"Salt" by Mark Kurlansky

Currently reading this delightful, informative and entertaining history of civilizations trough unexpected lens of human need for salt and how that need for it affected our history. For some time now I have been curious about how food shaped our history and occasionally my reading went that way ("An Edible History of Humanity", "In the Devil's Garden") so this book was just perfect example of this food-as-history literature and it came as no surprise that with so many other choices I could make, I selected this one because I just love to find out about strange and crazy facts from history.

Mark Kurlansky had previously written two similar books - "Cod" and "The Basque History of the World" so in this, third food-as-history book he connects the dots, spreading his net much wider and going all the way trough various continents and centuries. Although modern scientists are dead set against salt as silent poison, Kurlansky say this is a nonsense - salt is absolutely necessary for humans (and animals) and as we constantly lose it trough bodily functions, it needs to be replenished otherwise we would dehydrate. There is interesting story how the domestication of wild animals probably happen because of the salt - after Ice Age, sheep and cattle followed human traces of urine and wolves followed, which eventually led to training them as dogs and helpers for domestic animals. Chinese were the first who not only explored salt mines but understood how this necessity can be taxed and controlled by state. Romans even paid their soldiers in salt, hence the word "salary". It wasn't long before people found out that salt preserves food - ancient cookbooks are full of various uses of salt, apparently one of the most popular Roman delicacies was something called "garum" which was combination of fish, herbs and salt slowly boiled until the stink burned the hole in Ozone (it eventually fell out of fashion but it probably looked very much like today's modern pesto). North of Roman empire, in the Alps, so-called barbarians used salt mines for centuries and in fact little Austrian village Hallstadt that I visited recently was one of the most famous salt mines of the old world, along with similar places in Egypt, Crete and Cyprus - whoever controlled them, had all the power. There was a huge fight over salt between Venice and Genoa as Italians came to produce famous cheese and ham that was sold all over the known world (Samuel Pepys, famous 17th century diarist, saved his Italian cheese from burning London by burying it in the backyard, Thomas Jefferson had it shipped to him in Virginia). The medieval Catholic Church prohibited the eating of meat on religious days and in medieval world those were actually almost half of the year (no sex either on those days) and under English law the penalty for eating meat on Friday was hanging! (Just imagine, being hanged for eating meat! I just ate big portion of grilled čevapčići last Friday although it was Big Friday before Easter and they were delicious not only because of the taste but also because it is something that Croatians wouldn't do nowadays.) As red meat was forbidden, fish and various combinations came handy, here is where salt came as necessity again - salted Cod from the north sea opened the completely new market for fishermen from north Europe (Basques and Vikings who sailed everywhere, probably reached America back than so in a way salt expanded our knowledge of geography. I just came to the point in the book where salt became of strategic importance because salt cod and corned beef became the rations of the British navy - its just amazing that something that nowadays we take for granted was once considered so important that wars were fought for it. We understand that salt is important but because its such easily available commodity, we don't even think about it - and for thousands of years people actually controlled the salt mines, taxed the whole countries and held the power by selling and re-selling it trough the world like its gold. Just fascinating.