Salt: A World History

From
Salt : A World History
by Mark Kurlansky

Most American salt is rock salt, but in most of the world, the salt is sea salt. In the United States, there's only one commercial-free salt place left and that's in San Francisco Bay.

Mark Kurlansky, author of the book Salt: A World History, says salt has been tremendously important to the development of trade.

Before the age of refrigeration, so before the 20th century, the only way of preserving food was in salt. So salt was the only way to take an item of food and turn it into a commodity of international trade. You could have a dairy farm and you could produce milk and butter, but you could only sell it to your neighbors or it would spoil if you took it any further than that. You could salt it into cheese and you could sell that cheese around the world and that was the basis of the economy of most nations for a very long time.

And salt has played a role in politics and world affairs.

One consistent pattern is governments that try to raise revenues by taxing salt usually ended up in political disaster. The French Revolution, for example. One of the burning issues in 18th century France was the taxation system of salt. It was also one of the major issues of the Indian independence movement.