History Fix

Ep. 122 Salt: How the Cheapest Thing at the Grocery Store Was Once Worth Its Weight In Gold

• Shea LaFountaine • Episode 122

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This week is all about the history of salt! Yes, salt. You've probably never given it much thought. It sits in a salt shaker on your kitchen counter, spice rack, or cabinet. You can buy a pound of it for 76 cents at Walmart right now. But, believe it or not, salt was once an extremely valuable commodity. Whole civilizations rose up over salt. Trade routes were established. People became very wealthy. Salt allowed for the preservation of food which allowed humans to travel over long distances. It has invaluable medicinal properties. And, at it's most basic level, salt keeps humans bodies alive. Salt has impacted human history arguably more than any other substance on Earth. Join me to learn how!  

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When you think of the word crystal you may think of a fancy chandelier, elaborate drinking glasses, or perhaps priceless gems adorning the décolletage of a wealthy woman, the crown jewels of royalty through the ages. If I asked you what crystal has left the biggest impact on human history, has had the greatest overall value to us throughout time, you may be tempted to say diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, but you would be wrong. There is another type of crystal that has proved far more significant. This crystal shaped whole civilizations, necessitated trade, forced separate groups of humans to intermingle, became so valuable it was actually used as currency in many places. In others it incited revolution. It set people apart as distinguished, high class, elite, above the others. It was needed, not for vanity, but for health, for survival, for enjoyment. So needed, so valued it made its way into the texts of major world religions, it worked its way into our languages and superstitions. This is no precious gem like what might adorn the crown of a prestigious king. I’m talking about simple table salt here. Let’s fix that.  


Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I am back this week with a full length episode after a brief hiatus last week. If you missed it, I did release a mini fix from the Patreon vault so there is something there for you to listen to. Shout out again to my Patreon subscribers, old and new. I’ll have a new mini fix launching very soon. I’m also back this week with a video version of this episode. Remember you can watch that on either YouTube or Patreon if you’d like to see my face and also have visuals to go along with the story. So let’s talk about salt! 


If you go to the grocery store right now you can buy a decent amount of salt for a couple bucks. It is not very expensive, unlike pretty much all the other food at the grocery store right now. I actually looked it up on walmart.com. You can buy a one pound canister of salt at Walmart for a whopping 76 cents. I did not know you could find anything that cheap at the grocery store right now. So salt is not expensive. It’s like one of the cheapest things you can buy. Which is surprising when considering its history. At one point salt was traded pound for pound with gold. It was used to make currency. It may have even been used as a form of payment which is where the word salary comes from, although this is disputed by historians. We’ll come back to that. Salt was a valuable commodity throughout time because we need salt. We actually physically need it to survive. 


So let’s talk about why. Here’s the sciencey part of the episode. Salt contains two essential things that all living things need, sodium which is a mineral, an element on the periodic table, atomic number 11 my 6 year old will tell you. Yes I had to look that up, yes he knows them all, all of them y’all, 118 of them by memory. He actually, that was his act for the school talent show. He got up there, little tiny kindergarten man, and people shouted out elements and he told them the atomic number. He’s, yeah, he’s something. Actually the first one, cause I just rewatched the video I took, the first one that gets yelled out is sodium coincidentally. Here’s the audio clip, or the video if you’re watching that version. 




Salt also contains chloride ions which are electrolytes. We need sodium because it is essential for nerve and muscle function and it also helps regulate fluids in the body, controlling blood pressure and volume. Without it, that stuff gets all messed up, and that’s pretty important stuff. We also need chloride ions, these electrolytes, because they regulate blood PH and pressure. Chloride is also an important ingredient in stomach acid which we of course need to digest food. So we literally cannot live without salt. We are full of salt. When you cry, your tears are salty. When you sweat, your sweat is salty. We are salty beings, all of us, all of us living things on Earth. When we sweat, we often lose a lot of this salt. This is why electrolytes are so important for athletes and marathon runners and whatnot. A lot of marathon runners carry electrolyte tablets which are basically salt licks in order to replenish all the salt they are sweating out because our bodies don’t work without it. If sodium levels drop too low you’re looking at fatigue, muscle cramps, headaches, nausea, dizziness, low blood pressure, confusion, and eventually seizures, coma, respiratory failure, and death. We literally cannot live without it. 


Not just humans, all living things, we all need salt. Animals that eat meat and like fish, usually get a good amount of salt from their diet. But herbivores, animals that just eat plants have to seek out a source of salt. And this is how it all began really, the story of salt throughout human history. The earliest humans would have been getting salt naturally through their diets because they were eating mostly meat which has salt in it. But animals like horses and cattle, grazing animals that eat grass, they weren’t getting enough from their diet and so they had to actively seek out sources of salt. According to Time Magazine quote “The history of the world according to salt is simple: animals wore paths to salt licks; men followed; trails became roads, and settlements grew beside them,” end quote. That may be an over simplification but that’s the idea. Humans followed animals because they hunted animals but they also followed the trails that animals made because they were easier to walk on. Salt seeking animals led humans to natural sources of salt and the rest is history.


Now, as I said, humans were already getting enough salt from their meat based diet. But they soon discovered that salt could be used to preserve meat, make it last longer without spoiling. And this was a big deal. This meant having edible meat available during times of food shortages or during the winter months when food supplies dropped. This also meant being able to carry meat over long distances which made trade possible. They also began to discover the medicinal properties of salt which is a natural antiseptic. That’s why it keeps meat from spoiling, it inhibits the growth of bacteria. This was also beneficial for wound care. Salt water rinses were used on wounds to draw out fluids and bacteria to prevent infection. It also reduces tissue swelling and can help treat diarrhea. 


So salt was super useful even for these ancient people who were getting enough sodium and chloride ions already from their mostly carnivorous hunter gatherer diet. But then, around 12,000 years ago, we see a major shift, the agricultural revolution. Suddenly, humans are settling down and farming. They stop following game around and they start planting crops. They’re still eating meat, if they’re lucky, but they’re eating a whole lot more plants than they ever have before. Bread and cereals become a major staple of the human diet and these do not contain sufficient amounts of salt. And so now humans, like the grazing herds that wore those trails to natural salt licks, must intentionally seek out salt to supplement their diets. 


There are two different ways to get salt. You can get it from saltwater, oceans, seas, saltwater lakes, whatever. You have to evaporate the water either using sunlight or by heating it up over a fire. You evaporate all the water off and the concentrated brine that’s left behind eventually crystallizes into salt. So you can get salt that way or you can find underground salt deposits called rock salt. This is where most of the salt on Earth is. These are huge beds of sedimentary evaporite minerals that form when basically an underground lake or sea evaporates and leaves salt behind. They can be huge, up to 1,150 feet thick and stretch for miles and miles. So you can mine for salt but early humans weren’t mining for salt. They were going the evaporate salt water route. 


We see evidence of this from around 8,000 years ago during the neolithic period. According to Olivier Weller writing for Antiquity Journal, a Neolithic site excavated in Romania in 1984 showed evidence that they were evaporating water they were collecting from a salt water spring which was actually 6 times saltier than sea water. And this is the first evidence we have of humans intentionally extracting salt as a resource. Weller writes quote “The production intensity and uses of this crystallised salt for these early Neolithic communities of eastern Europe have yet to be determined. Was it only intended to be used for food? To preserve it? For the herds' needs? Or can we already see, in this early production, a desire to produce and exchange a rare status-enhancing substance?” end quote. 


A rare status-enhancing substance. I don’t know if these neolithic people in Romania 8,000 years ago were using it that way, probably not. But, it would soon become that for humans. Yes we and our animals need it to survive, yes it preserves meat, yes it treats wounds and other health conditions, but it also has perceived value. This is a weird thing humans do, like bitcoin? That’s nothing. That doesn’t exist. It only has value because people are willing to buy it. And so at some point, salt becomes this thing that people are willing to buy and trade for. It becomes a status-enhancing substance. We see this happening at Solnisata in present-day Bulgaria. Solnisata is the earliest known town in Europe from almost 7,000 years ago. It is the first pre-historic urban center. Even though it only had a population of around 350 people, that’s enough to qualify it as a proto-city. Solnisata was built around salt production. It had a wall built around it to protect the salt which was traded throughout the Balkans. And this made people in Solnisata very wealthy. Archaeologists have found a large collection of gold artifacts nearby which suggests that salt trade there was very lucrative. 


This kind of value comes from supply in demand. If there isn’t much of something and a lot of people need it, it becomes very valuable. I talked about this in the diamond episode, episode 35, how they’ve intentionally controlled the supply of diamonds, making them appear much more rare than they really are in order to keep the prices high. These underground salt rock deposits, which make up most of the salt on Earth, were not accessible to people in ancient times. And evaporating sea water worked but it was not enough. It was not enough to meet the demand and so salt became a thing of great value and we see this more and more as we move forward in time. We see settlements, whole civilizations established near salt water sources. We see salt trade roads popping up all over the world, trade that was only possible because of our ability to preserve food with salt. And these salt roads opened up the world, connected separate groups of people in ways that had never really been done before. We have a major salt road running from Morocco south across the Sahara desert and into Timbuktu which is in present day Mali in Africa. Timbuktu, I’m sure you’ve heard of it, is sort used colloquially to refer to just like the farthest reaches of the Earth right? All the way in Timbuktu. But Timbuktu was a big deal in its heyday. Which is surprising, because we don’t really think of Africa, outside of ancient Egypt, having big advanced cities like this. But Timbuktu emerged as this major cultural trade hub and that was largely due to the salt trade, on a massive scale. We’re talking caravans of up to 40,000 camels crossing the Sahara desert to bring salt to Timbuktu where it was often traded for enslaved people. I think Timbuktu may be the topic of my next mini fix. Look for that on the Patreon on Wednesday. 


We also see major salt roads running to ancient Rome, the Via Salaria. The Romans loved salt. They gave it its name, sal which comes from Salus, the goddess of health. Roman soldier’s pay was called their salarium and this is the root of the modern word salary. Because of this, many assume that this meant they were paid in salt, kind of like how ancient Egyptians were sometimes paid in bread and beer. But many historians disagree. They don’t think Roman soldiers were actually paid in salt, rather they were paid with money in order to buy salt and that’s why we see sal in the word salarium, but who knows. 


Salt trade, the value of salt, had a hand in almost every major city and civilization throughout time. To quote Time Magazine “Salt routes crisscrossed the globe. One of the most traveled led from Morocco south across the Sahara to Timbuktu. Ships bearing salt from Egypt to Greece traversed the Mediterranean and the Aegean. Herodotus describes a caravan route that united the salt oases of the Libyan desert. Venice’s glittering wealth was attributable not so much to exotic spices as to commonplace salt, which Venetians exchanged in Constantinople for the spices of Asia. In 1295, when he first returned from Cathay, Marco Polo delighted the Doge with tales of the prodigious value of salt coins bearing the seal of the great Khan. As early as the 6th century, in the sub-Sahara, Moorish merchants routinely traded salt ounce for ounce for gold. In Abyssinia, slabs of rock salt, called ‘amôlés, became coin of the realm. Each one was about ten inches long and two inches thick. Cakes of salt were also used as money in other areas of central Africa,” end quote. 


Salt was, of course, important in ancient Egypt where it first appeared over 5,000 years ago. According to History Cooperative quote “Early Egyptians mined salt from dried lakes and riverbeds and harvested and evaporated it from seawater. They were some of the earliest salt traders in recorded history,  and they benefited greatly from it.The Egyptian salt trade, especially with the Phoenicians and early Greek Empire, contributed significantly to the wealth and power of the Old and Middle kingdoms of ancient Egypt. Furthermore, the Egyptians were also one of the first cultures known to preserve their food with salt. Both meat, and particularly fish, were preserved by salting and a common part of early Egyptian diets,” end quote. Egyptians used a type of salt called natron harvested from river beds and it was a big part of the mummification process which we know was a critical ancient Egyptian ritual. 


Salzburg in Austria, which literally means salt city, was a major center of salt trade in ancient Europe. The Hallstatt salt mine there is still open today and is considered the world’s oldest operational salt mine. 


Salt was super important in ancient China as well. The earliest known Chinese treatise on pharmacology, the Peng-Tzao-Kan-Mu, from more than 4,700 years ago, lists over 40 different types of salt and their properties. It also discusses how to extract salt and use it for human consumption. Salt in China was traded in pottery jars of a standard size, much like how Egyptians regulated the size of a loaf of bread, and so it became like a unit of currency essentially. Eventually, the Chinese government began to regulate salt, tax it, and monopolize it. This led to economic stability in China through various dynasties but it also led to conflict and rebellion over unfair taxes and whatnot. We’ll see this happen much more recently as well. The French Revolution, episodes 90 and 91, caused in part by salt taxes. We think about bread usually, the extremely high prices of bread, as being the catalyst of the French Revolution, right, “let them eat cake.” But really, the salt tax called the gabelle was a major contributing factor. According to Wikipedia quote “The gabelle—a hated French salt tax—was enacted in 1286. From its inception, the application of the gabelle in France varied significantly depending on the region. The provinces subjected to the grande gabelle had to pay for salt at an official price and were also required to purchase a fixed amount annually, while in other areas, no taxes were paid at all. As a result, in the 18th century, the price of salt in Paris was 20 times higher than its price in Brittany, encouraging smuggling between regions. This tax was particularly despised due to both the regional differences in its application and the disproportion between the value of the product, which in many places could be obtained almost for free, and the amount demanded for it. The injustice of the gabelle was one of the reasons for the French Revolution,” end quote.


The American Revolution, we know, was also fought over unfair taxes. Salt was not one of them but it did come into play. Loyalists, Americans who still sided with the British, were known to intercept Patriot salt shipments to keep them from being able to preserve food, which was obviously necessary for troops traveling during war time. So this was a way to try to sabotage American war efforts by messing with their food supplies. In the 1930s, during the Indian Independence Movement, also from Great Britain, like, chill out guys, high salt taxes became another major grievance just like with the French Revolution. Mahatma Ghandi, who led a lot of non-violent protests during that time, organized a salt protest to demonstrate against the British salt tax. 





Salt was a status symbol which is why we see governments trying to control it as a form of oppression. You want the salt? You’re going to have to pay us. According to Time Magazine quote “The social symbolism of salt was painfully evident in the medieval equivalents of the Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette. As late as the 18th century, the rank of guests at a banquet was gauged by where they sat in relation to an often elaborate silver saltcellar on the table. The host and “distinguished” guests sat at the head of the table—”above the salt.” People who sat below the salt, farthest from the host, were of little consequence,” end quote. 


Salt was so important physically, like for survival, but also socially and culturally, that we see it take on spiritual meaning even. It had deep spiritual significance in many places and we see evidence of this in superstitions and religious texts. For many ancient cultures, salt was considered sacred. The Greek word for salt which is halas is the root of the word hilarious which now kind of means something really funny but it used to mean cheerful. The Greeks believed that salt brought happiness. A lot of cultures looked at its purification properties, the way it kept meat from spoiling and cleaned wounds, and applied that spiritually. They came to believe that salt could purify or protect against evil. You’ve seen this in the movie Hocus Pocus, because of course you’ve seen the movie Hocus Pocus, where they create a line of salt, like a circle of salt that the witches can’t pass over. So it has this spiritual protection quality to it. 


Superstitions arose during the middle ages that it was bad luck or a bad omen to spill salt. And so if you accidentally spill some salt, you’re supposed to pick up a pinch of it and throw it over your left shoulder because that’s where the evil spirits congregate, over your left shoulder, apparently. And I’ve been doing this one my whole life. Now I’m wondering if anyone else does this. It makes sense though, I mean not the demons thing, but why you wouldn’t want to spill salt. Not just because it was bad luck or whatever but because it was expensive. It was valuable. In Leonardo Da Vinci’s very famous painting of the Last Supper, if you look closely, you will notice that Judas has an overturned saltcellar in front of him which has symbolic meaning. It is alluding to the evil that is to come, a bad omen. 


Speaking of Judas, we see lots of references to salt in the Bible. Leviticus 2:13 says quote “with all thine offerings, thou shalt offer salt.” Salt was a big deal to Jewish people. Its use as a meat purifier in Hebrew sacrifices symbolized the eternal covenant between God and Israel. Kosher salt? That’s like all the salt at the grocery store. It’s all kosher salt. Not because it’s actually kosher certified or whatever but as a nod to the historical use of salt in Jewish meat preparation. It was that big of a deal. Salt plays a huge role in the story of Lot in the book of Genesis. This is the one where Lot and his family, his wife and his two daughters are living in this really sinful debaucherous city called Sodom. And two angels appear to Lot and tell him that he needs to take his wife and daughters and get the heck out of there, flee the city without ever looking back. Just go, do not turn around, do not look back. But as they are fleeing, Lot’s wife, of course because it’s always the women in these patriarchal stories, her faith is uncertain, she’s weak, yada yada, brainwashing, she looks back. She defies the angels and takes a quick glance back towards Sodom as she is leaving and she is turned into a pillar of salt. Seriously though, how great would it have been just for all of humanity, for every little girl in bible study, if it had been Lot and not his unnamed wife who had looked back? Girl doesn’t even get a name in this story. 


We see salt in later religious rituals and stories as well. In the new testament, Matthew addresses followers of Christ as the quote “salt of the earth,” which is a good thing here. Lot’s wife turning into salt is bad, these people being salt is good. I don’t know. In earlier baptism rituals in the Roman Catholic church, salt was placed in the baby’s mouth in order to purify him or her. This came from earlier pagan Roman rituals, of course because the Catholics borrowed almost everything from the pagans, in which grains of salt were placed on the lips of an 8 day old baby. 


So when we look at the story of salt throughout human history, its importance is hard to overlook. What started as a chance discovery while following game trails became a valuable commodity that led to the rise and fall of whole empires. We needed it to keep our bodies alive once our diet shifted to grains and plants that lacked the salt we had always unknowingly relied on. We needed it to preserve food during times of bounty so that we wouldn’t starve during times of famine. We needed this preserved food in order to travel, in order to trade, which opened up connections between different cultures that would not have been possible without salt. This facilitated an exchange of goods but also an exchange of ideas which set humans apart from all other creatures. We needed salt for its health benefits, its antiseptic and purifying properties, its ability to fight infection. And we needed it for its value, for what other people would give you for it, money, gold, spices, enslaved human beings, whatever that was. Salt made people very wealthy. Cities that could produce and trade salt emerged and rose to the top. Salt was powerful. It set people apart, proximity to the salt cellar on the dinner table denoting your status and importance. 


And yet, today, 76 cents at Walmart. So what happened? No one is building an empire on those kinds of prices. No one’s starting a revolution over 76 cents either. What happened to the value of salt? The very thing they intentionally stopped from happening to diamonds. The supply increased, in a big way. Throughout most of time, salt was difficult to obtain and transport, 40,000 camels remember? Today, that is not the case. Ever since the industrial revolution, we’ve been able to much more easily tap into those underground rock salt deposits which has increased salt supply immeasurably. New technology like dynamite and steam engines also made obtaining and transporting salt much easier and quicker. And then you also have to factor in refrigerators and canning as ways to preserve food that don’t require salt. So the supply went majorly up during the last couple of centuries but also the demand for salt went way down. Supply and demand. 


And so now you can buy a pound of salt at Walmart for 76 cents. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need it anymore. We still desperately need salt in order to survive. We don’t often think about that because our diets of mostly processed foods are overloaded with salt. Most people get way more salt than they need with zero effort. And that’s how it started, survival. But it’s safe to say looking back that salt has impacted humans arguably more than any other commodity. Time Magazine writes quote “If the importance of a food to a society can be measured by the allusions to it in language and literature, then the significance of salt is virtually unrivaled. Nearly four pages of the Oxford English Dictionary are taken up by references to salt, more than any other food. “A grain of salt” may be a recipe for skepticism [I say that all the time], But there can be no doubt about how salt has seasoned history,” end quote. So the next time you sprinkle some salt on your french fries or whatever, pause for a moment and let it sink in, just how critical a role salt has played throughout history. Physically your body would not exist without it but culturally, socially neither would the whole world you live in. I find it so interesting how much we overlook the importance of salt. 76 cents a pound for a substance without which none of this would be possible. 


Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix. 


Information used in this episode was sourced from Time Magazine, the National Library of Medicine, National Geographic, Wikipedia, Antiquity Journal, History Cooperative, and the University of Hawaii. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.