Salt: A World History

Kurlansky writes that “[t]he idea that salt enhances the taste of sugar has not entirely vanished from the West. It is a guiding concept of the snack food industry” (399). Oversalting is a good way to ruin a product, and some merchants try to mask this taste by adding sugar.

In the Baltic Sea, the patterns of herrings remain unpredictable. In the 18th century, more than 1,000 people lived on the island of Kladesholmen. By the beginning of the 21st century, there were fewer than 500. Kurlansky writes that “life has changed in all of Sweden” (403); the decline in salt usage is one reason, but “salt consumption is declining in most of the world” (403). There are still people who love pickled herring, olives, cod, and other fishes and vegetables, but the foods are no longer a necessity. Refrigeration is a more efficient way of preservation than curing. Jewish delicatessens are one exception, as they still sell many varieties of pickled vegetables and salted fishes, particularly lox, or salmon, although it has been replaced in popularity by a less-salty version called nova. Anchovies are still popular, but today they are preferable fresh, as opposed to cured, so they have become less salty.

Caviar has gained in popularity, and is seen by some as a successor to garum, but Kurlansky disagrees, saying that for the statement to be true, caviar “had to have been used as a seasoning rather than being eaten by itself” (411). Caviar was and is expensive, and has only grown more so, with its price doubling between 1900 and 1915. Commercial caviar fishing was primarily done in the Caspian Sea, which was controlled by Russia. By the 1970s, the price was prohibitive for most people. 

Kurlansky writes that “[t]ransportation was always the key to the salt business, and Morton was a company founded on a transportation idea” (426). In the late 19th century, Joy Morton, son of J. Sterling Morton, the founder of the Morton Salt Company (and also the founder of Arbor Day) bought a fleet of lake boats with $10,000. In summer, his barges could transport salt across the Great Lakes with little competition. By 1910, his company had purchased saltworks and was responsible for two innovations: 1) salt whose grains did not stick to each other, and 2) salt that had a uniformity of crystal size and shape, identified as “Morton’s salt” (427).

Morton’s rise showed that success in the salt industry was impossible without transport and quantity. Small producers began disappearing as he bought them or they went out of business; in 1955, “Morton bought the saltworks on Great Inagua Island in the Bahamas, then a British colony” (429). Very little of Great Inagua’s salt stays in the Bahamas, and is instead exported to the United States in quantities of over 1 million tons per year. Volume is the key to Morton’s continued success, and the US “is both the largest salt producer and the largest salt consumer. It produces over 40 million metric tons of salt a year, which earns more than $1 billion in sales revenue” (435). Most of the salt in America—51 percent—is produced for deicing roads.

In the current state of the salt-consuming world, “fashionable people are now divided into two camps” (442). One camp says that eating too much salt is unhealthy, and the other camp consumes salt specifically for health purposes. Kurlansky says that there is evidence to support both sides, but “clinical evidence show that people who consume large quantities of salt are not as healthy as those who don’t” (443). This has changed the mindset of many chefs, and some salty recipes and foods have dwindled in popularity, or vanished.

As the book ends, Kurlansky reiterates that it is still difficult to determine why salt has proven so essential to humans, and that pricing it accurately may be an impossible task: “Fixing the true value of salt, one of earth’s most accessible commodities, has never been easy” (449).