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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.
In both Islam and Judaism, salt seals a bargain because it is immutable. Indian troops pledged their loyalty to the British with salt. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans included salt in sacrifices and offerings, and they invoked gods with salt and water, which is thought to be the origin of Christian holy water.
Animals get the salt they need by finding brine springs, brackish water, rock salt, any natural salt available for licking. The licks, found throughout the continent, were often a flat area of several acres of barren, whitish brown or whitish gray earth. Deep holes, almost caves, were formed by the constant licking. The lick at the end of the road, because it had a salt supply, was a suitable place for a settlement. Villages were built at the licks. A salt lick near Lake Erie had a wide road made by buffalo, and the town started there was named Buffalo, New York.
On March 5, 1931, Lord Irwin signed the Gandhi-Irwin pact, ending the salt campaign. Indians living on the coast were to be permitted to collect salt for their own use only. Political prisoners were released. A round table conference was scheduled in London to discuss British administration in India. And all civil disobedience was to be stopped. It was considered a compromise. To some, the British had won on most points, but Gandhi was pleased because he thought that for the first time England and India were talking as equal partners rather than master and subject.
Gandhi had emerged as the leading voice of Indian aspirations, and the Indian National Congress had become the primary organization of the independence movement. In 1947, India became independent, and five months later Gandhi was assassinated by a fellow Hindu who mistakenly interpreted his efforts to make peace with Muslims as part of a plan to favor them.
Many of the workers are from the lowest caste and are hopelessly in debt to the salt producers. The glare of the salt in the dry-season sunlight renders many of the salt workers permanently color-blind. And they complain that when they die, their bodies cannot be properly cremated because they are impregnated with salt.
SOME 3,000 YEARS ago, wanting a capital in the commanding heights of the Judean hills, David conquered the fortress of Zion and built Jerusalem.
The minerals in the Dead Sea give a strange buoyancy that entices tourists for brief dips. The sea is oily on the skin and doesn’t feel like water. This is brine that will float more than an egg. After wading in a few feet, a human body pops to the surface, almost above the water, as though lying on an air-filled float. It is a most comfortable mattress, perfectly conforming to every part of the back—what a waterbed was supposed to be.
The sea recedes from Ein Gedi about fifty yards a year. In the first century A.D., Pliny described the now 45-by-11 mile body as being 100 miles by 75 miles.
A Turks and Caicos designer drew a crest that included Salt Cay saltworks with salt rakers in the foreground and piles of salt. Back in England, it was the era of Arctic exploration, and, not knowing where the Turks and Caicos was, the English designer assumed the little white domes were igloos. And so he drew doors on each one. And this scene of salt piles with doors remained the official crest of the colony for almost 100 years, until replaced in 1968 by a crest featuring a flamingo.
Mostly he remembers the weight of the sacks. The pay? “Oh, there was no pay. They paid us nothing. The big company kept all the money.”
“Of course you could buy some food for a shilling. There was rain in those days, and they could use the land. Grew corn and beans and cucumbers.” Today, the land is too dry for such gardens. With no salt, little work, and less agriculture, the aged belongers live on government assistance. The Turks and Caicos is still a British colony.
THE UNITED STATES is both the largest salt producer and the largest salt consumer. It produces over 40 million metric tons of salt a year, which earns more than $1 billion in sales revenue.
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.
Then, too, many people do not like Morton’s idea of making all salt the same. Uniformity was a remarkable innovation in its day, but it was so successful that today consumers seem to be excited by any salt that is different.
