I'm printing booklets today and the only time I get out is to go and
pick up fresh supplies of paper and toner. There isn't much natural history
on the table in the Queens Drive Fish and Chip restaurant in Ossett, apart
from:
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Salt from deposits derived from an ancient
dying sea.
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White pepper: the berry
of a tropical vine.
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Vinegar: made from malted barley with the
aid of the 'mother'; a living layer of bacteria and yeast.
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Demerara sugar from the cane fields of Guyanna
or the Caribbean.
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Tomato sauce: the tomato plant, a relative
of deadly nightshade, originated in the Andes. The name is probably
from the Aztec word Náhuatl.
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Steel: iron (an element which forms when a
star goes supernova) makes up 5% of the Earth's surface
and most of its core.
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China clay or kaolin, used in the manufacture
of ceramics, is the product of the chemical weathering of the
feldspar crystals found in granite. Molten granite batholiths
form at the roots of fold mountains so this cruette was a long,
long time in the making: the mountains must be stripped away
by millions of years of erosion before the (now cooled) underlying
granite is exposed to weathering. 
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Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk
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