New Monetary System

The other day I roasted a chicken as a way to prepare meals for the rest of the week.  After I had pulled it out of the oven and gave it some time to cool down, I separated the major sections of the bird to make reheating later on easier (I was careful not to say that I "carved" the bird, because I just used my hands).  As often happens, a lot of the skin started to separate from the body as I pulled off legs and wings and whatnot.  Since the skin had already fallen off, I just picked it up and ate it.  This worked fine because the skin is one of my favorite parts, especially since the way that I cooked it, the skin was nice and crispy. Now, I won't pull off the skin for the purpose of eating it, but if it falls off, I figure it's free game.

As I did this, I had the absurd thought that crispy chicken skin (CCS) could be the basis of an economy since it's so highly prized (by me, at least).  As I followed this line of thinking, I recognized how foolish that would be since money needs to have three qualities: valuable, portable, and durable.  So close.  Plus, once you traded something for that item's equivalent value in CCS, wouldn't you just want to eat your money?  Clearly this is not a realistic economic model, not that I thought it would be.

Then my mind thought about a society that uses a consumable good as a cash substitute: the US prison systems.  If you've ever seen any documentary or even fictional depiction of prison, there's often some talk about trading something for so many cigarettes.  Now, I don't know how often a particular inmate smokes his money, but I would think that a cigarette would be more valuable as a commodity to be traded, though I recognize that as a non-smoker, I'm biased.

So, the thought experiment ultimately led to a dead-end, but I am curious if anyone in my audience has a favorite consumable good that they think is desirable enough to have an economy based on it?  Instead of the gold standard, could we have a bacon standard? or a brownie standard? or a pizza standard?  Leave a comment with your thoughts.