Salt

I am a qualified Nutritionist and Naturopath and I appreciate reading books that are rich in meaningful information. I bought this book because I had increasingly noted that the concerns we have about table salt are unfounded. So I decided to do some research. To get a good handle on salt, I needed to go back in time (hence this book) to understand the use of salt throughout history, and then relate that to more recent studies that were conducted.

There were as many studies claiming salts benefits and there are many claiming salt is bad. So that did not give me any confidence that everyone was singing from the same hymn sheet. Whenever I see conflicting study outcomes, I immediately look to see whether we are comparing apples with apples, and we were not. You see, there are actually 3 types of salt and one is very good and two are not so good. Most studies did not even point this out, or realised that we humans eat three very different types of salt. So let me try to make sense of this:

I have certainly come to the conclusion that many others have already come to, that the benefits of eating generous amounts of the right salt to suit one’s taste is justified, and much better than being paranoid and limiting my intake. But we need to choose the right salt. What I did learn was that ocean salt is about 85% Sodium Chloride and the remaining 15% is this wonderful suite of over 84 minerals. The thing is, the salt processors remove the 15% part which is the really valuable portion, and sell it as Magnesium Oil. Once you understand that there are three types of salt (1) pure ocean salt (2) ocean salt with the 15% minerals removed and (3) tables salt being pure sodium chloride plus added free-flowing additives and iodine, then it all become very clear. If you eat the pure 100% sea salt you can have as much as you like (of course being sensible) whilst the others (#2 & 3) should be restricted.

The 'bottom line' is that many people are not getting enough salt which causes dehydration, and this insufficiency of water in the human body has all sort of consequences such as thicker blood (ie blood with high viscosity) and reduced metabolic function caused by low body fluid levels. This can have all sorts of consequences such as fatigue, increased colds and flu's, and hundreds of other ailments as the body struggles to move fluid around efficiently. The old line that salt is high in sodium and sodium increases blood pressure is a very simplistic explanation and one wonders how the population was ever duped into believing it. Years ago before we had refrigeration we would store our meats in barrels of salt and we ended up consuming a lot of salt. Whilst not suggesting we go back to those times, I would suggest that for most healthy people that 5-8 grams of salt per day for an adult is fine and will not increase blood pressure. Only those on salt-restricted diets need to concerned about limiting salt.

I have written a short paper about Salt and Magnesium Oil and some readers may like to download it to help understand the benefits of salt. You can download it here: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B4XGKNybHkRkb1lZT2N3VTgyXzQ&usp=sharing

And seemingly as long as salt has been around. Ok Im being dramatic but it was a long one. Very detailed. If youre a foodie and love finding out the origin and history of things ,then this book is for you. You will know all there is to know about salt after this.

I could not put this book down! From the fermented fish sauce of Roman times (YUCK!) to the modern mining of salt domes, I was fascinated by every detail in this book. One of the most striking things to me is that there were so many similarities between the modern world and the ancient: Insurance, contracts, protectionism, bribes, marketing strategies, it's all there.

I highly recommend this book. I learned a lot and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Interesting read. Who would have thought that a book entitled "Salt" would have so much interesting history? Have actually read twice and everyone I have given this too is surprised at how much they enjoyed it. Easy read and informative.

"Salt" takes the reader through thousands of years of human cultural and scientific development, all-the-while making it interesting and accessible. The common character throughout is ordinary table salt, which up until 100 years ago, played a far more important role in human society and economics. Through the use of this everyday material, Kurlansky takes us on a tour that from ancient China and Rome, to Britain's rule of India, into the slave operated salt mines of Europe, down to Avery Island during the American Civil War (and the creation of Tabasco Sauce); all with a focus on the cuisines of those places and times. A long book that I was sorry to finish.

Salt may be the single most important substance in the world after oxygen and water, and certainly one of the most expensive up to about a hundred years ago! This is a fascinating, well researched and readable history of salt production, its uses and abuses. Enjoy!

I'm occasionally scolded for using too much salt. SALT: A WORLD HISTORY simply reinforces the fact that NaCl has been in the human diet for millennia. So, get off my back already. If God hadn't wanted me to eat the stuff, he wouldn't have given me kidneys.
Besides being a narrative of how salt has been harvested through the ages, either by brine evaporation or the mining of rock salt, SALT is also a history of its link to food preservation and preparation and governments. Whether it be cod, cheese, herring, ham, beef, anchovies, butter, Tabasco sauce, sauerkraut, pickles, ketchup, or "1000-year-old" eggs, salt makes it happen. And successive bureaucracies over the centuries have harnessed the production, sale and shipment of salt for the enrichment of national coffers through monopolies and taxation schemes, some of them disastrously misguided. Perhaps most illustrative of the latter is the chapter describing Britain's curtailment of indigenous salt production in India during the Raj period. This imperial policy, designed to protect the domestic English salt industry, was of such detriment to large segments of the Indian population that it was the issue that sparked Gandhi's campaign of civil disobedience, ultimately leading to that colony's independence.
I would award five stars except for two statements made by author Mark Kurlansky in his chapter about salt and the American Civil War. These assertions have trivial impact on the book as a whole, but are so sloppy as to make me wonder about the accuracy of his interpretation of more relevant facts.
Regarding Confederate general George Pickett, who received a pouch of precious salt as a wedding gift: "... (he) later reached the most northerly point of any Confederate in combat when he ... led a ruinous charge up a sloping Pennsylvania field - the climax of the Battle of Gettysburg." The author is referring, of course, to Pickett's Charge, and perhaps he was speaking figuratively. While it is fact that one of his brigades briefly breached the Union line at Bloody Angle, it was that unit's commander, Brigadier General Louis Armistead, who was mortally wounded inside the Union position and was arguably the one who led the charge. Pickett wasn't in front on that one. Also, the site of that valiant effort was south of the town of Gettysburg, which had been occupied by the Confederates two days previous.
Further on, Kurlansky trips when describing the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee as "a standoff". Really? While Federal forces under Ulysses Grant took a shellacking on the first day of the battle, they rallied on the second to drive the Confederates into a full-scale retreat from the battlefield. Moreover, Albert Sidney Johnston, who began Shiloh commanding the Confederate forces and was perhaps the South's most respected general at the time, was killed. Though casualties were roughly the same on both sides, my scorecard has this as a Northern win.
But, I digress.
SALT is one of those books about something we take for granted that captivates the reader with useless but fun facts. Did you know that pastrami (salted beef) is of Romanian origin, that Laplanders drink salted coffee, that a Swedish favorite is salted licorice candy, that 51% of U.S. salt use is to de-ice roads, or that there's a working salt mine 1,200 feet below Detroit?
Curiously, though, Kurlansky says not one word about that most mystical of culinary inventions, salt on french fries - uh, sorry, "freedom" fries. What was he thinking?

Interesting story about the only mineral we eat. There are salt mines known from prehistoric times to modern day all over the world. Wars have been fought over them, and fortunes made and lost. Learned a lot.

I love history, science and the quirky arcane. This book has all three, nicely blended. Rich details of time and place abound. There are numerous recipes of more intellectual than culinary interest, for most of us would think them oversalted. My favorite is Cato's smoked ham, from 200 B.C.

This book is fascinating. The history of salt is really integral with the history of the world in so many ways. This purchase was my third copy of the book. I've recommended it to others. I've loaned it others -- and twice I never got it back.

Fascinating for people who are interested in the history of food in general, and the origins of salt. I didn't know that salt, taken for granted in western culture today, was such a critical item for survival

Unlike oil, salt and water are reusable and also among the most abundant elements on earth. There is no shortage of either one to last humanity through eternity. Except without energy, we just can't make good use of them. This has been the struggle throughout human history until about 100 years ago.

Mark Kurlansky's book, Salt: a World History, tells the world's history from the angle of salt and I will never view this commodity substance the same.

Earth has a huge amount of salt. Coastal places clearly have sea water. Inland areas usually have salt mines, sometime as big as a mountain, or salt lakes. Then there are brine springs all around the world. To extract salt from them, we need energy: to dig, to evaporate, to distribute. Historical major saltworks were usually at the location where all three were together: free flowing brine spring, big mountain of rock salt, or long coast lines; forest, coal mine, natural gas, or good weather for solar energy; and river, canal, or sea ports. All those places became major cities which, in turn, shaped most of our history.

Until canning and refrigeration, salting was the only way to preserve food: meat, fish, dairy, and vegetables. Therefore it became the element for survival. Without salt, people could not preserve food and would starve when there was no harvest or the weather turned bad. Salt also won or lost wars. Soldiers needed food to fight; food needed salt. No salt, no rations, no soldiers, no winning. Surprising number of wars were decided by the control of salt. For the US civil war, Union controlled salt better than Confederacy and eventually won.

Many of my favorite foods: smoked salmon, ham, bacon, kimchi, thousand-year egg, etc. came from the old days when salting foods was an everyday business. I learned that Chinese prefer to cook with already salted ingredients: soy sauce, dou-ban, dou-shi, zai-cai, etc. instead of sprinkling salt directly. I also learned how salt makes meat tender by breaking down the protein. This explains the working of curing meat, also why brining chicken makes them tasty.

With cheap energy, salt will be the easiest problem to solve. And the solution is right in front of us: nuclear. Almost all nuclear plants require cooling and what better to use than sea water? Cooling with sea water is the same as heating them up, salt just comes out of that process.

I cannot say this book is a page turner and all those ancient recipes became boring at the end. It surprised me many times with fresh angles and factoids unknown to me. Salt shaped much of human histories and has been largely forgotten, just like many of those cities used to thrive with saltworks. Next time I go to ChengDu, I would have a different perspective for the city.

Salt is a product so common and easily available that it's easy to forget that it was a precious and scarce commodity not so long ago. The author presents a great work of historic research about salt and its role in the development of civilization around the world. Highly recommended.

Who knew that salt provided many a "casus belli" in history, or that the word "salary" derives from it? What today is a forgettable commodity on everyone's table and is standard staple in the lowliest store was once a crucial food preservative whose sources were something for warring people to fight over.

The history of salt could easily make a "beat your subject to death" article in the New Yorker, but to this reader, a whole book full of salted history was overkill. I only read it because my book group recommended it.

If I expected to live another 50 years and had exhausted all the other unread fascinating book titles piling up on my night table, I wouldn't mind at all this entertaining, albeit now irrelevant, history.

So, if you like trivia or, more kindly, if you lack new subjects for small talk conversations, this is the book for you.

Boy this is very interesting. This book really digs in to salt and yet keeps it interesting. Even gets into the history of Natural Gas that is linked to salt. I'm glad I read it. I think I may read it again because there is a lot to take in.

This book is crammed full of very interesting information, and like Cod, Kurlansky causes the reader to reflect on the history of the world in very practical, logical and interesting economic terms, rather than in terms of religion, politics and crazy warmongers. But it is not spellbinding reading, and it is really, really long. Who knew there was that much history to salt?

An interesting perspective of the impact that the salt trade has had on history.
Towards the end of the book I became aware of similarities with another book on the history of Cod fish. Only after the book was finished that I discovered that it was by the same author.

very interesting history, sociological review of salt. I loved it. Someone lent it to me, and I found myself wanting to highlight it, so I had to get my own copy. Read only if you like to know stuff about things.

Salt is one of those commonplace things, like air, that you never notice till you don't have any. This book is a comprehensive history of how civilizations grew and flourished because of deposits of salt. If you're a history buff, you'll find this fascinating, as it gives a whole new twist on cultures from ancient times through today, including that a lot of Civil War battles were fought over lowly salt. Who knew? If you're not a history buff, you just may be after reading this. Enjoy.

I urge considering this book no matter if your interests are culinary, historical, cultural or economic. This is a well written and researched take on the most fundamental element of human need, besides water. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

This is a fascinating account of how salt has influenced history. Theexploration for sources of salt in the ancient world to it 's exploitation in the 19 th and 20th centuries is very interesting. I would recommend this book got all. Indeed, I have ordered and will read kurlanky's book on cod, based on my experience with"Salt."

Few people today realize how essential salt was to our survival for thousands of years. Before canning and refrigeration, it was the primary way we preserved food. This kind of understanding, thanks to a new crop of writers like Kurlansky, is what should be taught in school rather than rote memorization of dates. Interesting history books such as Salt truly have the ability to give people new perspectives on how the world was shaped. Page after page brought me fascinating insights. For those interested in just how much salt was worth, I would recommend learning more about West Africa in The Golden Trade of the Moors which actually goes all the way back to Carthage.