Things are Precious only when Rare

Bow did not even ask for his cherries this morning. He does not want them. He's had too many cherries lately, and he does not find them the least bit tempting, anymore. On the other hand, he finished his grapes.

Bow Looks at His Leftovers after Breakfast

The grapes are store bought, so I dole them out sparingly. The cherries are homegrown, so he can have them at every meal and snack time, if he likes.

Bow's Breakfast Table after Breakfast
grapes entirely consumed, cereal bowl with leftover flakes and cherries untouched

You can lead a chimp to cherries, but you cannot make him eat them. Of course, it wasn't always like this. If you have been following my other blog,  The Feast Before Us, then you know that at first, we anticipated the feast to come:

http://thefeastbeforeus.blogspot.com/2013/06/anticipating-feast-to-come.html

Then we enjoyed eating the cherries:

http://thefeastbeforeus.blogspot.com/2013/06/cherries-and-cherry-pits.html

And finally, to make the cherries more interesting, we also tried them in jello:

http://thefeastbeforeus.blogspot.com/2013/06/a-surplus-of-cherries.html

But the time has come to accept the facts: the cherries are less valued now that they are so abundantly available. It isn't a strictly human phenomenon or one that applies only to chimpanzees: to be precious, something has to be rare.

Have you noticed that food prices naturally tend to go up in a famine or fall in a period of abundance? It is not greed on the part of sellers nor cupidity in consumers. It is just a fact of nature. immutable and fixed, and it has nothing to do with money, except insofar that money reflects the most basic instincts of us all: we will appreciate it more if it is rare.