Rubber Match

When I was a kid, everyone knew where stuff came from. Cities, states, and countries were known for what they made, what they grew,  and what they lucked out and had underground.

Geography quizzes had fill-in-the-blank questions like “Wisconsin is known for its ___________.” And even the dullest of dullards knew the answer was something to do with cows. (I remember one even more cretinous quiz in which the question was “Singapore is a ________ city”. The correct answer was “hot.”)

We played with map puzzles. These always miffed me a bit, in that New England, with our puny states, got a bit short-changed when it came to product picto-grams – Maine, I believe, sports a potato. But games like this meant that even in our blissfully ample free time in those blissfully unprogrammed days, we were absorbing information about what people did in places, and what resources they had available to them that enabled them to do what they did in those places.

Alas, many of ye olde verities are not so vérité anymore.  Most of America has switched from “what you make” to “what you do,” where we all do “services.”

So Pittsburgh’s no longer the Steel City. Shoes aren’t made in Brockton, Mass. And you can go blind looking for the union label in clothing.

And what do you think when it comes to “Made in China”? Electronics? Junk? Sneakers? Everything?

Nope, it’s not so easy any more.

Fortunately, you can’t do much about what’s underground, other than use it up.

As far as I can tell, they ain’t going to be making any more fossil fuels any time soon.  So peat still comes from Ireland, and coal still comes from Kentucky. (Which reminds me of a conversation I had in Ireland years ago with a local County Kerry politician. He was talking about the peat bogs, and I asked what Ireland was going to do when they ran out of peat. “Sure,” he told me, “There’s plenty of it.” Well, yes, but there is the fossil fueliness of peat…)

And unless Superman flies in and starts crushing coal for us, there’s a finite supply of diamonds. So we remain confident that “real diamonds” – and not cubic zirconia – will still come from South Africa. (Whether round, square or pear shape they’ll always be a girl’s best friend is anyone’s guess.)

Then there’s what you grow – somewhere in the middle between what you make and what you have underground -  which doesn’t tend to change all that much. No one’s growing bananas or cotton in Aroostook County, Maine, any time soon. (At least I hope not.)

And rubber is always going to come from rubber trees, which are always going to grow in places that are hot.

Maybe not in hot places like Singapore, which mostly grows tall building.

But in hot places like Malaysia.

Anyway, a while back, Malaysia decided that it didn’t just want to export buckets o’ rubber to places that were going to manufacture something out of those raw materials. Things like galoshes, bathtub slip-proof mats, erasers, rubber bands (known in New England as “elastics”), red rubber balls. And rubbers.

So Malaysia made the moves to develop into a more vertically integrated country and started using some of its rubber to make condoms. Which look startlingly like binkies. Or Mexican sombreros. Ole! And now Malaysia’s home to Karex, the “world’s biggest condom manufacturer.”

“Demand for condoms is continuously growing,” said Goh Miah Kiat, whose great-grandfather started the company as a grocery store on a Malaysian rubber plantation almost a century ago…

“When we got into condoms, it was pretty much a dirty word,” Goh, executive director at Karex, said in a Nov. 12 interview. “Today, things have changed. Asia is going to create a lot of demand because our population is very young.” (Source: Bloomberg.)

And, let’s face it, because there are many circumstances in which condoms are the real girl’s best friend.

That’s quite a move Karex made, from grocery store to world’s largest maker of condoms. As the granddaughter of a grocery store owner, I wish that Jake’d been a bit more enterprising (which maybe he would have if he’d made it beyond the age of 52). Not that Chicago in the 1930’s and 1940’s needed all that many condoms. Still, if Jake had branched out, his many grandkids – and two surviving daughters – might be sitting pretty pretty.

It’s also quite impressive that Karex only began making those rubbers in 1988 and in just under 25 years grew its way to #1.

It’s no wonder, when you look at the rather winsome ads they’ve run.

And it’s not just rubbers  - 17 varieties, by the way, including fruity, sweet, and spicy - that Malaysia’s churning out. The country is also the world’s leading supplier of rubber and latex gloves.

Perhaps if New Englanders could figure out something else to do with the sap we tap from our maple trees… I guess we’ll have to content ourselves with maple syrup, maple sugar candy, and pictures of sap buckets on the map of Vermont (if they can squeeze in a picto-gram.)

Meanwhile, if they’re still quizzing kids of geographic word-association, I’m pretty sure they might still be saying “rubber comes from Malaysia.” Rubbers, I’m pretty sure, have not (yet) made it’s way onto the grammar school pick list. At least I hope not.