Life in complex unstable  communities abroad led me to always keeping a constant well stocked store of essential foodstuff which proved to hold us in good stead  several times. Stock piling toilet rolls may seem essential but not much use when the cupboard is bare - and buying in anything difficult. Toilet roll raw, boiled or baked  really is  not a life saver. 

Wheat in UK failed this  year so it is claimed and flour prices will increase - and doubtless with a price rising knock on effect. Lost holidays, empty airports, virus testing, sports, entertainment, fashion, political issues all fade into insignificance when commodities fail and people go hungry.

I mentioned cod wars in the Elephant thread and  Empire expansion  has roots in the search for commodities; tea and spices come to mind. And there were more unlikely ones such as indigo. I reckon Res Historians could - if the spirit stirs, broaden this  topic considerably. with interesting opinion and info.

We discussed this only recently in the thread in which Paul tried to suggest that WWII was the first "ideological" war and this of course raised the whole question of what constitutes an ideology, let alone one that can be claimed to be a "casus belli" in its own right. My own point was that however these things might be dressed up in terms of political ideology there is in fact a much more basic ideology underlying nearly all conflict - namely acquisition or protection of a community's access to resources.

Since the dawn of what we whimsically refer to as "civilisation" by far the strongest evidence of access to resources is the commodities that result from their ownership, and by far the most evident fault lines geographically (and now increasingly virtually) that are normally hidden in plain sight during times of conflict are the routes along which and the interface points between which these commodities travel as they are traded. The same applies to violent unrest within countries too - revolutions rarely occur without an important element justifying the revolutionaries' actions being access to commodities too, whether they arrived through trade or were generated locally. At its most esoteric level this is presented as access to the wealth required to acquire such commodities, but at the most basic level it is simply access to the commodities themselves, especially those on which one's very life depends. Simply a threat to existing levels of access can, in some cases, be enough to trigger radical change within a society, and violent change at that.

Reducing the means of subsistence to mere "commodities" might sound flippant - there is a world of difference between a loaf of bread and a new i-phone though both may be described as such - but in essence I think your opting to focus on that word is justified. "Commodity" infers by definition a complex system involving exploitation of resources, means of production, inter-social trade and sophisticated distribution criteria. When commodities, especially vital ones, therefore suddenly become noticeable by their absence then the implications for this complex network of inter-related human behaviour are potentially dire, and in a very existentialist sense. War is simply an easy and immediate existentialist threat to identify - however there are many others that maybe require a little more thought and investigation to properly understand. And the first clue to their existence may well be empty supermarket shelves.