Setting the Table

Put down this book for a moment and count what is on your table.

A plate. A fork, probably, and a knife beside it. A glass. Salt, if you are lucky, in a small dish nobody ever thinks about. Perhaps a candle, though more likely a lamp. A cloth, or the bare wood.

Now follow the salt. Before it reached the dish it sat in a cardboard drum on a shelf in a shop, and before that on a pallet in a warehouse, and before that in the back of a lorry, and before that it was hauled up a shaft somewhere in Saxony-Anhalt, near Bernburg on the Saale as likely as anywhere, from a seam laid down by a sea that dried out two hundred and fifty million years ago. Between the seam and your table are a mine, a mill, a chemical works, a printer, a bag, a road, a diesel engine, a shop, and several thousand people you will never meet. Behind the fork lies a steel mill. Behind the plate lies a kiln that burns hotter than any fire you have ever stood beside. Behind the glass lies a furnace hotter still. Every object on the table is the last link of a chain some ten thousand hands long, and not one of those hands is yours.