Gold and silver have no practical purpose in life, other than it's "rare" and shiny.
I used to use Silver alloys for welding bicycle frames together and they used to use silver alloys in Aerospace applications for welding together the titanium alloy structures for Vulcan Bombers together as well.
Silver has its uses and make for some very nice Sterling Silver cutlery as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_silverTry asking the wife for their gold jewelry to sell for some gardening tools/bags of fertilizer etc and see how far you get!
In a SHTF economy, or economic disaster, are you really going to be making airplanes, bombers, or bike frames? I should probably edit my above post to say there's very little practical application for gold/silver, but you're right in that there are some uses.
Gold (and to a lesser extent, silver, or heck, any precious gem) have value only because people want them to have value. In practical terms, they're near useless. Look at every third world country... food, water and shelter.
The only thing precious metals/gems are good for ie exchanging for goods with people that think they're worth the exchange. Cut out the second half of that (ie, "I'd rather keep this than hold on to a chunk of metal), and the whole system falls apart. There's a reason why bartering got replaced by currency, but if it goes back the other way ...
As for my wife, if the kid has dropped 10 lbs and is starving to death (she's only 17 lbs right now), I'm sure that jewlery is gone for a can of formula.
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