These things fall into two categories—stuff that you buy because the quality is unquestionably higher than alternatives, and stuff that may or may not be a little bit better than alternatives but that you have strong, minimally-rational feelings about.

I find the second category more fun to talk about, so I offer up the fact that this is a C&H [sugar, US based] house. Once my wife brought home some other sugar, and I complained until the bag was gone.

I’m neither a writer nor a scientist, but there’s a copy of this on my bookshelf and I wish I could lend it to you: Deadly Doses: The Writer’s Guide to Poisons