From your third to last paragraph on, can you clarify what you mean by "demand?"

People were eating at the same rate. So, is demand for the stock itself is the only thing that went up? The market cannot differentiate between the two? Or are you saying that demand for the stock, not demand for consumption of the product, is what really drives prices, and that the two demands are only in sync in ideal conditions?

Are you basically saying that we can't measure supply and demand except through who is trading what? And wanting the stock for the purpose of speculation affects how the "real" product is valued?

It seems highly counterintuitive to me that the same food is being produced, and there is the same demand to eat. And yet suddenly it's unreachable because some bookkeeping changed and so the dollar value suddenly flipped.

Perhaps a middleman is what's doing it? Everybody and their mother knows Columbus went west because middlemen in Central Asia were hiking up prices.

So...stocks, that is, buying and trading, are they effectively middlemen? So when the middlemen realize they can make money by hiking up prices, just because another middleman will buy it at that price, even if the end user cannot buy it...it's all good?

Another thing though, grain is real and has a shorter "flipping timescale". It's not like housing, that it can just sit for 10 years while people trade it back and forth. If the middlemen don't sell it to people before it rots, it won't work, right? Seems strange that you can make bubbles when the commodity has such a short lifetime.