Bread, paint & salt

Bread, paint and salt. 

In pre-industrial times they were, respectively, brown and gritty, soft and streaky, and grey and mushy. People, if they had the money, would pay a lot more for product that was, respectively, white and fluffy, hard and uniform, white and dry.

Come the industrial revolution and the diligent operatives, the technologists, slowly figured out how to make perfect bread, the perfect paint and the perfect salt. And they could make it just that much cheaper than the old rubbish.

Eventually some people got bored with perfection and a market was born for facsimiles of pre-industrial brown sourdough bread, milk paints and mostly-dried sea salts. But these cost twice as much, or more, than the perfect stuff.

And then the clever technologists started figuring out how to make the new-old stuff cheaply and everyone could get it, if they wanted it.

Like the Sneeches with and without stars, everyone forgot which was which and then got quite confused as to what they should be eating and painting. Fortunately there were lifestyle magazines and blogs to guide them every which way.

The moral to the story is this – if you see a market emerge for a new facsimile of an old product then jump on the opportunity to scale up its production and then you will be rich and you will be able to buy lots of whichever of the old or new, or new-old, or old-new stuff that you want.