by Tony A Grayson
Today, most folks identify salt as seasoning for food. Salt has a second use: It melts ice. Many municipalities that are subject to harsh winter weather, store mounds of salt to cast onto roads and sidewalks to make travel safer.
Salt was universally used as a preservative of meats, to delay spoilage. This use of salt is rarely practiced today, except in poor, isolated regions that have no electricity or other power to apply refrigeration.
As for seasoning, because salt excites certain areas of taste buds on our tongues, saltiness appears to bring out, or enhance the flavor of food. Food manufacturers, ever quick to promote their products the best way they can (by taste) put much salt into their processed food products. Pronouncements have been made by nutritionists on what is the daily recommended amount of salt that humans should consume. The abundance of salt in processed food that we eat counts heavily against that recommended number.
Thus, we are bombarded with the message, "Americans eat too much salt." Yet, salt is considered an essential ingredient in humans. A certain amount of it is in our makeup, and mostly, we get the salt we need by eating natural food, which also has a certain amount of salt within. Our individual craving, or the habit of shaking salt onto our food, fuels the idea that we must be eating too much salt.
In ancient times of distant commerce by sea and by land (a caravan), salt was an easily portable and welcome spice sold in food markets. Salt enhances the flavor of the poorest and toughest meat or the blandest vegetable.