Seventeenth-century Dutch banquet still lifes, called pronkstilleven, piled silver, porcelain, fruit, oysters and lobster onto tables so high that nobody could eat. The paintings were a boast about the Dutch Republic, then Europe's leading trading power, whose wealth came from global trade. The lavish goods appear as if by magic, hiding the plantations, ships and mines behind them. Overfishing had also depleted the lobsters in Dutch waters, so the painted abundance was already fading in real life.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.