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Science in the News: Activity 2 of 3

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“Please pass the salt” is a pretty ordinary request.  But it turns out that ordinary table salt—a chemical compound of the elements sodium and chlorine—has had an extraordinary history. In his 2002 book, Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky writes about the historic importance of those white crystals we now take for granted. 

Kurlansky notes that, early on, humans discovered salt’s value in preserving and enhancing the flavor of food. An ancient Egyptian papyrus proclaims: “There is no better food than salted vegetables.” But salt was hard to obtain centuries ago. It was harvested mostly through the evaporation of seawater or by mining the veins of salt in mountainsides.

Because of its scarcity, salt was extremely costly. In the 7th century BC, the Chinese levied a tax on it; the ancient Romans sometimes paid their soldiers in sal (Latin for salt), from which we get the word salary and the phrase “worth his salt.” The importance of salt to the American colonies can be inferred from the fact that, during the American Revolution, British soldiers destroyed colonial salt factories.

Salt: A World History is full of fascinating information about how different civilizations viewed and used this precious substance. One book reviewer concluded that because of the significance of salt through the ages, “civilization…might plausibly be called salivization.”


Photo: Tomasz Sienicki / CC-BY-SA-3.0

The book reviewer’s closing comment about “salivization” is

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