Pod Insights This Podcast Will Kill You Ep 194 Salt Part 1: The Seasoning About this episode Have you ever thrown a pinch of spilled salt over your left shoulder? Or said to someone “well, take his opinion with a grain of salt”? Or looked up the potential salary of a job listing? Salt is so deeply embedded in our cultures, our languages, our history as a species that we often take its influence for granted. We may forget (or perhaps we never knew) how much history is held within the unassuming yet ubiquitous salt shaker. In the first installment of this two-parter on everyone’s favorite seasoning, we delve deep into some salt lore. When did humans start to ramp up their salt intake? Why was salt such a big deal? Which places are named for salt? When did we start worrying about how much sodium we were eating? Tune in for a fun, fact-filled episode that’ll forever change the way you think about salt.
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Transcript 0:01 Speaker 00 This is exactly right.
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1:03 Speaker 02 Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:35 Speaker 03 The so-called Lick Women is made in this manner. The intestines of fish are thrown into a vessel and salted. Small fish, either the best smelt, or small mullet, or sprats, or wolffish, or whatever is deemed to be small, are all salted together and shaken frequently, and are fermented in the sun. After it has been reduced in the heat, garam is obtained from it in this way. A large, strong basket is placed into the vessel of the aforementioned fish, and the garam streams into the basket. In this way, the so-called liquevin is strained through the basket when it is shaken up. The remaining refuse is alec. Next, if you wish to use the garam immediately,
2:19 Speaker 03 that is to say, not ferment it in the sun, but to boil it, you do it this way. When the brine has been tested, so that an egg, having been thrown in, floats, if it sinks, it is not sufficiently salty, and throwing the fish into the brine in a newly-made earthenware pot and adding in some oregano, you place it on a sufficient fire until it is boiled, that is, until it begins to reduce a little. Some throw in boiled-down must, unfermented wine. Next, throwing the cooled liquid into a filter, you toss it a second and a third time through the filter until it turns out clear. After having covered it, store it away.
3:46 Speaker 03 So, um, did you like that?
3:49 Speaker 01 What is happening?
3:51 Speaker 03 At-home instructions to make this fishy, salty, fishy sauce called garam that's like, was very popular in ancient Rome. That recipe comes from, I mean, the original recipes are probably hundreds of years earlier, but that one comes from 900 C.E. From a Greek agricultural manual.
4:16 Speaker 01 I have so many questions.
4:18 Speaker 03 Um, like what?
4:25 Speaker 01 What? Why?
4:29 Speaker 03 I mean, who doesn't love a little salty sauce on there?
4:32 Speaker 01 A little sa- so it's the sauce, so you're not gonna eat the fish, it's like the sauce part that you're keeping?
4:38 Speaker 03 I mean, it's, it's also like made from fishy.
4:42 Speaker 01 Fishy, you're salting the fish, but it's this, it's the filter, it's the filtrate that you're keeping?
4:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, but I imagine it, it tastes fishy still.
4:51 Speaker 01 Quite fishy.
4:51 Speaker 03 Yeah.
4:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:52 Speaker 03 Yeah.
4:52 Speaker 01 It's like, um, fish sauce.
4:56 Speaker 03 I, I, I, I don't know what it tastes like, but I, I mean, yeah.
5:00 Speaker 01 Should we try it?
5:01 Speaker 03 I would love to. I love fish sauce, so.
5:03 Speaker 01 Me too.
5:04 Speaker 03 Could be good. Um, yeah, this is gonna be a couple of weird episodes.
5:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm really excited about it.
5:13 Speaker 03 Hi, I'm Erin Welsh.
5:15 Speaker 01 And I'm Erin Omen Updike.
5:16 Speaker 03 And this is, this podcast will kill you.
5:19 Speaker 01 It's getting weird, but we're talking about salt.
5:21 Speaker 03 Salts.
5:22 Speaker 01 Salt.
5:23 Speaker 03 This all started.
5:24 Speaker 01 For two whole episodes?
5:25 Speaker 03 Two episodes. Honestly, though, like, I, I think it ended up, it started, we, we've been through a roller coaster of feelings about salt throughout the process, the making of. Um, it started because I was like, I bought the book Salt, I found it at a thrift store, and I was like, I've been wanting to read this book for a while. Um, and I was like, I basically strong-armed you into doing two episodes on salt.
5:50 Speaker 01 That's accurate.
5:51 Speaker 03 And then I was like, I don't wanna do this anymore. And then you were like, no, I found a good story, let's do this. And I was like, okay. And then I was like, oh, cool, actually, salt is really interesting.
6:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, really, we, we went back and forth several times, um, had some regrets, came through it.
6:09 Speaker 03 Yeah. I think we'll have no regrets at the end of it.
6:12 Speaker 01 No, I'm already, like, really stoked for it. For today.
6:18 Speaker 03 Uh, I am too. I am too. We do have some business to get out of the way first.
6:24 Speaker 01 Yeah. Oh, should we like warn people what these two episodes are gonna be about?
6:27 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah, that's probably a good idea.
6:29 Speaker 01 FYI.
6:29 Speaker 03 Yeah. The first episode, so today what I'm gonna be talking about is kind of the historical aspects of salt. Like, why, when did we start using it as much as we did? And some, just like, honestly, you're gonna be well-equipped to hit up the next trivia night if there are any questions about salt, I hope.
6:48 Speaker 01 I love that. I'm really, I hope there's a whole salt-based section in your next trivia day.
6:56 Speaker 03 Wouldn't that be, if there is, please let us know.
6:58 Speaker 01 That would be so great.
6:59 Speaker 03 And then you, next episode, Erin, tell them what you're gonna be talking about.
7:03 Speaker 01 I'm gonna talk about salt and our health.
7:06 Speaker 03 There you go.
7:06 Speaker 01 Broadly, very, very broadly speaking.
7:09 Speaker 03 I'm excited for this because I feel like there is so much noise.
7:14 Speaker 01 Yes.
7:15 Speaker 03 Okay.
7:19 Speaker 01 But you're right, we have some business first.
7:21 Speaker 03 Quarantiny time.
7:23 Speaker 01 It's quarantine time.
7:23 Speaker 03 I love how it's turned from like, a fun thing that we do, to business.
7:27 Speaker 01 It is business.
7:28 Speaker 03 The business portion of it. We're drinking grains of salt.
7:33 Speaker 01 Grains of salt.
7:34 Speaker 03 Because there's a lot of the history of salt that you should take with a grain of salt, and there's definitely aspects of the current salt debate that you should take some grains of salt with.
7:45 Speaker 01 Yeah. There you go. Or maybe not. Ayy.
7:49 Speaker 03 Or not. And the grains of salt is based on a cocktail that, you know, has been established for a while that has salt in the name. It's called the Salty Dog.
8:00 Speaker 01 The Salty Dog.
8:01 Speaker 03 Which we also could have been.
8:02 Speaker 01 Have we done this before?
8:03 Speaker 03 Maybe.
8:04 Speaker 01 It's fine.
8:05 Speaker 03 It's fine.
8:06 Speaker 01 We're calling it something new.
8:07 Speaker 03 Yeah. I feel like after 100 something episodes, we are allowed to repeat if we.
8:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:13 Speaker 03 If we try our hardest not to.
8:15 Speaker 01 We can do whatever we want.
8:16 Speaker 03 It's grapefruit juice and either vodka or gin, whatever your pick, and a salted rim.
8:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:23 Speaker 03 It's pretty simple.
8:25 Speaker 01 Pretty simple, pretty delish.
8:26 Speaker 03 Yeah.
8:27 Speaker 01 We'll post the full recipe on our website. This podcast will kill you. Nope, we don't do that anymore.
8:31 Speaker 03 We're gonna try though, Erin.
8:33 Speaker 01 We're gonna try.
8:33 Speaker 03 It's on my to-do list.
8:35 Speaker 01 Our website, thispodcastwillkillyou.com, and all of our social medias where you will definitely see it there.
8:40 Speaker 03 Yes.
8:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:41 Speaker 03 Yeah. Also on our website, you can find all sorts of things from transcripts to links to our bookshop.org affiliate page, our Goodreads lists. You can find links to merch. You can find, oh, man.
8:55 Speaker 01 Bloodmobile, who does the music from all of our episodes.
8:59 Speaker 03 A link to a firsthand account form, a contact us form, stuff like that.
9:05 Speaker 01 Everything.
9:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
9:09 Speaker 03 Anything else or can we just get started?
9:12 Speaker 01 Tell me about salt, Erin.
9:14 Speaker 03 I can't wait to. Okay, let's take a quick break and then I'll get right to it.
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11:00 Speaker 03 Erin, I love salt.
11:03 Speaker 01 I know, I know you do.
11:04 Speaker 03 Like, you've seen me eat French fries. Like, I'm salting an already very salty food. It's not good. Or is it?
11:14 Speaker 01 Or is it?
11:14 Speaker 03 I guess we'll find out more next week. No, I think it's not good. I think it's bad. But despite knowing this, despite knowing that it's probably not great that I'm salting things and eating a lot of salt, I want more of it. I feel like I need salt. I crave salt. And it might occasionally be the case that I do actually need to replenish some salt. Like, maybe I do a long run in the heat or I'm working outside all day and I'm sweating out lots of salt. But in general nowadays, we eat a whole lot more salt than we need to make up for.
11:51 Speaker 01 Right.
11:51 Speaker 03 Like, we're able to make up the salt that we lose pretty easily.
11:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:56 Speaker 03 But what does enough salt mean? Like, what does it mean in a biological sense? I mean, and I'm not going to answer that question, but the answer does vary from person to person, I think, in general. And there are guidelines that also help to determine what enough is. And these guidelines have, of course, undergone some shifts in the past few decades. In his book, Salt: A World History, author Mark Kurlansky writes that the average human contains about 250 grams of salt.
12:30 Speaker 01 I love that statistic.
12:31 Speaker 03 Right, which is enough to fill, just to visualize this, a couple, a few standard-sized salt shakers.
12:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:39 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:39 Speaker 01 Like the little ones you have on your diner table.
12:42 Speaker 03 Salty, yeah.
12:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:43 Speaker 03 Whenever we lose salt, which we're constantly doing through bodily functions like sweating or peeing, we need to consume more to replenish what we've lost. If we don't, in extreme cases, we do run the risk of our bodies shutting down, basically. Salt is essential for life. And when I say salt, I am referring to the dietary salt that we think of, mostly sodium chloride, the stuff that we consume, not salt as in like the broad chemical term for when an acid combines with a base.
13:12 Speaker 01 I have like the same disclaimer in the next episode, too.
13:18 Speaker 03 Like just, I know someone's gonna be like, um, excuse me, salt is actually quite a broad term. Um, yeah, I know, but I'm talking about salt, like.
13:25 Speaker 01 Talking about sodium, brah.
13:27 Speaker 03 Sodium, yeah, exactly, yeah. I also don't know how you would approach a history of like salt in the broad chemical sense.
13:36 Speaker 01 I don't know, you'd learn about ions and.
13:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, I guess, sure. I mean, but to be honest, like, I'm also still grappling with how you approach a history of table salt, like sodium chloride salt, because it has had and it continues to have such a profound influence throughout so much of our species' evolutionary and written history. Salt has held symbolic and religious significance, it has shaped human settlement, it has led to revolutions, it has been used as a commodity, a currency, and as a medicine. Salt has held the key to some nations' prosperity and the downfall of others. It's some pretty powerful stuff.
14:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, it sounds like it.
14:20 Speaker 03 Right? But now, when you can saunter into any grocery store and pick up a jar of the stuff for pennies, you might not be awestruck by the wonder of salt. In fact, you might instead be shopping for low-sodium alternatives. Like, how can I get less of this stuff?
14:38 Speaker 01 How can I avoid this?
14:39 Speaker 03 Right. But that would blow the minds of time travelers from almost any other point in history prior to the 20th century.
14:47 Speaker 01 Really?
14:48 Speaker 03 Like, what do you mean you don't want salt in your food? What do you mean, salt is so cheap? These days, we don't think twice about whether or not we'll have access to salt. If anything, our primary concern when it comes to salt is how to eat less of it for our health. That wasn't the case for most of human history. One of the things that I love about microhistories is how they always make the case for like, this thing, this subject, this invention, this incident, this one point in history holds the key to everything. It explains everything. But with salt, though, I'm like, kind of convinced.
15:27 Speaker 01 You buy it?
15:28 Speaker 03 I'm buying it. I'm buying it. All animals need salt. How much they need and where they get it from depends on the species or the individual. And next week, Erin, you'll do this, the honor of talking about how much we humans need, maybe, which, as we'll see, is a very contentious issue, much more so than I realized. But for now, I want to tell you where humans got salt and what we did with it, what we used to do with it. Salt occurs naturally in all sorts of forms, right? It's in saltwater, the ocean and seas, in salt springs, in salt deposits underground, like rock salt, in the crusts of dried salty
16:10 Speaker 03 lakes. We can consume or harvest salt directly from these sources, and we can also get salt from eating the things that also take in salt, like, for instance, animals, right? So, early humans got a good proportion of their salt from the wild game that they killed, including both, like, eating, consuming the meat of animals and their blood, like drinking the blood or using the blood to make other sort of dishes.
16:36 Speaker 01 Sausage.
16:37 Speaker 03 Exactly, yeah. Or we got salt from fish or other marine life for those that were living closer to the coasts. But as humans started to settle in larger groups and develop agriculture, diet shifted to include proportionally more grains and vegetables, which are, generally speaking, much lower in salt than animal products. Fortunately, domesticated livestock like sheep, pigs, and cattle followed close behind the development of agriculture, making them a handy, close-by source of salt. One paper I read suggested that livestock domestication was actually helped along because the wild ancestors of these animals were drawn to human settlements by the salt content of human urine.
17:22 Speaker 03 They would be attracted to human settlements.
17:24 Speaker 01 Interesting.
17:25 Speaker 03 Right?
17:26 Speaker 01 So then it made it easier to domesticate them because they're like coming over anyways to lick up our...
17:31 Speaker 03 They're coming over anyway. Maybe they're getting used to humans, you know, like, yeah, yeah.
17:34 Speaker 01 How interesting.
17:35 Speaker 03 I mean, I don't know, and I don't know how you would like actually measure that in any capacity, but yeah.
17:41 Speaker 01 But it's a fun idea.
17:43 Speaker 03 Yeah. And so, and also, I think it's like which animals would be drawn to that. So I mentioned earlier how some animals need more salt than others, or they vary in how they get it. The general rule that I saw mentioned was that carnivores tend to get their salt from their prey because the bodies of animals contain a lot more salt than like grasses and veggies and whatnot. And so herbivores will often supplement with naturally occurring sources of salt, like salt licks. Here's my big reveal, so I have this sweatshirt on.
18:16 Speaker 01 Oh, my God, stop. Did you have like something covering it on purpose?
18:22 Speaker 03 It's a little Post-it that's ramen. It's like, yeah, instant ramen Post-it.
18:26 Speaker 01 That's so good on so many levels.
18:33 Speaker 01 Oh, wait, tell the people where your sweatshirts from.
18:35 Speaker 03 So my sweatshirt is a place that I have taken you, Erin. It is called Big Bone Lick State Historic Site. We called it Big Bone Lick State Park growing up.
18:45 Speaker 01 Big Bone Lick, baby.
18:46 Speaker 03 Big Bone Lick. So this is in northern Kentucky. Yes, that is the actual name of it. Yes, I am repping a sweatshirt that also has woolly mammoth on it.
18:57 Speaker 01 I wish you could see it better. Your mic is in exactly the wrong spot.
19:00 Speaker 03 Can you see it now?
19:01 Speaker 01 Nope. There it is.
19:03 Speaker 03 Check it out. It's rad.
19:06 Speaker 01 It is rad.
19:09 Speaker 03 And it's called Big Bone Lick State Park because there are old salt licks that prehistoric megafauna used to come to for salt. There are so many, lots of fossils of things like mammoth, ground sloths, et cetera, there. And it's known, I'm like, it's so thrilling to talk about Big Bone Lick State Park. It's known as the birthplace of American vertebrate paleontology because of all of these fossils that have been found there. And it's funny, too, a lot of the fossils that were found are actually reside in other countries because it was like in the 1700s and so and so they're all just being shipped out to other places. Yeah, 1800s.
19:46 Speaker 03 But also, it's, I just have to mention, it is in fairly close proximity to the Creation Museum, which I just find particularly a little, you know, rich irony.
19:58 Speaker 01 A little on the nose.
19:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, it is. But also, at Big Bone Lick State Park, State Historic Site, there is an annual salt festival that is held there. I've only been once, but I remember some of the salt-making demonstrations. It's really cool. It happens around mid-October, if I remember correctly. So if you're in the area next year, you should definitely check it out. Anyway, that's my little plug for Big Bone Lick State Park. Yes. There's a putt-putt, the free putt-putt course, we go there all the time. Anyway, back to salt licks and animals and domestication. You can also see this happening now. So for instance, if you, here in Colorado, if you drive up to Mount Blue Sky, often the goats will come and to your cars
20:44 Speaker 03 and lick the salt off of your cars.
20:47 Speaker 01 Interesting.
20:48 Speaker 03 Yeah. And it's not like these, these mountain goats are on their way to domestication, just that animals are drawn to salt. As are humans.
20:57 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
20:58 Speaker 03 Many early human settlements were situated close to sources of salt. You know, salty springs, salty lakes, underground deposits of rock salt. Archaeological evidence has actually been found at Big Bone Lick of early human habitation. Some sources provided a steady supply of salt year round, while others were more subject to the whims of like climate and environment. You can see this with like rising sea levels or falling sea levels, like it changes the access to to salt.
21:29 Speaker 01 To salt.
21:30 Speaker 03 And so having access to a steady source became the primary motivator for salt extraction or mining or refining technologies, which date back thousands of years to at least around 3,000 BCE. Yep.
21:47 Speaker 01 Ten more.
21:47 Speaker 03 And this is in in ancient China mostly.
21:50 Speaker 01 Okay.
21:51 Speaker 03 And those cities or towns or settlements that over centuries had the salt and the technology to produce it, they were the ones that grew that often grew wealthy and powerful as they controlled this valuable commodity. Why did we want so much salt? Like, did we need it?
22:11 Speaker 01 Why was it? Why was it such a valuable commodity?
22:14 Speaker 03 Why? Right, right? Well, we didn't need it in a physiological sense, right? At least as far as I could tell. We needed it because salt has an incredible superpower. It can freeze time.
22:26 Speaker 01 Hmm.
22:27 Speaker 03 Mm hmm. At the basic level, salt balances fluids. It shifts the amount of water from here to there. And if you overload something, like say a fish with salt, that will suck the moisture out of the cells and prevent the growth of microbes since they can't survive in that super salty environment. And so salt is one of our earliest preservatives. Why is this a superpower? Okay, so. Pretend, if you will, that you live 5,000 years ago and you make your living catching and selling fish. So you go out, you cast your nets, you set your lines, whatever it is, however you're
23:08 Speaker 03 catching fish, and then you boat back to shore to peddle your wares. This is pre-refrigeration, pre-ice. Your window for selling that fish is incredibly small, as is your potential customer base. So if you happen to be selling on a day when everyone's got loads of fish and you're like, "Well, you know, why would I buy yours over theirs? I can't eat this much fish." You probably have to drop your prices to be competitive if you're able to sell at all. And if you don't sell anything that day, that means that your labor has been lost and you have to go out the next day and try again. Your income, your livelihood, it depends on the whims of the local market.
23:51 Speaker 03 It's a tenuous life to live. But if you could freeze time, at least for the fish, by adding some salt and slowing its decay, you become a whole lot less tied to the day-to-day shifts in the market. In fact, you're not tied to your local market at all. You could bring your salted fish on long journeys along trade routes. And your fish now has more value overall since it's loaded with this tasty and precious substance. Nor are you tied to the seasonality of some foods. So during those times of scarcity, like overwinter when catch is low and you've eaten through all the food that you've stored for those long months, now you have these frozen-in-time
24:35 Speaker 03 salted fish getting you and your family through. It's amazing.
24:40 Speaker 01 It's pretty incredible. I mean, okay, so I have a, can I ask a question?
24:44 Speaker 03 Sure, of course.
24:45 Speaker 01 So, but- This is like thousands and thousands of years ago. 3000 CE, you said?
24:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, 3000 BCE, yeah.
24:53 Speaker 01 BC. Um, CE.
24:57 Speaker 03 The future, yeah.
24:58 Speaker 01 The future, the year 3000.
25:03 Speaker 01 What, before people figured out salt? First of all, how did they figure it out? Like, how did, how did they figure that out? And also before that, was there any, like, was it ju- you could smoke things? Is that, is that all they had, or?
25:18 Speaker 03 Uh, yeah, actually, that's a good question. I don't know when smoking, like, the relative timing of smoking versus salting.
25:25 Speaker 01 Okay.
25:27 Speaker 03 But also, I mean, smoking takes fuel.
25:30 Speaker 01 Right.
25:30 Speaker 03 As well.
25:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:32 Speaker 03 The extraction of salts also can take a lot of fuel.
25:36 Speaker 01 Okay.
25:37 Speaker 03 But, yeah. Uh, what was your other question? So I don't, I don't know about salting versus smoking. How did they figure? How did people discover salt?
25:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:46 Speaker 03 I mean, I don't know, except for the fact that salt tastes good. Right? So I would imagine it was sort of that.
25:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:55 Speaker 03 That aspect of it. Like, there, do I have this quote here? Yeah, there's a quote from ancient Egypt, from an old papyrus, that reads, "There is no better food than salted vegetables."
26:08 Speaker 01 Huh.
26:08 Speaker 03 I'm inclined to agree.
26:10 Speaker 01 To agree.
26:11 Speaker 03 With that, yeah.
26:13 Speaker 01 How interesting, Erin. It's so weird to think about, like, someone figured out, "Hey, if I, like, boil this water, what's left over is this stuff, and it tastes really good. Oh, by the way, also, it makes my fish last longer. By the way, now I've revolutionized the world."
26:29 Speaker 03 Yeah. Right? I know. And it was a trans- truly transformative idea, especially in regions where climatic shifts shortened the growing or harvesting or hunting or fishing seasons, right? So I used fish as an example, and fish would become, like, the hugest commodity after the 14th century with, like, salted herring and then later cod. But salt was fundamental to the production of so many other. Foods, some of which had been salted for centuries. Pickling, like sauerkraut and other veggies. The salted fish sauce in ancient Rome called garum. Miso paste, soy sauce, cheese, butter. Our dairy products used to contain a lot more salt.
27:12 Speaker 03 So there was a recipe from the 14th century for butter that called for one pound of salt for every 10 pounds of butter.
27:20 Speaker 01 Woo. That's salty butter.
27:23 Speaker 03 I know, I would, I would have loved it.
27:25 Speaker 01 It would be so good spread on some toasted sourdough.
27:30 Speaker 03 Perfection. Bacon, ham, olives. I mean, there are so many things that salt has been added to that helps prolong its shelf life. Right? Salami comes from the word for salted, as does salad.
27:46 Speaker 01 Salad?
27:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think it's like, yeah, salted.
27:49 Speaker 01 That's hilarious.
27:50 Speaker 03 So it's like so many things.
27:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:52 Speaker 03 Salt, food, food and salts was, yeah.
27:56 Speaker 01 Wow.
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29:43 Speaker 05 Learn more about how Cleveland Clinic and IBM are using AI and quantum computing to revolutionize biomedical research at ibm.com/smarttalks.
30:08 Speaker 03 It's easy to love salt, I think. This shows how easy it is to love salt, the number of things that it was added to, and not just for taste, but also for practical purposes, for longevity of the foods. And this utility and love of salt created a tremendous commercial opportunity. Cities that were close to sources of salt or those that produce lots of salted foods grew wealthy on the trade that they conducted. And as a result, global trade overall grew enormously. Salt was used for a whole lot more than just salt curing or even just like adding some seasoning to your meal. It was used to cure leather, clean chimneys, to solder pipes, glaze pottery,
30:51 Speaker 03 and as a medicine for all sorts of ailments. But it was really by reducing seasonal dependence on foods that salt made its mark on human civilizations. I don't call it a superpower lightly. Salt was also held in great importance by many cultures, I think because of the power that it held. It represented purity, incorruptibility, immortality, loyalty, durability, hospitality. You better make sure that you have a salt cellar on the table when you have guests over. Some of these salt cellars too, historically, are just so intricate and beautiful. The Romans actually held salt in such importance that they, salt had to be on the table before
31:36 Speaker 03 any other dish was placed there.
31:38 Speaker 01 Huh.
31:39 Speaker 03 Yeah. It's used in many different religions, offerings, and rituals. It was linked to arousal, and passion, and creativity. It was thought to be important for fertility. It was the essence of life. So think of the phrase, "salt of the earth." According to the Bible, that's what Jesus said to his disciples. "You are the salt of the earth, the best of the human race."
32:05 Speaker 01 Whoa.
32:06 Speaker 03 Right?
32:07 Speaker 01 Pretty big deal.
32:08 Speaker 03 Salt of the earth. It was used to protect from harm. Sprinkle a newborn baby with salt is what you're supposed to do. Sprinkle your herd of cows. Carry a little bag of salt around your neck to ward off evil. Or if you've watched the show Supernatural, there's always a bag of salt.
32:24 Speaker 01 Always salt.
32:25 Speaker 03 Barrier for demons, yep.
32:26 Speaker 01 Protect against demons. Make your witches circles. Hundred percent, salt.
32:30 Speaker 03 Yep. And so to spill salt was considered a bad omen. I mean, you're supposed to throw a little bit of salt over your left shoulder. That was like, that's the least extreme response to a little bit of spilled salt. There are some places where it was like, no, then you do that and you have to crawl under the table and then do that again. It's like this whole step.
32:52 Speaker 01 Wow. How interesting.
32:55 Speaker 03 And that, spilling salt being bad luck, goes back centuries. In Da Vinci's Last Supper, there's a bit of spilt salt in front of Judas Iscariot, indicating that, isn't that wild?
33:08 Speaker 01 I did not know that.
33:09 Speaker 03 Salt.
33:10 Speaker 01 Salt.
33:11 Speaker 03 Yep. Spilling salt could signify the end of a friendship, or at least a quarrel.
33:15 Speaker 01 Oh.
33:16 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm. Friendship was forged in salt. Homer called it a divine substance.
33:25 Speaker 01 Wow.
33:25 Speaker 03 Plato said that it was, quote, "especially dear to the gods." Plutarch wrote that "without salt practically nothing is eatable. Salt is added even to bread and enriches its flavor. Beyond that, salty food aids digestion and it makes any food tender."
33:43 Speaker 01 How interesting, Erin.
33:45 Speaker 03 I know.
33:46 Speaker 01 I'm thinking about all of this in the context of what I'm going to talk about next week, and it just makes it so interesting.
33:53 Speaker 03 It's quite the rebranding of salt, what we've experienced in especially the last 50 years or so.
34:01 Speaker 01 Right, right, right, right, right.
34:04 Speaker 03 I mean, Pliny went so far as to say that, quote, "a civilized life is impossible without salt." End quote.
34:12 Speaker 01 A civilized life is impossible.
34:15 Speaker 03 Impossible.
34:16 Speaker 01 Without salt.
34:17 Speaker 03 Yep. Is it any wonder, then, that those who held the salt held the power? Salt itself was not necessarily rare, right? It was never held as more important or equally valuable as gold. For example, that's sort of like a, I don't know what you call an urban legend. That's like a historical urban legend.
34:36 Speaker 01 A myth?
34:37 Speaker 03 Maybe, yeah, that's enough.
34:38 Speaker 01 I don't know if that's right there, but I have heard that, so I know what you mean by that.
34:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. It was just that it wasn't evenly distributed across a region and it required labor to extract and to move. And so you had to like spend some, it wasn't hard to get. It was just, it wasn't hard to get in the sense that it was rare. It was hard to get in the sense that it required labor and, yeah. And so those who were positioned to transport or produce salt benefited enormously from the taxes enforced on moving huge amounts of the stuff or of salted foods. So in ancient Rome, some of the first great roads were built for salt transportation purposes.
35:17 Speaker 01 Wow.
35:18 Speaker 03 Via Salaria is one of these. It means salt road.
35:21 Speaker 01 Salaria.
35:23 Speaker 03 Uh huh.
35:24 Speaker 01 Wow, I'm learning so much, Sharon.
35:28 Speaker 03 Ancient Rome also had a treasury position, whose job it was to make decisions about salt prices.
35:34 Speaker 01 Wow.
35:36 Speaker 03 Salt occasionally seems to have been used as currency, although not as much as is often suggested. It's another myth. And while the often repeated bit of trivia that Roman soldiers were paid in salt is not true, they were not paid in salt, they were paid in money. The word salary does come from this period, meaning someone paid an allowance to buy salt. So like, if you were paid a salary, it was like, here's your allowance to buy salt. Like, that is sort of where that comes from.
36:06 Speaker 01 Got it. We're not paying you in salt, but we're paying you so you can go buy your salt.
36:09 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly.
36:10 Speaker 01 Yeah. Get your own salt.
36:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, get your own salt. You know that phrase, "not worth his salt"? Meaning someone is not worth what you're paying them.
36:19 Speaker 01 Oh, that's so interesting, Erin.
36:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. I mean, there are salts. There are so, this is what I'm saying. Like, you are equipped now for trivia.
36:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, 100%.
36:31 Speaker 03 You're welcome. More salt sayings, or at least one more. "Take it with a grain of salt", meaning with a healthy dose of skepticism. That seems to have originated from a recipe for an antidote by Pliny the Elder, who, he listed a bunch of things like, "Okay, so you're grinding together walnuts and figs and roux, add a grain of salt", and that was thought to maybe like, aid digestion. And so, over time, that kind of evolved into its current use. People think maybe it's to like, aid digestion of difficult ideas.
37:06 Speaker 01 Interesting.
37:07 Speaker 03 I don't know. I don't know if that's... I feel like some of the salt lore is kind of like, "whatever you want it to be".
37:16 Speaker 01 Right.
37:17 Speaker 03 And so, that's what I want it to be, but...
37:19 Speaker 01 I like that because I feel like, otherwise, when you think about it, you're like, "Why does this phrase not seem to fit with the rest of the salt phrases"?
37:26 Speaker 03 Right. Take it with a grain of... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
37:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, because it's like, "Oh, I'm not, I don't really believe that, so like, take it with a grain of salt", so it's like, if it's more to aid your digestion.
37:35 Speaker 03 Aid the digestion of this difficult idea, yeah.
37:37 Speaker 01 Let's go with it.
37:38 Speaker 03 We'll go with it. Rubbing salt in the wound, for instance. That goes back to the days when salt was sometimes used as a not very effective and extremely painful antiseptic. So it would be like, "Apply some salt to that wound".
37:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:53 Speaker 03 Yeah. Back to the salt mines, meaning having to return to grueling or unpleasant work. That phrase originated in the 1700s and 1800s in Russia when prisoners were often sent to Siberia to work in the salt mines. But, I mean, salt mines were intense places. So here's a quote from 1555 about salt mines in Poland. Quote, "There are mountains in which the salt goes down very deep. Here on the 5th of January, 1528, I climbed down 50 ladders in order to see for myself. And there in the depths observed workers, naked because of the heat, using iron tools
38:35 Speaker 03 to dig out a most valuable hoard of salt from these inexhaustible mines, as if it had been gold and silver." End quote.
38:44 Speaker 01 Ouch.
38:44 Speaker 03 Yeah. Down there, you're so hot, you're naked.
38:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
38:49 Speaker 03 And you're having to chip away salt, like brutal. Yeah.
38:52 Speaker 01 Doesn't sound easy.
38:53 Speaker 03 So these were deeply unpleasant places to work, I would imagine.
38:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
38:56 Speaker 03 And often, you know, the ones who were working there were prisoners or enslaved people, and they were forced to work there as punishment. Okay, so generally speaking, there are two main sources of salt for easy extraction. Salt that's been dissolved in water, like seawater or salty springs. And then there's rock salt, which exists kind of like from that quote, in deposits underground. You can get rock salt out of the earth by mining, and you can get salt out of water by either boiling off the water, leaving salt crystals behind, which used a tremendous amount of fuel. Forests had been devastated in this process. Imagine, like, you can't, you know?
39:35 Speaker 01 Interesting.
39:35 Speaker 03 You're just burning and burning and burning.
39:36 Speaker 01 Just to get, just to get fuel to burn for, to make salt.
39:39 Speaker 03 Yep. I mean, and also, it wasn't like the, getting salt was the only reason for devastation of forests, but like, it helped.
39:48 Speaker 01 They contributed.
39:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. Or there's evaporation, which has the same end result. It just takes a whole lot longer and requires certain circumstances, right?
39:58 Speaker 03 And that is literally the most like surface level explanation of salt production. And that's all I'm gonna give you.
40:04 Speaker 01 Fair.
40:05 Speaker 03 I have though, actually, it's so funny, like some of the memories that emerged, like I was like, oh, my gosh, I've been to the salt festival and I've been to a salt extraction site, historical one in Peru at the salt mines of Maras.
40:17 Speaker 01 Oh.
40:18 Speaker 03 And it's like, yeah, it goes back hundreds of years at least. And it was really fascinating to see these like tiers of salt wells, all fed by like a salty underground spring. And then there's like, they're harvested. I had for a while, like a little baggie of salt from.
40:34 Speaker 01 Did you eat it?
40:35 Speaker 03 I did at some point, and then I don't know what happened to it. I lost it in the move, like one of my thousands of moves.
40:40 Speaker 01 Many moves.
40:41 Speaker 03 Yeah. And, and then there are also, there are lots of other steps and aspects to the extraction or production of salt, you know, things like purification, the different types of salt, the origins, some are more prized than others, some are considered crude or adulterated or like just gross. Salt production was so central to some towns and cities that they took their name from the presence of salt mines. Salzburg in Austria, meaning roughly salt settlement.
41:13 Speaker 03 Salt Coats in Scotland, Saltville in Virginia, Hall in Germany, many towns in England ending with which, like Middlewich, Northwich, Sandwich, Salt, like which is often, which is, from, from what I can tell, which is often tied to like the, like artisan production, like there were like goods that were made there, but a lot of which's towns that end in which are, were like salt towns.
41:40 Speaker 01 They were salt towns. How interesting.
41:43 Speaker 03 Salt production was extremely profitable, as was its transport. In 2000 BCE, the Chinese government became the first to basically create a salt monopoly and to use it to become extremely prosperous, putting taxes on both domestically produced as well as imported salt. And it would be like, I mean, it would be, we can make salt for this amount, we'll charge 10 times that, like that kind of thing. And thousands of years later, Venice did the same thing, first as a producer of salt and then by controlling commerce and supplying it to much of Southern Europe. The Venetians themselves described salt as quote unquote, "the true foundation of our state."
42:26 Speaker 01 Okay.
42:26 Speaker 03 Right. It was like salt made Venice in many ways. And while salt could make a region prosperous, like Venice, in other cases, such strict control over the stuff could lead to unrest. France had long had a salt tax since the 13th century, and, man, people hated this tax. First of all, it was really unevenly applied, and this, like, there could probably be a textbook written about the salt tax.
42:58 Speaker 01 Okay.
42:58 Speaker 03 But it was really unevenly applied, and so some regions were exempt while others weren't. Second, it was kind of a flat tax, so that people were forced to maybe buy a certain amount of salt, even if they didn't need all of it, and pay taxes on it regardless of how much they made. And so it was kind of this, like, unfair tax, because everyone had to pay a certain amount.
43:20 Speaker 01 Okay.
43:20 Speaker 03 If that makes sense. Yeah.
43:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:22 Speaker 03 And, and, salt was really expensive. So, like, the, when people had to buy that, you know, the amount of, that set amount of salt were required to, that would be about one-eighth of a peasant's yearly income. And it was, like, locally very expensive, or, like, within France, so it was, that was 10 times more than it cost just across the border. And so, salt smuggling became a huge thing.
43:51 Speaker 01 Sounds like healthcare in the US. Sorry.
43:53 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yep. And, and so, yeah, people would go across border and smuggle salt back, because they're like, I don't want to buy salt here, it's way too expensive. And then there were, like, designated salt police, who had the right to enter houses to search for smuggled salt based on their own suspicion.
44:13 Speaker 01 Entire salt police?
44:15 Speaker 03 I mean, they probably did more things, but they were like-
44:18 Speaker 01 I like to imagine that all they did was salt.
44:20 Speaker 03 Same. Same. Yeah. Again, there is, like, so much more to the salt, to salt tax. But, it, like, it's, it's so intense, that the Catholic Church even sided with the French government, adding a treatise in 1674 that stated, quote, "For all Christians, smuggling of salt is a mortal sin."
44:43 Speaker 03 End quote. It's ridiculous. If you were caught, it could mean death. Every year, thousands of people were arrested for salt smuggling and either put in the galleys, forced to do labor, or they were hanged.
45:00 Speaker 01 What?
45:00 Speaker 03 Isn't this ridiculous? Yep. One paper I read estimated that the last year before the French Revolution, 3,500 citizens were sentenced to death or the galleys for salt smuggling.
45:15 Speaker 03 And so, salt, because of all of this ridiculousness around salt, it became a symbol of the injustices of the government, of the monarchy. And so, it has been suggested that salt was a contributing factor to the uprising leading to the French Revolution.
45:32 Speaker 01 Wow. Not just the cake thing.
45:35 Speaker 03 Not just the cake. Don't let them eat salt.
45:39 Speaker 01 Don't let, no, they can have cake, no salt.
45:42 Speaker 03 Yep.
45:44 Speaker 01 How interesting, Erin.
45:46 Speaker 03 Isn't that wild? And it's like, probably aspects of that have been exaggerated, but that is what, like, I have citations for these myths, right?
45:56 Speaker 03 But that's not the only revolution where salt has featured prominently. The oppressive British tax and monopoly on salt in India led Gandhi to march to the sea in 1930 in an act of civil disobedience. And eventually, this helped pave the way for Indian independence, ending British colonial rule. So, you know?
46:16 Speaker 01 I love it.
46:17 Speaker 03 I mean, given all of this, like, it is really strange to think about this thing that we probably all take for granted. Salt, as something that created empires, incited revolution, was integral in religious ceremonies, and held such important meaning. For thousands of years, salt was a big deal. From the time of its first widespread production 5,000 years ago to the Industrial Revolution, salt was, if not king, at least one of the major players in shaping human history. And over that time, salt intake went from not very much at all. This is worthy of a larger discussion, but one book estimated that our Paleolithic ancestors
46:59 Speaker 03 consumed less than one gram of salt per day. Today, what is it, like eight and a half grams on average per day?
47:07 Speaker 01 10.
47:08 Speaker 03 10, okay. I saw eight and a half somewhere, but yeah. Dietary or nutritional epidemiology is a challenge. But we went from not very much to orders of magnitude more. And as we added more and more salted foods to our diet, our salt consumption skyrocketed. Some regions that ate a lot of salted fish, like people in Sweden in the 16th century, for example, are estimated, this does not seem right to me, but I read it somewhere, are estimated to have eaten around 100 grams per day.
47:46 Speaker 01 That seems impossible.
47:49 Speaker 03 Maybe that's if you're looking at just the straight salted fish, but if the salt was rinsed off or if the fish were soaked. And so like, I can't imagine it being that much.
48:01 Speaker 01 That would be so salty.
48:03 Speaker 03 I know. It hurts my mouth thinking about it.
48:05 Speaker 01 And like dry thinking about it.
48:07 Speaker 03 Yeah. But in the book, Salt, Kralansky says that Europeans in the 16th to the 18th centuries were taking in about 40 to 70 grams per day. But I've also seen lower estimates around like 18 grams.
48:22 Speaker 01 Okay, that's so interesting, Erin, because I was going to ask you if there were any estimates, because I couldn't find any estimates from like, you know, the last few hundred years. Oh, this is all just such good fodder for next week.
48:35 Speaker 03 It is fodder. But this is, yeah, so even if it's at the lower end of the estimate, like 18 grams, let's say it's 20 grams, that's still double what the average American consumes today, which is actually double than what is recommended. And so we are doing a lot better nowadays, like even though we're told that we're not, we are doing a lot better now than we were a few hundred years ago. Why did salt intake go down? It's not because of health concerns. Let me just get that out of the way. It was because of refrigeration.
49:10 Speaker 01 Oh, that totally makes sense.
49:12 Speaker 03 Right? It blew my mind.
49:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, so everything was way, way, so, okay, there was, let me just.
49:19 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, recap us.
49:20 Speaker 01 So, back in the day, like, when we, humans evolved into humans, and started doing agriculture and all of that initially, we were consuming a minimal amount of salt. We weren't adding salt to our things. We were getting salt just from the places like animals and salt, if it was there, etc.
49:42 Speaker 03 For most of human history, we consumed very little salt, is what it seems, yeah.
49:46 Speaker 01 Then, we figured out, whoa, you can use salt to make things last a lot longer. So, we started eating crap tons of it.
49:55 Speaker 03 Tons of it.
49:56 Speaker 01 So, an unbelievable amount. Then, we invented the refrigerator and we're like, cool, we don't need as much salt.
50:04 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
50:06 Speaker 01 Fascinating.
50:07 Speaker 03 There you go.
50:07 Speaker 01 And now we are today.
50:09 Speaker 03 And now, we are here today, still eating salt, because salt tastes good. I mean, that's like, that's the other thing, is that like, and I know that you're gonna get a little bit into the sort of the the evolution, the salt cravings and stuff like that. But there's a difference between tasting good and like, needing salt for.
50:26 Speaker 01 Correct.
50:27 Speaker 03 But, it is, it seems like, it has been suggested that that we think of salt, like, taste, salt tastes good to us. That's an adaptive trait.
50:37 Speaker 01 Right.
50:38 Speaker 03 Because we would have needed more salt historically, I think. Or we would have been maybe more on the edge.
50:44 Speaker 01 On the tenuousness of it, because we are omnivores, whereas like carnivores don't really have salt. We will talk more about it next week, but yeah, 100%. It's a, it's a, there are reasons why salt tastes so good to us.
50:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, and there are reasons also, I mean, there are reasons that salt tastes good, and so therefore, removing salt from foods, even though it's better for our health, makes people not want to eat those foods, which means that the salt industry. History doesn't want us, doesn't want to remove the salt from foods. Anyway, we'll get to that next week, too. But also, I'm just putting in a plug now for a book club episode that's coming out later this season, all about the history of refrigeration. It is fascinating. It's called Frostbite by Nicola Twilley, and so stay tuned for that. But yeah, it wasn't just refrigeration, there was also canning. So there were just alternatives to salt when it came to long-term storage or transport of foods.
51:38 Speaker 01 Preservation.
51:39 Speaker 03 Yeah. At the same time, the Industrial Revolution had made salt extraction much simpler, using updated technologies and fuel. And so you have this simultaneous drop in demand, just as it had become easier to produce.
51:53 Speaker 01 Interesting.
51:54 Speaker 03 So that explains in part why it's so cheap today. I mean, this was quite the fall from grace for salt. To go from this esteemed substance, without which civilized life is not possible, or whatever Pliny said, to, "Oh, we don't need you anymore. You're not welcome here."
52:11 Speaker 01 "You may be bad for me."
52:12 Speaker 03 Yeah. It's gonna hurt. That's like, that's quite a transformation.
52:18 Speaker 01 Salt is just like, "Oh, oh, oh."
52:20 Speaker 03 And then the death blow was about to come. Things were about to get a whole lot worse for all NACL. The salt wars were about to begin.
52:29 Speaker 01 Tell me.
52:30 Speaker 03 Yeah. I mean, this is what you're gonna tell me about.
52:35 Speaker 01 I thought it was a real war.
52:37 Speaker 03 No, no, no, no. I mean, it's just like, I also don't know if it's just for the early part of the debate about salt, or like, also if salt wars can be applied to the discussions that have been happening over the last few decades. But anyway.
52:50 Speaker 01 I'll tell you.
52:52 Speaker 03 In the late 1800s, when salt consumption began to decline, salt had a very different reputation than it does today. Rather than being seen as a contributing factor to cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, and other health issues, it was avoidance of salt that was thought to be bad for your health.
53:09 Speaker 01 Interesting.
53:10 Speaker 03 What changed? It started with a trickle of papers suggesting that salt maybe wasn't as healthful as previously thought. In 1899, a couple of researchers put forth the idea that salt pulled water from your tissues, increasing plasma volume and water retention. And then a researcher named Achard in 1901 suggested that salt consumption led to the edema of Bright's disease, which is chronic inflammation of the kidneys, and possibly a whole host of other conditions. And then in 1904 is kind of really when the salts, the, not really the tides began to turn, but it was like, this was the sticking idea.
53:52 Speaker 03 Two French scientists, Ambard and Bojard, published their hypothesis that high salt intake led to hypertension.
53:59 Speaker 01 Hmm.
54:00 Speaker 03 1904. And this kicked off what would become known as the Salt Wars.
54:04 Speaker 01 Interesting.
54:05 Speaker 03 Side note, though, these two scientists were not the first to suggest the salt blood pressure hypothesis, or sodium blood pressure. In fact, several thousand years before, around 2,600 BCE, an ancient Chinese medical text warns of the relationship between salt and hypertension.
54:24 Speaker 01 Interesting.
54:26 Speaker 03 Quote, "If too much salt is used in blood, the pulse hardens," end quote. Isn't that fascinating?
54:35 Speaker 01 It is really fascinating. It was like, someone said it way back when, but they're like, yeah, it's fine, though.
54:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
54:41 Speaker 01 We're all dying from infectious disease well before hypertension becomes a problem.
54:44 Speaker 03 I mean, that's probably a big part of it, too. They're like, well, just never got, never caught up with you.
54:51 Speaker 01 Right.
54:52 Speaker 03 Yeah. But thousands of years later, we're still fighting about this, right? After the paper by Ambard and Bojard, other researchers attempted to replicate their findings. Essentially, what these two had done was feed six patients with hypertension, varying amounts of salt, and found that those who were on lower sodium diets had a reduction in blood pressure. But the replication part of this was tricky. They often didn't include controls. The first study by Ambard and Beauchard did not. The results were not very clear cut. It was like, for some, maybe it did something. For others, it didn't, you know? And it didn't specifically implicate salt, and only salt, in the blood pressure changes that they observed. Because it was like a whole dietary shift. So it was like, was it less salt?
55:37 Speaker 03 Or was it also that you're eating more rice? Or, you know what I mean?
55:40 Speaker 01 Yeah. Such good questions.
55:43 Speaker 03 Some scientists did observe a reduction in blood pressure with declining levels of sodium, while others saw no difference whatsoever. And so it was like, kind of all over the place. By the mid 20th century, the consensus was a weak one. Yes, low-salt diets did seem to improve blood pressure, but only in a subset of people. Add on to this the fact that low-salt diets are not tasty when you've been used to eating loads of salt, and people were not keen on the idea of limiting salt as a way to treat high blood pressure. But some researchers kept on looking. Because if salt reduction can be helpful, like, how and why? This could save lives.
56:25 Speaker 03 And so the second half of the 20th century saw a ton of studies, much more carefully designed, carried out, on the relationship between sodium intake and hypertension. And as with the earlier research, the results were mixed and the message became complicated, not easily communicated within a headline. Because whoever actually reads, like, the body of text in an article...
56:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
56:46 Speaker 03 The nuance surrounding any aspect of nutrition and health is huge. And salt is no exception. There are industry groups, like the Salt Institute, also threw their hat and their consultants, sometimes physicians or academics, into the mix, which further muddied the waters. And after years of back and forth, and, well, technically, and commentaries on articles and replies to those commentaries, it seems that we now have maybe a clearer picture on the relationship between sodium and hypertension? Maybe not. I'll let you tell us next week.
57:19 Speaker 01 Okay. I can't wait to. That was such a good setup, Erin.
57:25 Speaker 03 Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Um, salt.
57:29 Speaker 01 Salt.
57:30 Speaker 03 Yeah.
57:31 Speaker 01 I am thrilled to keep going with this.
57:35 Speaker 03 Me too.
57:36 Speaker 01 Because, yeah, that was just such a good way to set up. Especially this idea that...
57:43 Speaker 01 Like thousands of years ago, we were consuming minimal salt, many thousands of years ago.
57:52 Speaker 03 Yes.
57:52 Speaker 01 Then for potentially thousands of years, we were consuming so much salt. And now where are we at today? I can't wait to tell you next week.
58:01 Speaker 03 Where are we? Oh, it's so exciting. And there is like, this was, there is so much to the history of salt. You could read whole books on, on recipes with salt. I mean, there really that the Kurlansky Salt Book just is mostly recipes, I feel like is, is what it ended up being. It's, it's a really interesting, I just love the history of food, too, I think is what I'm realizing.
58:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
58:30 Speaker 03 But yeah, but if you would like to learn more about salt, I've got some sources for you. So I don't know if I would give the Salt Book a resounding recommendation. I actually found it like, not very well organized. And so a little bit disappointing in that regard, but there are lots of other papers about salts. There was one by, I think it was called Bo Cerillo from 1994, A History of Salt Block from 1976, Salt in Human History. There's, and then if you want to learn about the origins of the Salt Wars, there's one by De Nicola, Antonio and O'Keefe from 2017 called The History of the Salt Wars. And just a whole bunch more that I will post on the website, thispodcastwithkillee.com.
59:15 Speaker 01 Podcastwithkillee.com.
59:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. Thank you to Blood Mobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes.
59:22 Speaker 01 Thank you to Leanna and Tom and Brent and Pete and Jessica and everyone else at Exactly Right Network for making all this possible.
59:31 Speaker 03 Yeah. And thanks to you listeners for listening. Tell us what you think about salts. Do you have any fun salt facts to share?
59:40 Speaker 01 And make sure that you're subscribed so you don't miss next week's episode.
59:43 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because that's where the, the meat of it really is.
59:46 Speaker 01 No, so this was meat.
59:47 Speaker 03 No.
59:48 Speaker 01 Salted meat. But I'm.
59:50 Speaker 03 This was the seasoning. Next week is the substance.
59:56 Speaker 01 And a special thank you also to our patrons. Thank you so much for your support. It really does mean the world to us.
1:00:02 Speaker 03 Yeah. Well, until next time, wash your hands.
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