Salt: A World History By Mark Kurlansky

 Salt: A World History 

By Mark Kurlansky

Mark Kurlansky is an American journalist and writer born in Hartford Connecticut on December 7th, 1948. He attended and graduated in 1970 from Butler University, with a BA in theater. After graduation, he headed off to New York and worked mostly as a playwright with several off-off-Broadway productions (this means theaters with fewer than a 100 seats), and winning the 1972 Earplay Award for best radio play of the year. He worked several other jobs during this time: commercial fisherman, dock worker, paralegal, cook, pastry chef, and playwright in residence at Brooklyn College. In 1976 he decided to try his hand at journalism and ended up working as a correspondent in Western Europe for the Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, and eventually the International Herald Tribune based out of Paris. In 1982 he moved to Mexico, still practicing journalism. In 1992 he wrote his first book A Continent of Islands, which was a nonfiction work about the nations and peoples of the Caribbean. It was the first of many nonfiction books written by Mark Kurlansky about the history and peoples of regions, like his 1999 work The Basque History of the World. However, a lot of his other works such as his 1997 book Cod focus on the history of food. Salt: A World History was published in 2003 by Penguin Publishing and won a Pluma Plata award; it's also the topic of this week's review. A quick note, our regular editor won’t be joining us today, please welcome our guest editor Mike. 

So salt, it’s the only rock we eat and is craved by many of our fellow creatures; for example, a lot of the early roads first cut through North America followed game trails to salt licks. At the time of the book’s publication, the US was the world's biggest salt producer at 40 million metric tons a year. It was overtaken in 2012 by the People's Republic of China, which now produces about 62 million metric tons annually. The Chinese are also the world's biggest consumers of salt (literally) although efforts through education have led the average Chinese consumer to reduce their salt intake. This decline in salt consumption is reflected across the entire world; for example, in the US only 8% of the salt we produce is meant for human consumption (Did this percentage share used to be higher in the past? Or has the consumption of table salt in the US declined in per capita terms? {Yes to both}). Over half of our current salt production is used for de-icing roads. Over in Europe, the amount of salt in people's diets has fallen in half since the 19th century. While we still eat a lot of salt and most experts would tell us that we're eating to much, salt consumption across the world is on a steady tick downwards; while you still need a certain amount of salt in your diet, the odds are likely you could stand to eat less of it and will eat less in the future. While salts of various kinds still have a wide variety of industrial uses, it does seem like a food item fated to be pushed increasingly to the edge of the table. However, there was once a time when salt was not just a vital and sought-after part of everyone's diet, but an item of national security, where being dependent on another nation for salt could spell ruin and despair. Why was that? How did different governments deal with that and how was salt used across the ages?, Finally, why has there been a dramatic reduction of salt use in the last century? Well, let's discuss that.

As you might have guessed, Mr. Kurlansky takes us on a tour of the history of salt, which stretches back into prehistory. Hunter-gatherer societies used salt, but humanity’s first large-scale attempts at making salt didn’t arise until after we settled down and started farming.  Once we became farmers who were attached to a single location, we found ourselves with a problem that most nomadic groups don't have: How do we preserve our food through winter, or whatever the equivalent season is where you can't grow new crops, so we can make it to spring and plant new crops? The answer we came up with was salt. Salt was one of our first methods of keeping food from spoiling and it was far and away the most popular and widespread answer. Salt can be used to preserve both meat and vegetables for long periods and can be used for large amounts of food. In some cases, salt even enhances the taste of the food in question. Salt can even be used to preserve butter and is vital in making food products like cheese. Back in the days before supermarkets and high-speed travel, the ability to keep food from spoiling for months was the difference between life and death; thus, salt became a necessary and treasured commodity. 

While images of salt mines may be dancing in your head right now, interestingly enough that's not where we got most of our salt. Instead, most of it came from either the sea or brine ponds along the coast. At first, we would simply get water from these ponds or the sea and boil it away in pots. However, it was soon noted that solar evaporation created better quality salt (Does the author give any details about why this is? I am curious {Grain and crystal size are more uniform and tend to be smaller, for most of human history people though smaller grains were better}). This led to people building artificial brine ponds accompanied by a series of ponds where water would become increasingly salty, making it easier to extract the salt. This could get a bit labor-intensive, however, (Was this universally labor-intensive or did some civilizations figure out to make this process easier? {It remains labor-intensive until automation}) and soon across the world salt works were the concern of the state. There were also of course the proverbial salt mines where salt was dug up from underground and those were even more labor-intensive. Organizing that extensive labor force and getting salt from the mine or the salt work, and then from the salt work to the consumer became a state-level concern. So salt became a driving force in creating not just states but states that were centralized and strong enough to maintain the trade networks and keep the labor organized, paid, and fed.

     This is most clearly illustrated in China where salt (along with iron) became a state monopoly, a deeply reviled and hated monopoly that would cause intense debate across centuries in Chinese society. Confucianists, for example, would gain public support by arguing against it and saying that it led to the state being in direct conflict with its people which made it bad policy. Chinese folklore would lionize and make heroes out of smugglers and rogues who defied the monopoly and sold illegal non-government salt. Rebellions would use the salt monopoly as a rallying cry, but Chinese states would be perpetually seduced by the mass profits that could financially power a state-level military all on its own. Nor was China the only state to succumb to this lure -  France had the hated gabelle, a series of regional-level salt taxes, with each region of France paying a different amount. The French found a way to make an even more loathed system than the Chinese by not only making it arbitrary but by pairing it with salt duties. The Sel Du Devoir at times required every French subject over the age of 8 to purchase 15 pounds of salt a year at mandated high government prices. You were also forbidden from using any of that 15 pounds to make salt products like hams, fish, or cheese to keep from competing with government-appointed butchers and the like (The pious and faithful French subject was only allowed to gather the salt into a pile and stare at it while cursing the hated English for their perfidy). This honestly really helps me grasp why the French were so rebellious as a people and resisted centralized authority. The British example in India is so notorious that when the founding fathers discussed salt taxes it was denounced as imperial-style tyranny. Of course, British salt policy in its colonies later grew so oppressive that Gandhi was able to use it as a rallying cry to jump-start his nonviolent independence movement. 

On the other hand, not every nation took such a heavy-handed approach - Ancient Egypt was fairly liberal when it came to salt, with the Pharaohs preferring to focus their energy on dominating the export market for salted fish.  Indeed, salted fish actually made them more money than raw salt did according to documents that archaeologists would find. Nor was every salt tax violently resisted or hated - Venice had a salt subsidy in addition to paying merchants to import salt. Between the salt subsidy and the fact that the Byzantine Empire allowed Venice to move goods from their ports completely duty and tax-free, Venetian traders were allowed to undercut their competitors on... Everything else. Fast forward to the United States where a salt tax actually paid for a number of the New England canals connecting the cities and ports of New England to the Great Lakes. In fact, the American salt tax for the canals is the only popular salt tax I can find on record, proving that even Americans will accept and even cheer on a tax if they can see some tangible material benefit from it like shiny new infrastructure (The pretzel-shaped interchanges on interstate highways being a subconscious manifestation of this link between salt and popular infrastructure).

Mr. Kurlansky doesn't just take a look at how salt powered the growth of state power and its relationship to government policy; he also looks at how salt was used on different foods and in different times and places. Whether it's the Roman fish sauce garum, or how salt made the massive cod and herring industry not just possible but so profitable that nations would go to war to possess far-off cod fishing waters. Salt also played a role in how different meats were prepared and became widespread from ham to corned beef. What really intrigued me was just how many sauces have their roots in salt: Tabasco sauce, soy sauce, and even ketchup. I had no idea going into this book that ketchup started out as a sauce made up of anchovies, salt, and various herbs and spices; Tomato ketchup wouldn't take over as the main type of ketchup until the 1800s (I’m guessing, however, that cats were never the main ingredient of catsup {As far as I can tell no}). Even the interplay of sugar and salt is discussed in this book. Mr. Kurlansky also includes a number of recipes in the book so folks can see just how much salt affects things. The book also covers the downfall of salt, as refrigeration became possible year-round and canning was invented. Canned meats and vegetables first replaced salted foods as military rations because they would keep longer and were easier to carry, but these new preservation methods would spread to the civilian world quickly enough. The rise of chemistry as science also led to the discovery of more diverse salt products causing table salt to lose more of its importance as production shifted away to more profitable industrial salts that are actually poisonous. Today it's rare to see salt-preserved food anywhere because due to industry and globalization we just have better alternatives (Out of curiosity, does Kurlansky talk about the medical establishment connecting sodium with heart disease in the late 20th century? Given that there’s still a ton of high-salt food available for purchase it may not have made much of a dent in real terms.{He does but doesn’t really go in-depth into it. Just noting that high salt consumption has been linked to a number of bad health outcomes.}).

     Mr. Kurlansky gives us something of a grand tour in this book - How salt impacted the creation of the state as we understand it, how the different policies and stances taken by various governments caused problems or fueled the solutions to problems. The book also takes an in-depth look at salt as a food and  industrial product. I found this book fairly interesting because these days we tend to overlook salt and don't assign a lot of importance to it in our lives (Briefly putting on my Comrade Tortoise hat, it is interesting how salt is again becoming a conspicuous signifier of wealth and status - See artisanal Himalayan salt vs. proletarianized iodized table salt). Some of us even try to cut out of our lives completely. I would even argue this is a book that aspiring world history students should look at and a book that aspiring fantasy authors should consider giving a look at. I'm giving Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky an A.

        I'd like to thank our readers for their patience this week.  Next week we should be on track with Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Sidney W Mintz.  Until then stay safe and keep reading!

Indigo text is our guest editor Mike

Black text is your reviewer Garvin