Salt: A World History

by Mark Kurlansky

Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.

SALT PRESERVES. UNTIL modern times it provided the principal way to preserve food. Egyptians used salt to make mummies. This ability to preserve, to protect against decay, as well as to sustain life, has given salt a broad metaphorical importance—what

continent, once human beings began cultivating crops, they began looking for salt to add to their diet. How they learned of this need is a mystery.

The Chinese, the Romans, the French, the Venetians, the Hapsburgs, and numerous other governments taxed it to raise money for wars. Soldiers and sometimes workers were paid in salt. It was often used as money.

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 on foreign oil.

In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value.

China is the oldest literate society still in existence, and its 4,000 years of written history begin as a history of inventions.

It is no longer clear when legends were made into men and when living historic figures were turned into legends.

Chinese governments for centuries had seen salt as a source of state revenue.

“A country is never as poor as when it seems filled with riches.”

The Chinese had invented gunpowder by isolating saltpeter, potassium nitrate. The Egyptians found a salt that, though they could not have expressed it in these terms, is a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and sodium carbonate with a small amount of sodium chloride.

Roman government did not maintain a monopoly on salt sales as did the Chinese, but it did not hesitate to control salt prices when it seemed necessary.

Salt was served at the table, in a simple seashell at a plebeian’s table or in an ornate

Salt was the key to a policy that made Venice the dominant commercial force of southern Europe.

Under English law the penalty for eating meat on Friday was hanging.

Others besides the Basques caught cod in the Middle Ages—the fishermen of the British Isles, Scandinavia, Holland, Brittany, and the French Atlantic—but the Basques brought back huge quantities of salted cod. The Bretons began to suspect that the Basques had found some cod land across the sea. By the early fifteenth century, Icelanders saw Basque ships sailing west past their island. Did the Basques reach North America before John Cabot’s 1497 voyage and the age of exploration?

It was considered rude, sometimes even unlucky, to touch salt with the fingers. Salt was taken from the cellar on the tip of a knife and a small pile put on the diner’s plate.

Determined to make butter more than a luxury for a rural elite, northern Europeans consistently tried to preserve it in salt. But getting good, properly preserved butter remained a problem until refrigeration was invented. In fact, the first experiments in refrigeration were not with fish or meat but with everyone’s favorite luxury—butter.

Ketchup became a tomato sauce, originally called “tomato ketchup” in America, which is appropriate since the tomato is an American plant, brought to Europe by Hernán Cortés, embraced in the Mediterranean, and regarded with great suspicion in the North. The first known recipe for “tomato ketchup” was by a New Jersey resident.

In the eighteenth century, life in England began to change. England experienced an extremely favorable shift in climate that allowed longer growing seasons and cheaper food. With food prices lowered, many English farms failed. Failed farms in turn created a workforce for industry.

The English, before anyone else, believed industry was the answer to all problems.

Agro-industry, which abandoned the goal of producing the best food and strived to produce the most per a...

STUDYING A ROAD map of almost anywhere in North America, noting the whimsical nongeometric pattern of the secondary roads, the local roads, the map reader could reasonably assume that the towns were placed and interconnected haphazardly without any scheme or design. That is because the roads are simply widened footpaths and trails, and these trails were originally cut by animals looking for salt.

This was very interesting! The local roads we have today were originally trails that were cut by animals in search of saltwater

A salt lick near Lake Erie had a wide road made by buffalo, and the town started there was named Buffalo, New York.

That’s how the name Buffalo came about!

It may be an exaggeration to claim that the great Mayan civilization rose and fell over salt. However, it rose by controlling salt production and prospered on the ability to trade salt, flourishing in spite of constant warfare over control of salt sources.

THE WORD CHEMISTRY was first used in the early 1600s, although the science was not considered an independent field of research until the end of the century.

Long before it was called geology, a number of geological debates persisted. One of them was on the origin of salt. Was a giant bed of salt at the bottom of the sea keeping ocean water salted? Or, as some believed, did the tremendous pressure at great depths so squeeze water that it turned salty? Another theory held that salt did not come from the ocean at all, but that salt on earth was carried to sea by rivers.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the raging geologic debate pitted neptunism against plutonism. The neptunists, led by German mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner, believed that the source of all bedrock was a common ancient sea.