Thursday, February 27, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: Edible rock

By John Ziebell

On the shelf above the range in my kitchen--and maybe in yours too--there's a container of sea salt from France. I'm no snob, but you need some of the white stuff around, and the label shows where the salt came from, which is somehow appealing. I've got a blue box of the kosher variety too, because it's frequently called for in a cookbook I like. Two kinds of salt--an extravagance of an ingredient that's supposed to raise blood pressure and stop hearts. Mark Kurlansky starts his entertaining and informative history of the ubiquitous substance by persuasively invoking the argument the Monsanto corporation uses as a policy defense: Without it, life itself would be impossible.

"Salt is a chemical term for a substance created by the reaction of an acid with a base," the author tells us, triggering memories of the deadly boredom, measured in hours, that was the lab science survey course experience. But Kurlansky doesn't write a dull sentence very often, and when he's got to, he comes quickly to your rescue: "When sodium, an unstable metal that can burst suddenly 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."

That's science at its most entertaining--at its most literate, too. And it's true, which not only makes the book more readable but rewards you with a wealth of arcane trivia you can use to impress friends and family.

Kurlansky, who wrote a similar treatise on cod, calls this book "A World History," but the subtitle more accurately discusses plurality. There's the history of salt in China, where it was mined and controlled by the government from pre-dynastic times to the 20th century. There's the history of salt in and around Europe, where it defined both production and trade from the glory of Rome through the rise of Venice to the collapse of the British Empire. There are plenty more manageable vignettes, like the interconnected annals of fish sauce, gunpowder, salads, Gandhi, cheeses, the Erie Canal and McIlheney's "Tabasco" sauce--a blend of local salt, imported vinegar and peppers that are brought to seed on the family homestead in southern Louisiana but grown in Mexico, where the labor to pick them is still affordable. And it was used to stuff King Tut, too.

What connects these disparate narratives is the value our cultures put on salt as a basic life necessity, as an evolutionary tool, as a commodity. Initially, salt was privileged for its utility as a preservative; this didn't change until the mid-19th century in Europe, with the invention of canning, and even later in Asia. The refrigerator had an incredible impact on food preservation, but consider the climates--and populations--where electricity, let alone grocery stores, are available only to a select social strata. Medieval Venice first realized that controlling the trading of salt was more economically beneficial than controlling its production; centuries later, companies and national coffers would both swell based on the fact that trading salted fish generated more income than dealing in either component alone.

Sometimes, as you might suspect, Kurlansky makes some long figurative reaches. Students of America's past might agree that both our Revolution and Civil War rose from economic concerns; salt might have been an issue, but not one that comes readily to mind. And while China was still drawing brine from wells a decade ago, to forge a causal link between the collapse of the salt monopolies with the abdication of the last emperor in 1912 seems...perhaps a bit forced. But there's no doubt that salt always had a cultural and economic importance that is easily overlooked by contemporary standards, and even when Kurlansky's arguments seem farfetched, there's some validity in making them.

Salt is a fun book, and while you may learn a lot, you won't find the answers to those pesky health issues here. The Chinese were debating the pros and cons of salt use centuries before the birth of Christ, and scientists are still arguing about its impact on the human body. But hey, it's been around for longer than we've been keeping track, and we wouldn't have olive oil, French fries or mummies without it. Learn to cope.