table talk / By Joseph Byrd

Salt

It makes food taste good, but is it good for you?

(March 4, 2010)  In the late fall of 1967, the brilliant science writer John McPhee challenged Euell Gibbons (author of Stalking The Wild Asparagus) to a foraging trek along the Appalachian Trail. They would eat only wild food at first. After a week, they planned to gradually add elements of civilization: salt, sugar, coffee, cooking oil. Gibbons was by then a legend as an advocate of eating off the land.

But even given the two men’s dedication to the venture, the first days were a shock. They were constantly hungry. There were remarkable discoveries, of course: a just-shot coot, freshwater clams, wild mushrooms, watercress — but each in isolation. After six cold and miserable days, they bought a box of salt:

GALLERY >

Dinner revived me. Gibbons had found some catnip, and he made catnip tea. We built a high bonfire that whipped in the wind. The dandelions, boiled in three waters, were much better than they had been the night before, and the oyster mushrooms might have been taken from a banquet for the Olympian gods. Each mushroom was at least six inches across and, in the center, nearly an inch thick. As they steamed, the vapor from the pot did seem to carry the essences of oyster stew. Their taste, however, was fantastically like the taste of broiled steak.

The simple ingredients of that dinner — dandelions and mushrooms — were splendid in themselves, but they were made transcendent by the presence of salt.

One might suppose that salt has been part of the human diet since we were hunting mammoths in the Ice Age, but in fact, salt has been an additive to food for less than 5,000 years. For five million years our ancestors ate a diet to which no salt was added. This was the diet of all mammals, one to which they were thoroughly adapted. Like other mammals, humans relied on the amount of salt occurring naturally in food to provide chloride and sodium, and to regulate the amount of fluid in the body.

In Salt, Diet and Health: Neptune’s Poisoned Chalice, Graham MacGregor says that with the rise of large communities, and the use and need for salt as a preservative, we became addicted to it. It was the central item of trade, the economic foundation of empires, and a means for governments to control their people (and tax them). It became embedded in cultural, political, and religious institutions. The symbolic significance of salt runs deep in the traditions of monotheism. The covenant between God and the Hebrews was ritually celebrated with salt:

All the holy offerings which the children of Israel offer unto the Lord, I have given thee, and thy sons and thy daughters with thee, by a statute for ever: it is a covenant of salt for ever before the Lord… Numbers 18:19>Thou shalt not suffer the salt of the covenant of thy God to be lacking from thy meat offering: with all thine offerings thou shalt offer salt… Leviticus 2:13

Salt is one of the few flavors we taste only in the mouth, not combined with the nose. It enhances other tastes. Sweets taste sweeter. Naturally bitter foods like chocolate and broccoli become delicious. But precisely because we are attracted to salt, commercial, prepared, and fast foods are loaded with it. They pretty must have to be to compete. You’ve doubtless noticed that “low salt” products cost more? Why is that? Salt is cheap; making special “low-salt” versions is expensive, and it complicates marketing.

1 2 3 NEXT PAGE >SHARE