Salt. It pervades the entire world. It is the only rock we eat. It has served as currency, influenced trade, led to wars, and regularly helps us keep our roads free of ice. Homer called it “a divine substance.” It was often associated with fertility in the ancient world, with the roman word for a man in love being salax, which means in a salted stated, and is the origin of the word salacious. Supposedly, demons and evil spirits detest salt. In the book of Genesis, Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back as the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. Most importantly, salt is required for us to live: “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.” Mark Kurlansky, a writer who often examines our food – his most famous book is a biography of Cod – delves into this story in Salt: A World History.

Kurlansky tries to make this book an all-encompassing review of salt. He bounces from biology (why do mammals need salt) to extraction (where does salt come from) to history (how has salt influenced history and culture) to uses (what other types of salt exist beyond what is on our table and how do we use them) to how we eat salt (with a large selection of historical and modern recipes interspersed throughout the text). This leads to Kurlansky’s problem – how do you organize an all-encompassing book with such a range of diverse subjects. He seems to be trying to make the point that history itself is organized around the story of salt, but he never really addresses the counterarguments and the other causes of numerous historical events (such as when he claims one of the major reasons for the fall of the South during the civil war was the lack of salt production). He admirably tries to make the story flow, but to me, it really didn’t. I thoroughly enjoyed the historical tributes to salt and how it had played such a key role in history, but I was so bogged down by all the recipes along the way that I often wanted to put the book back on the shelf (I did actually read this one instead of listening to it on my iphone – it felt good to have a real book in my hands while I was recovering on the couch from a recent surgery).

The story starts with the ancient Chinese and progresses through to the use of salt domes to store the US Strategic Petroleum Reserves and how modern science assesses the amount of salt we should consume on a daily basis. Along the way, you learn that salting meat, and thus preserving it, was one of the major industries of the entire world until freezing food came along, and drove trade and commerce around the globe. My favorite historical chapter was on Gandhi, and how he used a famous ‘Salt March’ to protest the British rule of India in 1930. The British had a monopoly on salt manufacturing, and then taxed its sale heavily. Gandhi led a 240 mile march to the shorelines near the village of Dandi, where he boiled salty mud in seawater and produced his own salt. He them proclaimed “With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire.” The march helped marshal Indian support against the British while also leading foreign governments, including America, to sympathize with the Indians.

I really wanted to enjoy this book. I love the smell of a salt spray in the air and the feel of salt on my face when near the coast or out to sea. You can tell that Kurlansky is enthusiastic about his subject and enjoyed his research travels around the work (he even mentions the Coast Guard when he visits the Bahamas), but the book just seems too disorganized and haphazard for me. Score: 4.0 (if it had been less, I probably would have set it aside along the way and never finished it).