Salt (2 page)

Would not all this attention to salt be inexplicable, Jones’s argument goes, unless we were really thinking of more important things—things worthy of an obsession? Jones concludes, “There is every reason to think that the primitive mind equated the idea of salt, not only with that of semen, but also with the essential constituent of urine.”

J
ONES WAS WRITING
in an age with a thirst for scientific explanations. And it is true that semen and urine—along with blood, tears, sweat, and almost every part of the human body—contain salt, which is a necessary component in the functioning of cells. Without both water and salt, cells could not get nourishment and would die of dehydration.

But perhaps a better explanation for the human obsession with this common compound is the one offered a few years later, in the 1920s, by the Diamond Crystal Salt Company of St. Clair, Michigan, in a booklet, “One Hundred and One Uses for Diamond Crystal Salt.” This list of uses included keeping the colors bright on boiled vegetables; making ice cream freeze; whipping cream rapidly; getting more heat out of boiled water; removing rust; cleaning bamboo furniture; sealing cracks; stiffening white organdy; removing spots on clothes; putting out grease fires; making candles dripless; keeping cut flowers fresh; killing poison ivy; and treating dyspepsia, sprains, sore throats, and earaches.

Far more than 101 uses for salt are well known. The figure often cited by the modern salt industry is 14,000, including the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, the melting of ice from winter roads, fertilizing agricultural fields, making soap, softening water, and dyeing textiles.

Salt
is a chemical term for a substance produced by the reaction of an acid with a base. When sodium, an unstable metal that can suddenly burst into flame, reacts with a deadly poisonous gas known as chlorine, it becomes the staple food sodium chloride, NaCl, from the only family of rocks eaten by humans. There are many salts, and a number of them are edible and often found together. The one we most like to eat is sodium chloride, which has the taste that we call salty. Other salts contribute unwelcome bitter or sour tastes, though they may also be of value to the human diet. Baby formula contains three salts: magnesium chloride, potassium chloride, and sodium chloride.

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.

A French folktale relates the story of a princess who declares to her father, “I love you like salt,” and he, angered by the slight, banishes her from the kingdom. Only later when he is denied salt does he realize its value and therefore the depth of his daughter’s love. 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.

S
ALT 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 Freud might have considered an irrational attachment to salt, a seemingly trivial object, because, in our unconscious, we associate it with longevity and permanence, which are of boundless significance.

Salt was to the ancient Hebrews, and still is to modern Jews, the symbol of the eternal nature of God’s covenant with Israel. In the Torah, the Book of Numbers, is written, “It is a covenant of salt forever, before the Lord,” and later in Chronicles, “The Lord God of Israel gave the kingdom over Israel to David forever, even to him, and to his sons, by a covenant of salt.”

On Friday nights Jews dip the Sabbath bread in salt. In Judaism, bread is a symbol of food, which is a gift from God, and dipping the bread in salt preserves it—keeps the agreement between God and his people.

Loyalty and friendship are sealed with salt because its essence does not change. Even dissolved into liquid, salt can be evaporated back into square crystals. 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.

In Christianity, salt is associated not only with longevity and permanence but, by extension, with truth and wisdom. The Catholic Church dispenses not only holy water but holy salt,
Sal Sapientia
, the Salt of Wisdom.

Bread and salt, a blessing and its preservation, are often associated. Bringing bread and salt to a new home is a Jewish tradition dating back to the Middle Ages. The British dispensed with the bread but for centuries carried salt to a new home. In 1789, when Robert Burns moved to a new house in Ellisland, he was escorted there by a procession of relatives carrying a bowl of salt. The city of Hamburg, Germany, symbolically renews its blessings once a year by carrying through the streets a chocolate-covered bread and a marzipan saltcellar filled with sugar. In Welsh tradition, a plate was put on the coffin with bread and salt, and a local professional sin eater arrived to eat the salt.

Because salt prevents decay, it protects from harm. In the early Middle Ages, farmers in northern Europe learned to save their grain harvest from a devastating fungal infection called ergot, poisonous to humans and livestock, by soaking the grain in salt brine. So it is not surprising that Anglo-Saxon farmers included salt in the magic ingredients placed in a hole in the plow as they invoked the name of the earth goddess and chanted for “bright crops, broad barley, white wheat, shining millet . . .”

Evil spirits detest salt. In traditional Japanese theater, salt was sprinkled on the stage before each performance to protect the actors from evil spirits. In Haiti, the only way to break the spell and bring a zombie back to life is with salt. In parts of Africa and the Caribbean, it is believed that evil spirits are disguised as women who shed their skin at night and travel in the dark as balls of fire. To destroy these spirits their skin must be found and salted so that they cannot return to it in the morning. In Afro-Caribbean culture, salt’s ability to break spells is not limited to evil spirits. Salt is not eaten at ritual meals because it will keep all the spirits away.

Both Jews and Muslims believe that salt protects against the evil eye. The Book of Ezekial mentions rubbing newborn infants with salt to protect them from evil. The practice in Europe of protecting newborns either by putting salt on their tongues or by submerging them in saltwater is thought to predate Christian baptism. In France, until the practice was abolished in 1408, children were salted until they were baptized. In parts of Europe, especially Holland, the practice was modified to placing salt in the cradle with the child.

Salt is a potent and sometimes dangerous substance that has to be handled with care. Medieval European etiquette paid a great deal of attention to how salt was touched at the table—with the tip of a knife and never by hand. In the most authoritative book of Jewish law, the
Shulchan Arukh,
The Prepared Table, written in the sixteenth century, it is explained that salt can only safely be handled with the middle two fingers. If a man uses his thumb in serving salt, his children will die, his little finger will cause poverty, and use of the index finger will cause him to become a murderer.

M
ODERN SCIENTISTS ARGUE
about how much salt an adult needs to be healthy. Estimates range from two-thirds of a pound to more than sixteen pounds each year. People who live in hot weather, especially if they do physical labor, need more salt because they must replace the salt that is lost in sweating. This is why West Indian slaves were fed salted food. But if they do not sweat excessively, people who eat red meat appear to derive from it all the salt they need. The Masai, nomadic cattle herders in East Africa, meet their salt needs by bleeding livestock and drinking the blood. But vegetable diets, rich in potassium, offer little sodium chloride. Wherever records exist of humans in different stages of development, as in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America, it is generally found that hunter tribes neither made nor traded for salt but agricultural tribes did. On every 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. A victim of starvation experiences hunger, and so the need for food is apparent. Salt deficiency causes headaches and weakness, then light-headedness, then nausea. If deprived long enough, the victim will die. But at no time in this process is a craving for salt experienced. However, most people choose to eat far more salt than they need, and perhaps this urge—the simple fact that we like the taste of salt—is a natural defense.

The other development that created a need for salt was the move to raise animals for meat rather than kill wild ones. Animals also need salt. Wild carnivores, like humans, can meet their salt needs by eating meat. Wild herbivores forage for it, and one of the earliest ways humans searched for salt was to follow animal trails. Eventually they all lead to a salt lick or a brine spring or some other source of salt. But domesticated animals need to be fed salt. A horse can require five times the salt intake of a human, and a cow needs as much as ten times the amount of salt a human requires.

Attempts to domesticate animals may have occurred before the end of the Ice Age, and even then humans understood that animals needed salt. Reindeer were observed going to encampments where human urine provided a source of salt. People learned that if salt was provided, the reindeer would come to them and eventually be tamed. But though these animals became a source of food, they never became truly domesticated animals.

Around 11,000
B.C.
, the Ice Age ended, and vast sheets of ice that covered much of the known world, including what is today New York and Paris, began to shrink and slowly vanish. At about this time the Asiatic wolf, a fierce predator that despite its small size would eat a human if it had the opportunity, came under human control because its friendly young cubs could be fed and trained. A dangerous adversary was turned into a dedicated helper—the dog.

As glaciers melted, huge fields of wild grain appeared. Humans, but also wild sheep and goats, fed on these fields. The initial human reaction was probably to kill these animals that threatened their food supply. But tribes living near such fields soon realized that sheep and goats could become a dependable food source if they could control them. Their dogs could even help in this work. By 8900
B.C.
, sheep were domesticated in Iraq, though they may have been domesticated in other places even earlier.