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Chloride is essential for digestion and in respiration. Without sodium, which the body cannot manufacture, the body would be unable to transport nutrients or oxygen, transmit nerve impulses, or move muscles, including the heart. An adult human being contains about 250 grams of salt, which would fill three or four salt-shakers, but is constantly losing it through bodily functions. It is essential to replace this lost salt.
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.
In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value. The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.
Proteins unwind when exposed to heat, and they do the same when exposed to salt. So salting has an effect resembling cooking.
It is a sad fate for a people to be defined for posterity by their enemies.
At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression “worth his salt” or “earning his salt.” In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.
THE ROMANS SALTED their greens, believing this to counteract the natural bitterness, which is the origin of the word salad, salted.
In sixteenth-century Hungary, with an economy based on the export of food, there were only four important food imports: spices, wine, herring, and salt. Much of the export of food depended on the import of salt. Pig fat was a staple for both eating and preserving other food. From the seventeenth century on, fat was included in wages. A high-fat diet was considered a sign of wealth, and city people luxuriated in more fat than peasants.
Anglo Saxons called a saltworks a wich, and any place in England where the name ends in “wich” at one time produced salt.
Ketchup derives its name from the Indonesian fish and soy sauce kecap ikan. The names of several other Indonesian sauces also include the word kecap, pronounced KETCHUP, which means a base of dark, thick soy sauce. Why would English garum have an Indonesian name? Because the English, starting with the medieval spice trade, looked to Asia for seasoning.
Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, the Comte de Mirabeau, the man who had defied Louis XVI by opening the National Assembly, said, “In the final analysis, the people will judge the revolution by this fact alone—does it take more or less money? Are they better off? Do they have more work? And is that work better paid?”
Rouelle, a member of the French Royal Academy of Sciences, wrote a definition of a salt that has endured. He said that a salt was any substance caused by the reaction of an acid and a base. For a long time, the existence of acids and bases had been known but little understood. Acids were sour tasting and had the ability to dissolve metal. Bases felt soapy. But Rouelle understood that an acid and a base have a natural affinity for each other because nature seeks completion and, as with all good couples, acids and bases make each other more complete. Acids search for an electron that they lack,
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It turned out that salt was a microcosm for one of the oldest concepts of nature and the order of the universe. From the fourth-century-B.C. Chinese belief in the forces of yin and yang, to most of the world’s religions, to modern science, to the basic principles of cooking, there has always been a belief that two opposing forces find completion—one receiving a missing part and the other shedding an extra one. A salt is a small but perfect thing.
Fast freezing had at last made the unsalted fish people wanted, available to everyone, even far inland. Soon fishing vessels, instead of salting their catch at sea, were freezing it on board. Most salted foods became delicacies instead of necessities.
On March 2, 1930, Gandhi wrote to Lord Irwin, viceroy of India: If you cannot see your way to deal with these evils and my letter makes no appeal to your heart, then on the twelfth day of this month I shall proceed with such co-workers of the ashram as I can take, to disregard the provisions of the salt laws. I regard this tax to be the most iniquitous of all from the poor man’s standpoint. As the independence movement is essentially for the poorest in the land, the beginning will be made with this evil. The wonder is that we have submitted to the cruel monopoly for so long.
Pliny wrote that “the Dead Sea produces only bitumen.” This natural asphalt was valued for caulking ships and led the Romans to name the sea Asphaltites Lacus, Asphalt Lake. Its water is 26 percent dissolved minerals, 99 percent of which are salts. This concentration is striking when compared to the ocean’s typical mineral concentration of about 3 percent.
Contemporary geologists still argue conflicting theories of why the Dead Sea is so salty. According to the most widely accepted of them, 5 million years ago the Dead Sea was connected to the Mediterranean near the current port of Haifa. A geologic shift caused the Galilee Heights to push up, and these newly formed mountains cut off the Mediterranean from the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea no longer received enough water to keep up with the rate of solar evaporation, and it began to get saltier. This theory would explain why the sea is becoming more concentrated, slowly evaporating like a huge salt
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The Yangtze, the 3,700-mile waterway from the Tibetan mountains to the port of Shanghai, the third-longest river in the world, divides China into its north and south, and yet, until the 1949 Communist victory, China had so little transportation infrastructure that there was not a single bridge crossing it.
Pants wear out, but a good jacket lasts forever.
salt and sugar are ingredients in most industrial snack food.
SALT CONSUMPTION IS declining in most of the world. The average twentieth-century European consumed half as much salt as the average nineteenth-century European.
It is easy to be romantic about the vanished Caribbean salt trade, but in truth it was similar to the history of sugarcane on other islands. Salt was built on slavery, and many thought that abolition in 1836 would mean the end of salt. But the salt merchants survived for a time because they could still get workers for near slave wages. There was no other work.
THE UNITED STATES is both the largest salt producer and the largest salt consumer.
But little of this is table salt. In the United States, only 8 percent of salt production is for food. The largest single use of American salt, 51 percent, is for deicing roads.
Because of the sealing ability of salt, it has also occurred to engineers that salt mines might be the safest place to bury nuclear waste.
AFTER THOUSANDS OF years of struggle to make salt white and of even grain, affluent people will now pay more for salts that are odd shapes and colors.
Gray salts, black salts, salts with any visible impurities are sought out and marketed for their colors, even though the tint usually means the presence of dirt. Like the peasants in Sichuan, many consumers distrust modern factory salt. They would rather have a little mud than iodine, magnesium carbonate, calcium silicate, or other additives, some of which are merely imagined.
