that people and animals eat, or plants absorb, to keep them alive” “Anything serving for consumption or use”

“The things that people or animals eat”

- Selected definitions

All humans and animals require Food to survive, but what is Food?

More specifically, what makes something Food?

This question was featured in Part I’s Introduction to help us distinguish between “categorical” and “conceptual” thinking.

We eat things because they are Food — not the other way around.

This basic principle is reflected in the timeless warning from new parents to their child: “don’t put that in your mouth!”

We ascribe many different meanings to the physical objects we encounter in our external world, but recognizing Food is among the most ancient and fundamental classifications that humans can make.

It took millennia of survival by trial-and-error before our species understood which plants and animals could safely be eaten as Food in their respective environments.

Nature was not a grocery store.

Our earliest ancestors had no choice but to develop their conceptions of Food from first principles.

Why do we eat it?

What are our goals?

How are these goals best served?

When thinking about Food categorically, however, the quality need not be considered. Food can simply become “the things that people or animals eat.”

While an accurate description of Food, this would be a dangerously misleading definition.

And as with concepts and categories, this is an important distinction to make.

Descriptions are simply accounts of a person, object, or event. They reflect the perspective of the describer and may diverge considerably from other descriptions — even when the exact same thing is being described.

With descriptions, you can include or omit whichever characteristics you choose.

Definitions are different.

They are attempts to state the exact, general meaning of a word, without regard for a specific perspective. A good definition would extract the most broadly accepted meaning from the totality of characteristics.

This is different from describing something, even if the description is accurate.

We eat things because they are Food. But what makes something Food?

How can we define it?

Whether something qualifies as Food should depend on whether it sustains or enhances life.

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But our earliest ancestors could not know this in advance.

They had to learn the hard way.

We are the fortunate beneficiaries of our ancestors’ trials and errors.

Just as each plane crash makes future flights safer, it was our ancestors’ “errors” that generated the most useful knowledge with regard to Food — often at the expense of the individual.

Given the risks associated with eating unknown plants and animals, it was better for early humans to copy existing diets rather than experiment for themselves.

This was the original “risk management.”

It’s normal for humans to think of Food as “what people eat” because this is an ancient survival strategy, allowing us to benefit from the risk-taking of others while avoiding the potentially lethal pitfalls of experimentation.

In the business world, this is called a “second mover advantage” — innovation is copied rather than initiated.

But although this may be a relatively safe rule today, we couldn’t set out this way. Someone had to experiment and discover new Foods before their actions could be observed and copied.

Our Food decisions have always been shaped by what we see other people eating, but mimicry cannot inform our conception or definition of Food.

To “eat what others eat” does not capture the full meaning of Food.

Our species’ unique physical capabilities and capacity for planned action causes human mimicry to produce more varied results than animal mimicry.

Narrowly focused on survival, animals might mimic each other for millennia without meaningfully changing the initial behavior or results. The variety of Foods from which they can choose remains essentially unchanged.

But when humans start copying each other, something entirely different happens.

We use our observations of other people’s actions to help us conceive what is possible.

And we don’t stop here.

By remembering further back and thinking further ahead, our minds work to expand our perceived possibilities. And unlike with animals, these new discoveries could be passed down to each successive generation through language, and eventually writing.

This is a major difference between “Animal Time” and “Human Time.”

Modern humans conceive of Food in many different ways relative to animals.

But after millennia of mastering the question of what is possible, our species’ relationship with Food has become so complex that it’s increasingly difficult to know what is best.

To master The Algebra of Life we must learn to recognize and understand these divergent conceptions.

Next post: Modern Conceptions of Food

Previous post: Time, Consciousness, & Our Bodies

Scientists can hardly agree that consciousness exists, much less understand it.

Serious discussion of the topic seems to be reserved for specialists — although this has been changing in recent decades.

The future is uncertain. Even the past is uncertain, to our minds.

We’ve previously described the past and future as being separated by the present, but this doesn’t prevent our memories from interacting with our hopes, dreams, fears, or expectations.

The boundaries between these cognitive layers are porous.

Our present is chaotic.

We may have negative experiences which “scar” us, leaving lasting memories which dampen our hopes or dreams in some way.

On the other hand, positive experiences may enhance our conceptions of what is possible or which is best.

Our past and our future only exist within our minds, where they can’t help but interact with each other.

Consciousness may come from the interactions between our “past” and our “future” — the interplay between our memories and expectations. But since neither can be measured or observed, the interactions between them are even harder to analyze.

That our consciousness may be a synthesis of our perceptions of the past and future is an untestable theory, but it’s a sufficient approximation for our purposes.

Learning to use consciousness to our advantage is more important than being able to precisely define it.

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Although it originates within our minds and cannot be directly observed, our consciousness serves as a vital link between our species’ experience of Time and our physical bodies — particularly with regards to Food.

Unlike our thoughts or feelings, our bodies must adhere to the laws of physics while also complying with the natural rules of many other chemical and biological systems.

Chemistry is the science of matter, while biology is the science of life.

Physics is about energy and force.

All of these apply to both humans and animals.

Our chemical Foods interact with our biological bodies. But since humans consume a much wider variety of increasingly complex Foods relative to animals, our bodies’ interactions with these Foods is also more complex.

As a species, we can physically access virtually any Food that can be found in nature.

We’ve invented a seemingly infinite number of synthetic “Food products.”

And the medical, dental, and pharmaceutical industries have introduced many of their own non-Food chemicals to our bodies over the years.

Remember: within The Algebra of Life, the domain of Food includes everything that goes inside our bodies — not just what we typically think of as “Food.”

Animals certainly feel how Food affects their bodies, but only humans can become consciously aware of the biochemical mechanisms through which their Food interacts with their internal systems.

Modern humans are uniquely capable of becoming aware not only of how certain Foods makes their bodies feel, but also why.

If you pay attention to your body, you can feel what you eat.

And if you pay attention to the underlying science, you may begin to understand why. But it can also be a rabbit hole. Not everything is settled.

Eating or drinking too much will produce certain feelings in the short-term, but there are also longer-term considerations: the next morning, month, year, or decade.

We also don’t want to run out of Money — but that’s a topic for later.

The relationship between the Foods we eat and our experience of Human Time will be returned to in Chapter 4 (Time & Food). For now, know that it exists.

By synthesizing our brain’s perception of our bodily states, consciousness is what connects our experience of Time to our physical bodies.

But before the more complex relationships between Time and Food can be analyzed, we must first introduce the second “variable” of The Algebra of Life.

What is Food?

How should we think about Food?

These questions will be addressed in the next Chapter.

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