And then on every table in the world, salt, we see your piquant powder sprinkling vital light upon our food. Preserver of the ancient holds of ships, discoverer on the high seas, earliest sailor of the unknown, shifting byways of the foam. It is found most everywhere in nature. Animals have worn ineradicable trails in their quest for salt licks. Men of primitive tribes have reportedly sold their wives and children into slavery for it.
Salt is the only rock directly consumed by man.
It corrodes but preserves, dessicates but is wrested from the water. It has fascinated man for thousands of years not only as a substance he prized and was willing to labour to obtain, but also as a generator of poetic and mythic meaning. The contradictions it embodies only intensify its power and its links with experience of the sacred. Visser Arab traders carved great salt trading routes around the known world from earliest times. The two kinds of salt are sea salt and rock salt.