At the head of the pack is Austin, where Apple recently announced a large expansion, and Salt Lake City, No. 2 on our big cities list, which is a major destination for expansion for Silicon Valley firms such as Adobe, Twitter and Electronic Arts.

MSN: The best cities for jobs

These days my pack is filled with a small container of olive oil, dried herbs, salt and pepper and fresh fruit rather than packets of dehydrated beans and rice or bags of quick-cooking oatmeal flavored with desiccated strawberries.

NPR: Forget The Granola: Camp Cooking Goes Gourmet

By contrast, all-natural salts--like the pink lava salt chef Walter Manzke throws on raw tuna at Bouchee , a Carmel, Calif. restaurant--pack a mineral-rich wallop, unadulterated by iodine or anticaking ingredients with unpleasant names like sodium ferrocyanide.

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