by Tamaal Ghosh

Created on: March 27, 2009   Last Updated: March 31, 2009

Salting It Away.

The use of dietary salt is hotly-debated with the media leading a near-hysterical popular antipathy towards it.

Scientists, on the other hand, have shown repeatedly that it is crucial to maintaining homeostasis - the internal balning acts that makes continued living possible.

It's also enlightening to discover that history, too, approves of the mineral; the wise old Greeks and the all-conquering Romans of classical times both viewed salt as a precious commodity.

The Greeks often bartered with the mineral, usually for slaves hence the derogatory term of someone being "not worth his salt". The globe-spanning legionary, meanwhile, received at least part of his pay in salt his salarium, or "salary".

Its influence and value also were known in the Middle East: the words, "war" and "peace" are derived form the ancient Arabic and Hebrew for salt and bread.

While Mankind was hunter and a forager, the salt (and especially the sodium) requirements were met largely through the fish and meat they caught and ate. The Bedouin, Masai and Zulu peoples continued this prehistoric tradition until relatively recently - that hunters in Greenland began eating salt as a separate component even later, with the introduction of whaling in the seventeenth century.

It was the coming of agriculture, civilisation and the accompanying fall in meat intake (in around 10 000 B.C.E) that encouraged the search for, processing of and trade in salt.

It has been suggested that the regions of Mesopotamia, the "Cradle of Civilisation", and the Mediterranean were ideal for this advent of city life. This is because, in addition to fertile river valleys, the urban populations near deserts and in "arid" zone climates made discovery of undissolved salt sources possible.

In wetter climes, these deposits would more likely be dissolved into the soil and bodies of water.

Up until the nineteenth century, salt was one the few methods of preserving food. There is evidence that people had been adding salt to stop food going off by 2000 B.C.E,

Fruits and vegetables were dried, cereal grains were parched and fish and game were salted and dried. In addition, it was used to make delicacies such as salted olives.

All the old religious cults - pagan, Mithraic, Vedic and, most notably, Judaic - made a point of demanding that meat offerings be thoroughly dried to kill all bacteria.

Typically a carcass is strung up to drain the blood. This still leaves more than a fifth of the body fluids, along with dangerous microbes

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