Worth their salt......................

     Today, thousands of years of coveting, fighting over, hoarding, taxing, and searching for salt appear picturesque and slightly foolish.  The seventeenth-century British leaders who spoke with urgency about the dangerous national dependence on French sea salt seem somehow more comic than contemporary leaders concerned with a dependence of foreign oil.  In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value.
     The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories.  But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.

-Mark Kurlansky,  Salt:  A World History