Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Peri... Book

Before it became fashionable to think about what's on your plate, this author wrote a brilliant, extensively researched book in a trope it's as unforgettable as your phone number. Take the most simple meal you can imagine - one composed of 9 ingredients like salt or butter that you never think about on their own - and explain in depth each element.

Visser uses each ingredient to burrow into its importance to a dizzying number of cultures, to construct a chapter-length world with that ingredient at the epicenter, and to undercover nerdily amazing factoids.

Two of every dozen factoids stick with the reader, and this reader found that with so many facts and cultures, it's tough to read more than a page at a time without being overloaded. Still, when information comes as densely packed as the original slang for Westerners in Japan was "butter-stinkers," 1/4 of Detroit sits on top of abandoned salt mines and the reason our parents threw rice at weddings, it's worth reading even a page at a time.