[dwaltrip]

I agree that food is pretty darn close to having a constant, stable value to all humans.

However, the edge cases aren't imaginary, and they give us a chance to refine our ideas.

Say there is a huge harvest and a town now has much more food than it can eat. A food merchant passes through the town and wants to sell some of his goods, however obviously no one is interested. Has the merchant's food lost its intrinsic value? Why doesn't anyone want it?

We can also consider the vastly different food preferences found all over the world. And so on...

Being a bit pedantic, food isn't really a specific thing, it's an amorphous category. It's literally defined as "anything people eat that provides nutrition", so it almost feels tautological to say that food has intrinsic value.

Finally, almost any other concrete, specific example I can think is much less universal than "food".