Food riots in poor countries around the world and de facto rice rationing in California by national retail chains have had a peculiar effect on me. They make me worry about gold.

The human tragedy and human propensity to hoard are worthy topics in their own right, but for myself, the relationship to things numismatic is the important point.

Events like this happened in the 1970s. They happened closer to gold tops than to good buying opportunities for the precious metals. The smart time to buy is when everything is quiet and nobody sees any reason to get into precious metals. The smart time to sell is when everybody is predicting that gold will reach the moon.

Is that why gold closed below $900 a troy ounce yesterday at $886.80?

It is never too late to make an investment. As long as there are people, gold will be bought and sold as a hedge against inflation. But that doesn’t mean markets go straight up forever. In fact, they can take a very long time to reach new highs as gold buyers in early 1980 found out.

Gold can correct and it can correct severely.

Have we reached a point of such speculative excess that gold will stage a significant retreat? Even gold bulls seem to be predicing a routine correction, but could it be more severe than that?

When I talked to Leon Hendrickson of SilverTowne on Saturday he said his smelting and refining operation was buying $3 million in gold a week.

Now large numbers by themselves don’t mean anything, but how much of this metal is being sold by people’s whose household budgets have been stretched to the breaking point by high mortgage payments, high gasoline and high food prices?

We had lines in 1980 to indicate everybody and his brother were selling. Many pundits paid no attention, but the physical selling helped swamp the markets with supply. This time perhaps technology makes this warning more subtle.

I asked Leon where the coin counters were like in 1980 and he said electronic scales are so much better and faster. They are also much quieter.

We don’t hear the clinking and clanking on the floor anymore, but that doesn’t mean significant public selling is not occurring.

I received a couple of cents in change yesterday along with two quarters a dime and nickel. Both lay in my hand Memorial side up. My first thought was one was zinc. The other was copper. I turned them over. Sure enough, that’s what they were.

Recognition of this kind is not exactly the most exciting news, but it got me thinking about rolled-up sleeve collecting of the kind we did during the circulation finds era. What is the equivalent today?

Collectors of the time looked at huge numbers of coins in hopes of finding a 1909-S VDB cent or a 1916-D dime. I never found either one, or anything that was truly valuable, but I did get an education.

I learned what metals looked like. I could tell the difference between silver and copper-nickel without having to look at the tell-tale edge that the general public relied on. I could tell you a date range a coin would fall into from the reverse just looking at the wear. I could tell what a real uncirculated coin looked like versus something that had been played with.

None of these so-called skills would be of much interest at a cocktail party because all of the collectors of the day had to wash their dirty fingers after a coin examination session just like I did.

But we all learned the texture and feel of real coins and even their smell.

What of the collectors of today when they are facing an onslaught of fake coins from China? How will they know the difference if they have basically not handled many or even any of the real ones?

If all you do is buy coins that are encapsulated either by the Mint or a grading service, how will you ever learn what we circulation finds collectors learned by simply rolling up our sleeves and diving into a pile of coins?

It likely won’t have an impact on the ultimate sales totals for the Bald Eagle commemorative coins being sold this year, but the Mint nonetheless deserves applause for a public relations feat on behalf of the program.

Country music singer Dolly Parton participated April 10 in the release of an eaglet by the American Eagle Foundation at Douglas Lake near the Great Smokey Mountains in Tennessee.

Not to denigrate the appeal of the star, but coin collectors are a stubborn bunch. They make up their own minds. They don’t easily get stampeded into doing something by noncollectors.

Fortunately, the coin program is an appealing one. Eagle images have appeared on the coins of the United States since the U.S. Mint opened. Some looked scrawny. Some looked majestic. Some, such as the one on the Bridgeport, Conn., commemorative looked positively supersonic. But, hey, showman P.T. Barnum is on the other side. What other kind of eagle would have suited him?

Collectors like our national emblem. They have strong attachments to the images and strong opinions about how they look. They probably are pleased to be joined in this appreciation by Parton.

The Bald Eagle program adds some new renditions that collectors seem happy with. Roughly half the silver dollars and $5 gold pieces have been sold. Perhaps all of the coins will sell out by the end of the year.

Whether they sell out or not, the appearance of Dolly Parton in a related event creates a long-lasting positive memory of the program that we will be recalling for many years as we write about it in the future.