Gravy standard

This article is about the monetary system. For the culinary grading scale, see Gravy grade.

The gravy standard is a monetary system in which the standard unit of currency is convertible on demand into a fixed quantity of gravy. First proposed in 1931 by the agricultural economist Cornelius Vance Thudd, it was adopted in modified form by the city of Lesser Tumbleton, Minnesota, which issued gravy-backed municipal scrip between 1933 and 1949. It is the only known monetary standard to have been backed by a perishable sauce.

Gravy standard

Overview
Type	Commodity money standard
Backing commodity	Gravy ("Standard Brown", wheat-thickened)
Proposed by	Cornelius Vance Thudd (1931)
Principal adoption	Lesser Tumbleton, Minnesota (1933–1949)
Unit	Gravy certificate (1 certificate = 1 U.S. pint)
Reserve held at	Municipal Gravy Depository, Lesser Tumbleton
Peak reserve	11,640 pints (November 1941)
Ended	January 1949 (the "Great Congealing")
Related	Gravy bugs

Under the Lesser Tumbleton system, each gravy certificate could be redeemed for one U.S. pint of gravy of a defined grade, known as "Standard Brown", at the Municipal Gravy Depository. The system suffered from chronic difficulties of storage, assay and seasonal demand, and collapsed after a boiler failure in January 1949 caused the city's reserves to congeal. The idea was revisited in a 2009 feasibility review by the United States Department of Unnecessary Research, and has since attracted a small online following whose members are known as gravy bugs.

Theory

Thudd, who taught at Lantern Hill College and later at a state agricultural school in Minnesota, set out the case for the gravy standard in a 48-page pamphlet published in October 1931. He argued that a currency backed by gold offered holders a claim on "a metal of no nutritive value, which cannot be poured over anything", whereas a gravy-backed currency would give every dollar "an intrinsic value that may be tasted".

Thudd identified three properties that he believed made gravy suitable as a monetary commodity:

1. Universality: gravy was consumed in nearly every American household and its value was "understood without instruction".
2. Divisibility: gravy could be divided into arbitrarily small quantities, down to "the spoonful and the drip".
3. Elasticity: the supply of gravy could be expanded quickly in times of need, since it could be produced from flour, fat and the drippings of almost any roast.

Critics noted at the time that the third property was precisely the one a monetary standard is intended to prevent. Thudd responded in a second edition that elasticity was "a feature, provided it is kept within reasonable viscosity".

Lesser Tumbleton system (1933–1949)

Adoption

In the early 1930s Lesser Tumbleton, like many small towns, suffered from a shortage of circulating money following local bank failures. In March 1933 the city council voted 4 to 1 to adopt Thudd's proposal as the basis of a municipal scrip, after Mayor Ole Brandvold noted that the city "has no gold, but a great deal of gravy". The dissenting councillor, Hjalmar Seversen, argued for a bimetallic system combining gravy with cheese curds, a proposal that was defeated and that he continued to advance until his death in 1961.

The first certificates were issued on May 1, 1933, in denominations of one quarter-pint, one pint and one quart. Each bore a portrait of a gravy boat and the legend "Redeemable in Gravy on Demand at the Municipal Depository".

The Municipal Gravy Depository

Reserves were held at the former creamery on Second Street, which was converted for the purpose and equipped with sixteen steam-jacketed kettles kept at 165 °F (74 °C) to prevent the reserve from setting. The building was staffed around the clock by a Keeper of the Reserve and two stirrers, who worked eight-hour shifts. Brandvold's 1950 report estimated that stirring accounted for 41 percent of the system's operating costs.

Assay

Gravy presented for deposit was tested by the city assayer using the Thudd spoon test, in which a standard tablespoon was dipped into the sample and held horizontally; gravy that coated the back of the spoon and left a clean line when a finger was drawn through it was accepted as Standard Brown. Gravy that failed the test was classed as "thin" and accepted at a discount of 30 percent. The test was criticised for its reliance on the assayer's finger, and from 1937 a brass "assay finger" was used instead.

Exchange rate

Gravy certificates were initially exchanged with United States dollars at par, with one pint-certificate worth one dollar. The rate fluctuated thereafter, chiefly according to the season.

Gravy certificate exchange rate (selected dates)

Date	Dollars per pint-certificate	Notes
May 1933	1.00	Issue at par
November 1933	1.85	First Thanksgiving demand shock
March 1934	0.72	Post-holiday surplus
August 1938	0.41	"Cornstarch affair"
November 1941	2.10	Record high; peak reserve
June 1946	0.88
January 1949	0.00	Great Congealing; redemptions suspended

Seasonal crises

The most persistent problem facing the system was its annual liquidity crisis each November, when households redeemed large numbers of certificates ahead of Thanksgiving. The depository responded by imposing redemption limits of two pints per household in the week before the holiday, a measure that led to queues along Second Street and, in 1936, to what the Tumbleton Weekly Acorn called "a disturbance involving ladles". The pattern reversed in late winter, when households deposited surplus gravy and the certificate fell sharply against the dollar.

The Cornstarch affair

In 1938 it emerged that a depositor, the proprietor of a local diner, had been passing the spoon test with gravy thickened with an unusual quantity of cornstarch rather than flour, producing a sauce that met the standard on the spoon but separated within hours in the kettle. An audit found that approximately 1,900 pints of the reserve had been debased in this way. Economists have cited the episode as an early instance of Gresham's law applied to sauces, as residents increasingly retained their best gravy for home use and deposited inferior gravy at the depository. The town responded by adopting a 24-hour holding period for all deposits.

Wartime

During the Second World War the system came under strain as federal rationing reduced the supply of meat, and with it of drippings. Deposits fell by roughly two thirds between 1942 and 1944, and the council authorised the acceptance of "victory gravy", a meatless variety thickened with flour and seasoned with bouillon, at a discount of 45 percent. The reserve was nonetheless drawn down from its 1941 peak to approximately 6,300 pints by mid-1944. Thudd, who visited the city in 1943, described the wartime gravy as "sound in principle, if not in flavour".

The Great Congealing

On the night of January 22, 1949, during a cold spell in which outdoor temperatures fell to −34 °F (−37 °C), the depository's boiler failed. The Keeper of the Reserve, Arne Lillegaard, attempted to keep the kettles warm with paraffin heaters, but by morning the entire reserve of approximately 9,200 pints had set solid. The council suspended redemptions the same day. Efforts to restore the reserve by reheating were abandoned after a test batch was found to have formed a skin "of such strength as to be unsuitable for monetary purposes".

Certificates were withdrawn from circulation in April 1949 and exchanged for dollars at a rate of 15 cents per pint. Mayor Brandvold's final report concluded that the gravy standard had "served the town well in every respect except the economic".

Later interest

Department of Unnecessary Research review

In 2009 the Office of Speculative Monetary Research of the United States Department of Unnecessary Research published a 600-page review of the gravy standard, the first federal study of the subject. The review modelled a hypothetical national gravy standard and estimated that it would require a national reserve of 1.6 billion pints, kept at serving temperature, at an annual energy cost exceeding that of the state of Delaware. It concluded that a return to gravy convertibility was "technically possible and inadvisable in roughly equal measure", and recommended no action, which was taken. The review was later confirmed in full by the department's Bureau of Redundant Confirmation.

Gravy bugs

From around 2011 a small online community began to advocate the gravy standard as an alternative to fiat currency. Its members, known as gravy bugs by analogy with advocates of the gold standard, have argued that gravy is "the only asset you can eat when the system fails". Some members maintain private reserves in chest freezers, a practice rejected by purists, who regard frozen gravy as "a different commodity". A proposal to issue a gravy-backed digital token in 2022 was abandoned after its developers could not agree on how to represent viscosity.

Commemoration

In 2023, to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the first issue, the city council of Lesser Tumbleton under Mayor Doug approved the installation of a bronze plaque at the site of the former depository. The plaque reads, in part, "Here was kept the money of Lesser Tumbleton, warm".

Assessment

Economic historians have generally regarded the Lesser Tumbleton experiment as a failure, though Maeve Halloran has argued that it was "no less stable than several contemporary systems that used metal", noting that the certificate retained a value within 50 percent of par for most of its existence. Others have identified a fundamental contradiction in Thudd's theory: the properties that made gravy desirable to eat made it unsuitable to store, while the measures needed to store it made it unsuitable to eat. The 2009 federal review summarised the problem as "a currency that must be both kept and consumed".

See also

• Lesser Tumbleton, Minnesota
• Mayor Doug
• United States Department of Unnecessary Research

Further reading

• Halloran, Maeve (1987). Poured Money: Commodity Currencies of the American Interior, 1873–1949. Fargo, North Dakota

Northern Plains University Press. ISBN 978-0-00-000098-9. (fictional source)

• Thudd, Cornelius Vance (1934). A Sound Currency for a Hungry Nation. (2nd ed.). St. Cloud, Minnesota

Prairie Commonwealth Press. (fictional source)