The Salt of the Earth (Part 1)

From the French Revolution to the science of geology, this show examines how salt has been an important ingredient in human history.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History, where I also serve as the director of the Hayden Planetarium. My co-host this week is Eugene Mirman.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eugene, I love having you here.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  I love being here Neil.

• 0:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. Sometimes I go into your place where you have your Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And sometimes you come in studio with us.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  I do. Sometimes I will travel uptown.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good to get you out of your digs down there. You know, this week's show topic is all about salt.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  I know.

• 0:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, because you read the notes.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, the listeners don't know. I was informed beforehand. So yeah, we're talking about salt.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the white stuff that we all take for granted.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, you know.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  I don't take it for granted. I think it's amazing. It's changed lives. It was a currency at one point, probably.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, well, we're going to get into that. This whole show will orbit the subject of salt.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course, it's really cheap now. I remember when I was a kid going to the store. Salt was like the cheapest thing on all shelves. You can get a, I'll tell you how old I am, you can get a little box of salt for 10 cents. And I thought, it can't be. You know, 10 cents? What? And it's still cheap, even though it's more than that today.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Romans would be furious to hear this. I am like, that seems reasonable.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you know, in the past, yeah, it was rare and valuable commodity, a strategic commodity even.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  You could use it as a weapon. Maybe not. That might be the one thing. Is that one of the 14,000 uses?

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, well, one of them was that you can pour on the wounds of, who's the guy in the movie?

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Of someone who, I don't know. I mean, I know that

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck Norris.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Chuck Norris. Have you put it on Chuck Norris? It's was it put on to help him or to hurt him? Because doesn't it sort of clean? Does it have like a cleaning power?

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, well, it's it's it's it's a disinfectant, not a it's an antibiotic. I mean, it prevents the growth of of microbes on it. But we'll learn all about that.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't want to ruin the whole thing.

• 2:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just so that we're on the same page, the salt that we normally think of and chat about is table salt is sodium chloride. Sodium is an element on the periodic table. Remember that mysterious chart of boxes in your chemistry class? Chlorine is also there. You put them together. You get sodium chloride. By the way, sodium is highly explosive. Yeah. It in reactive in the presence of water. And chlorine, each of these will kill you separately.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Really?

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And together, it's some of the most

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Delicious.

• 2:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the

• 2:43Speaker 01

  If you put sodium in water, it would

• 2:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And essentially, you want to get out of the room when you did that.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Because it creates

• 2:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It reacts violently with the water.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  I hope that no one listening is off doing that.

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's hard to get a slab of sodium.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Is it hard to get sodium? You have to break it in somewhere? Does McDonald's have it?

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't. I've never looked. I don't know. And chlorine is stuff that keeps your, you know, swimming pools clean. And and it's it's quite the disinfectant. You put it together, it's table salt. And it's a testament to the extraordinary diversity of what the elements on the periodic table do for us when brought together as as molecules. I mean, molecular chemistry is a whole different thing from atomic chemistry. It's a whole other world.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  I doubt it. No, you're probably right.

• 3:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's the same world, but different, different, different rules. Different rules. And I happen to know, as an astrophysicist, you make every one of these elements in stars. They're forged in the centers of high mass stars that later explode, spreading their enriched guts across the galaxy, out of which you then make planets and people and salt. Just in case you were wondering.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, is this table salt from an exploding star? And yes, it is. Good to know.

• 3:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The ingredients of table salt come from exploding stars.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  I'm glad recipes don't say one quarter spoon exploding star.

• 3:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So what we got here, you know, salt, what's funny about salt is that it's, you know, you go to farms, I don't know if you've been on a farm, if you're a city person, but like

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been on the farm.

• 4:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's salt licks. And when I was a kid, I said, ew, who'd want to do that, you know?

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so these, these huge herbivores that we sustain on farms, they, they, they need salt. They've got to lick salt as part of their daily diet. And, you know, I said, you know, this, this topic's too big for just me. And what I decided to do was bring in an expert, I invited to my office, Mark Kurlansky. He's, he's the author of the book called Salt: A World History.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Not to be confused with that movie. With Angelina Jolie, where she is not salty.

• 4:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. Well, let's check out that clip, my first clip of my interview with him, just to find out what, what role salt has played in human history.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 4:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's hard for anyone today to imagine that salt was so highly valued as it once was. What happened? We throw away salt today. Salt is 25 cents in the store.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Well, to begin with, salt didn't have a great deal of value because most civilizations started off being hunter gatherers and not agricultural. And hunter gatherers don't really need salt. So the basis of the importance of salt is that we all need sodium and chloride for our bodies to function. But if you're on a mostly red meat diet, you will get all of the salt you need without having any additional salt. But then what happened is that civilizations moved to agriculture. Now there's a whole bunch of problems. Salt is needed for caring for the properties in the soil. It's needed to raise livestock because other mammals just like us need sodium and chloride.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  And before the age of refrigeration and freezing, you really couldn't have a food trade without salt. You know, if you were a dairy farmer and you produce milk and butter and things like that, you could sell them to the immediate area. Not too good even there in the summertime. But if you made cheese, which is preserved with salt, you could throw it on the wagon and ship it all over the world. The same was true of meat and fish and vegetables. And basically, the entire food trade depended on salt. And in pre-industrial society, that was a very large part of trade. So it's not an exaggeration to say that without salt,

• 6:38Speaker 02

  you couldn't have an international economy.

• 6:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you're saying is back then, any food you ate from afar was salty.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, any foreign food or anything that shipped any kind of distance was salty. And people used to eat a lot more salted food than they do now. And it was much saltier. Bacon, for example, the bacon we eat now is sort of salted in a token sort of way because it's kept in the refrigerator. But if you're going to salt bacon so that it can survive without being chilled, it has to be much saltier than that.

• 7:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So salt was a preservative?

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Salt was the leading way to preserve food. There were some other things such as smoking. Smoking doesn't work that well unless you use a little salt also. And there was burying in the ground, which also needs a little salt. So most anything you tried to do to preserve food involved salt.

• 7:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eugene, do you bury your food in the ground?

• 7:32Speaker 01

  I do, I do with salt. That guy sounds like a saltist. Like, I believe him that it's important, but it's like, it's a little suspicious.

• 7:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there are other salts. It's not just sodium chloride. There's like saltpeter. It's a major ingredient in gunpowder and other explosives. Baking soda.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Good, I was hoping that salt could be a weapon.

• 7:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sodium bicarbonate. I mean, it goes on and on and on. But we got to end this first segment, and we're coming back. And when we come back, I have a special guest to speak to the role of salt in ancient cultures. This is Star Trek Radio.

• 8:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. I'm your host, Mr. Grass Tyson, and welcome again to Eugene Mirman. Eugene, you tweet. Is it at Eugene or?

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's at EugeneMerman.com.

• 8:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eugene Mirman.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  I might have been beaten by just to be just at Eugene.

• 8:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yes, that's too bad. Sorry about that.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Oddly by sting.

• 8:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, just our topic today is salt. Who would have thought that salt could be so important in the history of the world? And I could not do this alone, and not that I don't love you, Eugene, but I had to bring in some more ammo here. And so-

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Really, because I am a salt expert.

• 8:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We comb the halls of the American Museum of Natural History, where we have an entire department of anthropology. And guess who I found there? I found Peter Whiteley. Peter, welcome to StarTalk Radio.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Thanks very much. Great to be here.

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're an anthropologist specializing in North American natives.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Native North Americans, yes, especially the Hopi and Zuni and other pueblos in the southwest.

• 9:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I brought you on, because salt is not just something you put in your diets. Salt was, is a strategic commodity for people who can't just go to the grocery store and pick it up.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Well, in the southwestern pueblos, it was very much of a commodity that people traded back and forth, and that goes back 3,000 or 4,000 years. So, in the particular places where they find it, like Zuni Salt Lake or the Mansano Salines east of the Sandia Mountains, they found examples of that salt 300 or 400 miles away in the archaeological record.

• 9:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hundreds of miles. So, they would go get it.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And, for example, Hopis still have a salt pilgrimage that they go on to the bottom-

• 9:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Still, as in 2000-

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Still to this day.

• 9:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To this day.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Which one of us will tell them about Costco?

• 9:50Speaker 03

  And very recently, they used to go to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and they still go to Zuni Salt Lake to get salt.

• 9:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so that's right, because those of you who are up on your geology know, you might ask, well, where does salt come from? Where's a good place? Well, one way is salt water, right? You get a salt water, either a huge lake that had become salty over the years, or ocean. And all you need is to corral off a piece of it and let the sun sort of-

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Corral a piece of the ocean. Oh. I see what you're saying, yeah.

• 10:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You let a tide bring in some water and it comes out, but you trap some of the water as it comes in. And some lakes are large enough that they became salty over the years.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Salt Lake for one, just a big easy.

• 10:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a low hanging fruit there, yeah.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Baltic Sea, a big lake.

• 10:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there are ways to actually make it. And in my interview with Mark Kalansky, that we're slotting into this show, he tells us some stories about how you find salt and how you make it and where you get it from. So let's check it out.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  The cheapest, most efficient way to make salt, if you live in a sunny climate, is to just take seawater, dam it off into pounds and let it sit there in the sun and eventually all the water will evaporate. It may take a year, but you have a lot of different holding tanks which you rotate, so there's always one that's at crystallization. This is a very efficient, very old way of making salt that hasn't changed in thousands of years and requires very little investment and attracts beautiful birds.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does that mean all salt is sea salt?

• 11:28Speaker 02

  No, although the majority of table salt is sea salt, which is something Americans don't understand because in America it's not. Americans eat mostly rock salt. There's only a few places left that produce sea salt in the US. That wasn't always true, but for one reason or another, most of the sea salt places have gone out of business and...

• 11:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know the difference between rock salt and sea salt. How do you just make rock salt? Don't you need a seawater to make rock salt?

• 11:55Speaker 02

  No, you need a place underground that has salt and a shovel.

• 12:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you mine the salt?

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. Well, there's two ways of doing it. The salt deposits that are under the earth, you can either go down there and mine it like you would any other mineral, or you can flood it and pump the water out, which will come out as brine, and then evaporate the brine like you would sea salt.

• 12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what you're saying geologically is that the minable salt was once salty water deposit where the water had evaporated and left the salt behind.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, most likely, these are all places that were ocean at one time. And there's huge deposits in North America and in Europe and in Asia. There's salt under most of the Great Lakes area going, you know, all the way from the plains to upstate New York.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Remind me, are the Great Lakes salty or not? At what point are you big enough to become salty?

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Well, bigger than the Great Lakes. I think at the point at which you're an ocean. You know, this is something that hasn't ever been completely worked out about why seas are salty. It's a little bit mysterious. But the Great Lakes, although there are salt beds under the earth all around the Great Lakes, the Great Lakes are freshwater.

• 13:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Peter Whitley, I got you in this show from the American Museum of Natural History. Your Hopi Indians would, so they wouldn't create salt by drying up salt water. You're telling me they actually found salt in the mountains?

• 13:27Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, the bottom of the Grand Canyon and then at the Salt Lake that's not too far away from Zuni Pueblo, about 50 miles away.

• 13:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the Great Salt Lake in Utah?

• 13:35Speaker 03

  Uh, no, not that one. That's even further away.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Salt Lake Two?

• 13:39Speaker 03

  This is a junior version of that.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Was it also called Salt Lake?

• 13:44Speaker 03

  It's called Zuni Salt Lake.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Okay, well, as long as they add in an extra word.

• 13:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have an embarrassing urban story to tell you. I was flying to California and we're flying over Utah, but I wasn't thinking that at the time. I was just looking out the window. And so this huge white area, and I said to myself, wow, that looks like a salt residue, like from a lake that might have been there. That looks like, of course, we're flying over Salt Lake City. I mean, I deduced from first principles of science that that was the Great Salt Lake. But it was obviously that. I mean, once I thought about it, but, but there I was pumping my geological knowledge into.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Is that how you fly over the Grand Canyon? You're like, this is a very, very big canyon. It feels almost grand in its canyon-essness.

• 14:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so other great deposits. So we have obviously the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and you have your, your Salt Lake Two version, yes? And of course, the Dead Sea in Israel.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, where you can sit up in.

• 14:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, yes.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  You can sit in it. Like, it's so salty, you can sit in it.

• 14:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have you tried walking on it, though?

• 14:53Speaker 01

  I, I'm oddly weird. It's weird. I can walk on it. I didn't want to spook people when I was there.

• 15:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't want to fool people into thinking

• 15:02Speaker 01

  By magic.

• 15:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're someone other than

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can walk on it, but I, but it's purely scientific.

• 15:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You chose not to. So what gets me is that, of course, it's called the Dead Sea because there were no fishes in it. But that's more a measure of the fact that they didn't have a microscope because there are microbes everywhere, wherever you have liquid water in the world. So it's a, it's a scientific limitation that it got called the Dead Sea. And also, of course, you, uh, you know, there's a, near Detroit. Four hundred million years ago, there is a, Michigan at the time was warm and there was, there was a shallow sea. And when the water dried up, it left one of the world's largest salt deposits. And so mining continues to this day in those mines.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  In near Detroit?

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Near Detroit, yes.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the shafts go down more than a thousand feet below the surface just to get the salt. I mean, this is extraordinary, the, the, the, the extent that people go to, to recover this stuff. So, so, so you're, you're a hopi tribe, so they, they would get the salt. They knew they needed the salt.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And they would, uh, they went off on long expeditions, uh, which were really ritual pilgrimages. Some of them, especially to, uh, to those two places I've mentioned, they have to go through all sorts of ritual preparations. And it's associated with an initiation, uh, and so on. So they, it's a very arduous trek down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

• 16:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But somebody had to, somebody had to go that far to begin with and find it.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  And then they passed the information along. Are you saying it's basically like a salt bar mitzvah?

• 16:29Speaker 03

  And, and if you like to think of it that way, yes.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  I would like that. And I'm going to, and I'm gonna tell people that's what you said.

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's, that's your next gift at the bar mitzvah.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, not the, not the eighteen dollars, but packets of salt.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  But the information that you were referring to was widely known and shared among prehistoric peoples in the greater southwest. So they all knew where those places were. And they, you know, sacralized it too. There are their salt deities associated with those places, goddesses and gods and so on.

• 16:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To sacralize is to make it a deity. I like that word. That's my first time I've heard that word.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  It's the first time I've heard it.

• 17:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sacralize.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  But it's not gonna be the last.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Maybe I just invented it.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  I'm gonna hear it later when I tell people about it.

• 17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, he just said he might have just invented it.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  That's fine.

• 17:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I mean, my list here is long about all these cultures going back thousands of years. You know, the Chinese in 6,000 B.C. would harvest dry beds along the salty, how do you pronounce this, Lake Yuchin, Yuchin?

• 17:22Speaker 01

  I like that you're asking me. Uh, no, Neil, close, though. That sounds fine. Sounds fine to me.

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Celts were mining rock salt in the Austrian Alps as far back as 700 B.C. I mean, this goes on and on. Peter? Yeah, it's global. So what gets me is how people know that they need the salt. Why did they know they need the salt, but the people who are getting scurvy for not having vitamin C didn't know they needed vitamin C?

• 17:51Speaker 01

  They eventually found out. I mean, it's trial and error. Everyone's dying and then it's like, oh, we should get some salt.

• 17:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, we gotta wind down this segment, but when we come back, let's learn more about where salt comes from and what its effect is on the history of cultures in the world. Its geopolitical influence knows no bounds. I'm here with Eugene Mirman, my favorite stand-up comedian, one of my favorites.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  No, too late.

• 18:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Peter Whiteley, anthropologist, American Museum of Natural History. You'll be right back.

• 18:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I am Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host. You know, you can find StarTalk on the web at stargtloradio.net. Not only that, you can download us as an iTunes podcast. And we are in the Twitterverse. What other handle but, of course, at StarTalk Radio. Co-host this week, Eugene Mirman. Eugene, good to have you back in studio. And you know, we're orbiting the show on the subject of salt.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And an interview that I conducted with Mark Kurlansky, author of Salt: A World History. And we got into discussing, that's a book about everything about salt, stuff you never thought existed or was true.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  About salt.

• 19:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About salt.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  The secrets of salt.

• 19:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The secrets of salt.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  The working title of that book. No one but me knows that.

• 19:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he and I discussed some surprising cultural beliefs involving salt. Let's check it out.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  I have spent a lot of time working in Haiti, so I already knew that salt was used to cure zombies. Which might be where-

• 19:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To cure zombies or kill zombies?

• 19:26Speaker 02

  No, to cure zombies. Yeah, because salt takes away evil.

• 19:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so in a ritualistic way, salt has-

• 19:33Speaker 02

  You can tell if somebody has been zombified, you can bring them back to normal with salt.

• 19:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how do you apply the salt? You sprinkle it on them with a salt shaker?

• 19:42Speaker 02

  I'm not sure, I have to say, I haven't done it. But, there is this association with salt preventing evil and curing evil, because it stops rotting. So, in Japanese theater, the stage is sprinkled with salt, to chase away bad spirits. And, there are lots of examples of salt used for that. Salt, in many cultures, is brought to a new home for good luck.

• 20:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's with the salt over the shoulder?

• 20:10Speaker 02

  The problem with spilling salt, is a Middle Eastern thing, comes up a lot in Judaism, and in Islam. And that is related to the ability of salt to preserve things. So it seals a bargain. So, for instance, in Judaism, salt is a symbol of sealing what's called the covenant, the agreement between God and Jews. So, if you spill salt, it's like the covenant has been broken, and so you have to do something about that. So you get rid of it, chuck it over your shoulder. If you look closely, in the painting of The Last Supper, you will see that there is a spilled salt cellar on the table by Judas.

• 20:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I never knew that.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  That table's got all sorts of interesting details in it.

• 20:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eugene, did you know there was salt on the table of The Last Supper?

• 21:01Speaker 01

  I did not know that. I didn't know that you could cure zombies with salt. And I wonder how it's ever been tried practically.

• 21:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, plus, I mean, but it's good to know, because of all the apocalypses, the asteroid, you know, we can deflect an asteroid, virus, we can find a cure, but the zombie apocalypse, that was gonna be an unbeatable one. But, but salt is it, totally.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  When he was gonna say odd uses for salt, I was really hoping that somebody would think that salt could get you pregnant. You can't have everything.

• 21:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have in studio one of our special guests, Peter Whiteley. He's a curator of ethnology, I think is the official title there, at the American Museum of Natural History. He's a cross-department colleague of mine, actually. And thanks for coming in. He's an expert on

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 21:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  the culture of the Hopi tribes and other sort of southwest Native American cultures. And apparently salt was a big deal to them.

• 21:52Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yes. Because since they have to go so far to get it, it achieved a great deal of importance in their culture.

• 22:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So more than just the nutritional value of the stuff?

• 22:03Speaker 03

  Exactly. So it became symbolically valued, and there are deities who are named after salt. There are salt goddesses and salt gods and so.

• 22:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's the Epsom salt deity, I guess.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Don't think I heard about that one.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  How far would they walk? Did you say 50 miles or more?

• 22:21Speaker 03

  50 miles and more. The distance to the Grand Canyon from the Hopi mesas is about 100 miles.

• 22:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So why not just move there? I mean, the Native Americans were known to be nomadic in many ways.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Well, that's right. There are some.

• 22:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would move to where the salt was. Excuse me. That's what I would do.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  That's a good plan.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  There are, of course, Native peoples who live at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, like they have a supai. And in the past.

• 22:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You say that like that was just so obvious that what an idiot.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Some people do. But there's not room for everybody, so some people like to walk. Plus, it's like, if you move there, then you get rid of the spiritual meaningfulness. That's why we don't live at Disney World, we walk to it.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Or it would have no meaning to it.

• 23:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess. The pilgrimage gives it meaning.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 23:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. This goes way back. I mean, it was a commodity for a while. Was it also a commodity among the Native American tribes?

• 23:11Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So even today, you'll find Zunis who will bring Zuni salt to Hopi, and they will exchange it for the same measure of ground blue cornmeal. That goes back a long, long way.

• 23:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Again.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  And that's a symbolic thing that they're doing.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  Well, it's a nutritional thing, too, but it represents the contributions that each have to each other's.

• 23:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Again, Eugene, they haven't found Costco.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Well, no, what I'm asking is this is more of like a spiritual, like a recognition of each other's value more than it is like, we need blue corn meal. This is the only way we can do it.

• 23:43Speaker 03

  Well, that's right. And there's a special celebration of this particular kind of salt that hopis call it by a particular term, ba ängä, which means literally water salt. And that's something that they value more highly than what you get from Costco.

• 23:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what's weird? You look back, you look back, Chinese emperors had a salt monopoly and the Venetian government controlled the price and export of salt through its ports, through the lagoon. And the Erie Canal was called the ditch that salt built because it was financed by a tax on salt. I mean, it's amazing. Just you go down this list and Romans salted their vegetables and hence the word salad, salad for salt. And the salary comes from the word salt?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  You now have reached where it sounds like it's like an Illuminati conspiracy about salt. Where like, did you know everywhere in history, salt was there making decisions?

• 24:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was there.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Voting for the president, salt.

• 24:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, more of my interview with Mark Kralansky, the author of Salt, and my in-studio guest, Peter Whiteley. We'll be right back.

• 24:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm here with my co-host Eugene Mirman and a special in-studio guest, Peter Whiteley. He's a curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History. And today's topic is salt, salt as a cultural geopolitical force.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I have slotted in here an interview that I had in my office with Mark Kralansky. And he wrote the book, Salt: A World History. And he told me how salt contributed to the science of geology, which I hadn't thought about, but in retrospect, clearly that would be the case. If you care where your salt is, you're going to learn about what Earth did to get it there and what you're going to have to do to get it from the Earth. And also what role salt, what role geology played in devaluing salt itself. So let's check another clip out from that interview with Mark Kralansky.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  The whole science of geology grew up on salt. Geology was basically the science of finding salt.

• 25:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a sec. How does the need for geologists to help you find salt compare with the need for geologists to help people find iron or any other valuable ore?

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Well, it's very much the same thing. It was a very valuable ore, and that's why this science grew up looking for it. Until the beginning of the 20th century, and then a discovery was made that there was a relationship between salt and oil. The reason for this relationship is that very solid deposits of salt, which are called salt domes, are impenetrable. So, organic material that pushes up against salt won't go any further and it'll be trapped there, and that's how oil is made. When this was discovered, originally in Pennsylvania and then in Texas, the science of geology

• 26:47Speaker 02

  became about looking for salt so that you could find oil. And went back to all of these places in the Middle East where salt domes had been discovered and found oil. And today, geology is very much focused on finding oil.

• 27:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that only values the oil, it doesn't devalue the salt?

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Well, it did devalue the salt because it stepped up the search for salt. And it was discovered that there was just much, much more salt in the earth than anybody had ever imagined. Just these huge, huge deposits. I mean, from Ireland, across northern England into Scandinavia, from eastern France, across Germany and Austria into Poland, you know, from Detroit to Syracuse. It's just huge. So, that, for one thing, lessened the value of salt. But, at the same time, refrigeration and freezing were being developed. Which is actually my next book.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  I'm working on a book, a biography of Clarence Berzai. Clarence Berzai ruined the salt industry by developing commercial freezing.

• 27:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Peter, do these Native American tribes, today, part of the salt was nutritional, but also to, was it, it was also to preserve food over the winter months, and, but there are other ways to preserve today, and, and you're, you studied the relatively recent history of these tribes, why are they still doing it the old fashioned way? Just put them in a condo and give them a refrigerator?

• 28:16Speaker 03

  Well, they, they like the way it tastes, they like that, that particular kind of salt that I was talking about, but of course, they have many other methods of preserving meat and fish and so forth in, in the past, as well as in the present, so you'd get, get deer meat and smoke it, or dry it, or clams and salmon and halibut on the, on the northwest coast, they spent many hours drying these in smoke houses and so forth, especially, especially for that purpose.

• 28:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I have in-laws from the Pacific Northwest, and, you know, there's a whole culture of the dried, the dried meat, and it tastes great, and it's very, and it's very high calorie, actually, and so you don't need much of it to, to keep you going through the day.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's great stuff.

• 28:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the, what I find interesting is just how salt had all these secondary effects on the rest of the conduct of cultures, and that's extraordinary, and, and is, what I, what I wonder, though, is, has salt been devalued in the, in the Native American community because of its, the full access? Are those deities still operating in the cultures? The deities you spoke of in an earlier segment?

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Because of all the salt domes in Europe.

• 29:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  He was like, they're all over France and Ireland.

• 29:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that was like, like, the, like, the, the military map of, of Napoleon.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, had all the salt, and then also in Detroit. I'm glad they have something, even if it's salt.

• 29:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Napoleon's last stand in Detroit.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  I think traditionally oriented people still pay attention to those things, and again, they do value the, the native salt more than the commercial salt, very much so into the, into the present.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Is it, is it actually a better quality?

• 29:53Speaker 03

  I think it tastes better, and Hopis talk about it, there's Pasquale, much more flavorful, much, much sweeter than the commercial salt.

• 30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It sounds like you speak Hopi, we'll have to get back to that after this segment.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  A little time.

• 30:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a little bit, I will, will, and you speak Klingon, don't you?

• 30:09Speaker 01

  I speak Russian.

• 30:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll get back, when we come back on StarTalk Radio, more on the topic of salt. Right back.

• 30:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm here in studio with Eugene Merman and a special guest, an ethnograph-- curator of ethnography. Did I get that right? Yes. Yes, Peter Whitley at the American Museum of Natural History specializing in southwest Native Americans of the southwest, the relatively recent history that they've enjoyed. And this topic is salt and what role it's played in cultures and how they've treated each other and how they've developed. And we also have clips from an interview, we have the last of several clips, of my interview with Mark Kurlansky, the author of "Salt: A World History."

• 31:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why don't we start off with that clip where he talks about salt not simply as being important for your survival, but it was so important for survival that in fact it became-- Some people married it. It became a strategic commodity. Let's check it out. Tell me, the history of war and salt, is that a book unto itself?

• 31:25Speaker 02

  In many ways, actually, because salt was also used to cauterize wounds, so an army that didn't have salt was in trouble. But you get examples like the Union Army in the Civil War. The Union Army had a strategy of preventing the South from getting salt. They couldn't get northern salt because there was an embargo, and wherever they found a salt work, they destroyed them. Sometimes they went back repeatedly and destroyed them. So that the South was in desperate shortage of salt during the entire Civil War, which created a food shortage in wintertime.

• 31:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, so the control of salt became a major military tactic?

• 32:04Speaker 02

  Yes, and salt has often been regarded as strategic in British government policy. It tells you something about the British government. They were always more concerned with salt as a strategic commodity than they were with it as a commercial commodity. Queen Elizabeth I warned the English people of their dangerous dependency, exact quote, "dangerous dependency on French sea salt."

• 32:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, salt of yesterday is oil of today.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  That's right. You know, when you look at salt and oil, there's a great lesson there. It's actually one of the secret reasons why I wrote the book. What you think is valuable and what you're willing to fight and die for, is it really valuable? Value is an illusion and it shifts all of the time. And I am absolutely certain that someday, oil will be worth about what salt is worth today.

• 32:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some wishful thinking there.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  It's certainly possible, but it doesn't mean at the time, you shouldn't go to tons of wars over oil and salt.

• 33:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I liked, I'd forgotten that, yes, you can use salt to quarterize wounds. And of course, Rambo did that.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  I still do it. If I get into a knife fight, I go right to some salt.

• 33:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, was it Rambo? No, no, he actually took the gunpowder out of a bullet. And ignited it in the wound in his side to quarterize the wound. So that was, that was the manly thing that he did.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wouldn't do that. I would just put salt on it. I'm not a lunatic.

• 33:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this goes way back for the military. The Roman army was sometimes paid in salt. And the origin, origin of the world's sal- of the word salary.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Salary, salad.

• 33:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And salads.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  All of it, all of it.

• 33:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, and of course.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Sally was a very salty lady.

• 33:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course, the expression is he worth his, worth his weight in salt, you know?

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what's odd, because when I first learned of salt, I had heard that it like gave you high blood pressure and killed you. So when someone said he's the salt of the earth, it's like, ooh, you must not like the person. I came way out of, out of sync with when, when all of this was, all this vocabulary was established. And of course, one of, one of the major causes, there's several of course, but one of the major causes of the French Revolution was the salt tax. We never talk about that because we can't even picture it. We can't even think about it.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  I think we can picture it.

• 34:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you know that the French prisons were full of people convicted of salt smuggling?

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Salt smuggling? Oh, trying to avoid being, salt taxes?

• 34:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what we do that today.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  There was also, tea was also very important. I mean, I, I, I guess I think it's perfectly reasonable that salt was so important.

• 34:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of the first things they did at the end of the revolution was to spend the salt tax. And of course, famously portrayed in the film Gandhi, but what Gandhi actually did was one of his steps to fight for India's independence from Great Britain was the. He was concerned about his policies concerning salt. And then the, what was that, that March to the Sea? Where he made salt without the oversight of the British? And that was viewed as almost a, as a strong act of defiance. And here we look at it and say, what's he doing? He's making salt. What do you care? British?

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Let him have some salt. Whoever consult, controls the salt, controls the world. A movie I'm going to be working on.

• 35:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Peter, we're running short on time. Any concluding comments you have about this whole business?

• 35:17Speaker 03

  Well, I think that, that concept of salt being a strategic resource is very widely present. I'm thinking, for example, of some societies in Papua New Guinea, where there are specialized salt producers and salt makers. They have a, you know, they'll be, they'll have a high role in, in the local hierarchy. And they get to be responsible for trading salt in a very controlled fashion among different groups of neighboring tribes.

• 35:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's, it's still going on. It's still there.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 35:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Still there. And, and, and like I say, it would be interesting if oil one day became the salt of the past.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Yes. And I can't wait for a new thing to replace it that we go to war over. I just hope I get to control it.

• 36:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we got to wrap up this first hour of StarTalk. There's a lot more to discover in part two of our show about the science of salt. And in that second hour, that's when we get into the health considerations of salt and what it means to us physiologically. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. Eugene, thanks for being in this first hour. And Peter Whitley, thanks for joining us in this first hour of StarTalk Radio. StarTalk is brought to you in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. As always, I'm compelled to tell you that until next time, keep looking up. Neil deGrasse Tyson.