Vanilla, BOOM

If I were a novelist writing about the end of the carbon-fueled era, I would open with someone going to buy a bottle of vanilla extract.

"You'll have to break the bank," the clerk says.

This happened to me last week. 

You've maybe seen vanilla prices have skyrocketed? 
Four ounces for $25 (at Penzey's, which isn't the cheapest, but still, that's double the usual price). I only bought it because I had a Christmas gift card.

I looked it up, and the "culprits" are consumers demanding natural flavorings, and... 
surprise, surprise,
climate change, or "extreme climate events" --cyclones hitting Madagascar.

{How did vanilla ever get the reputation as boring, when it's the bean of a tropical orchid? 
How exotic can you get?
I haven't looked this up.
Maybe it's because it doesn't impart color to ice cream, unlike chocolate or strawberry?}

It's hard to stand outside our times, don't you think? and get perspective on historical turning points as they happen. 

There are a million little things that ripple outward from huge events (the HIV/AIDS virus, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina), and a million mini-manifestations of massive but slow changes--manifestations such as the price of vanilla. Which ones are key? Hard to say until after the fact, eh?

Meanwhile, unless we're hit full on, we absorb the aftershocks, which is a good thing for our sanity!

Do worlds end, boom! just like that?

Probably mostly they fall like Rome: it wasn't built in a day, and it didn't fall in a day either.

I was thinking about this, reading Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure, the memoir of Langdon Gilkey of his time (1943–1945) as a young American man imprisoned by the Japanese in a civilian prison camp in northern China.

It's not a horror story of brutal treatment, like Unbroken--mostly the Japanese left the prisoners alone to govern themselves.
"Our problems were created more by our own behavior," Gilkey wrote, "than by our Japanese captors."

So it's really a meditation on human society. Mostly people adjusted pretty quickly to the new "normal," as people do.
That's all very interesting, but I'm mentioning the book here because of something that happens at the end. 

Gilkey and the others––1/3rd Americans, 2/3 British––had no news about what was happening during the war. 
When the war ends, the freed prisoners can't go home right away, so they all stay in camp as the British and US armies prepare to send them on their way. 
But not necessarily back "home."

Gilkey writes (p. 221):

On a chilly gray day in mid-September, some four weeks after our rescue, a British colonel showed up to address the British subjects. His purpose was to tell them with all possible candor ... the reality they now had to face.

"In the three years since you left, [the colonel said] ... your small businesses... have been almost destroyed beyond repair. Everything that has not been shattered, has passed into Chinese hands. There is little or no hope of reparations with which to get started again.

"Above all, I must say to you with all the force and authority at my command, that the days of 'colonial life' in Asia are over.

"Those of you whose roots lie in China alone had best resign yourselves to the loss of the old life. An era has ended, and with it has ended your own past lives.
I'm sorry, but these are the facts."

Gilkey goes on to reflect that while it doesn't usually happen--BOOM--just like that, it's normal in human history that eras and empires and ways of life end.

It's also normal––and my favorite podcast, Hidden Brain, talks about this too––that we humans are programmed to ignore or adjust to shocks. 
Unless, of course, they come too hard and too fast.

Vanilla prices, I can absorb.
But I'm adding to my imaginary future-world, in which I sit around a campfire with other survivors of climate disaster (or whatever) and list things we miss:

Hot running water!
Escalators.

Vanilla.