Mark Kurlansky. I tried to read his Basque History of the World but didn't get more than a page into it, but I don't remember for certain whether I blamed that on the book or on me. This was great and maybe I should try again about Basques and cod. In Salt, the third major element in that triangular relationship is expanded upon.
Also, I'm rereading Wide Sargasso Sea, and it's nearly a new read because I remember absolutely nothing from it--the narrator changes from Antoinette Cosway/Bertha Mason to her unnamed but Mr. Rochester-y husband less than half-way through? All I remembered was violence and Antoinette-Bertha. Anyway, when Antoinette taunts another child, one of her insults is that the other girl eats salt fish. Kurlansky writes of how dependent upon such provisions was the slave trade.
Kurlansky says that salt is the only rock we eat. Perhaps it's the only one we eat separately, not dissolved in other foods, because vegetables and meat contain minerals, which are rock, right? I think. I was glad to have more background on Gandhi and Indian freedom, and how interesting that the third-longest river in the world (the Yangtzee), 3700 miles long, had no bridge across it until after 1949, and he even made the genesis of Tabasco interesting.
He alleges that "sterling" derives from a word meaning "easterner"--I don't have the book with me, Dutch or German along the lines of "osterling"--by way of the Hanseatic League and that guild's assurance of quality. Wikipedia--which I am more and more inclined to take as gospel in a way I hope James Surowiecki (The Wisdom of Crowds), would approve--agrees, with reservations.
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Bookclub two days later (Thursdays are the Other one, not the neighborhood one) had the least book-oriented conversation of my experience. At one point I tried to segue from someone's trip to Israel to the book by asking her if she swam in the Dead Sea (yes, and her experience made a good story), but it didn't work. Didn't anyone like the history? Or how China invented percussion drilling and techniques the West wouldn't credit itself with for a thousand years? Or how Kurlansky skillfully wrote the new, all-inclusive history, with, e.g., a contextual aside about Columbus and genocide that acknowledged the fact without being either flagellatory or apologetic?
I brought two different seaweed salads from Wild Oats, because of salt and because of Wide Sargasso Sea.