Salt: A World History

Salt ultimately is a great book of knowledge around its main topic, and has a lot to offer readers. Readers can learn about how salt started as an essential element to cure and preserve meat, and how because of its value it became a currency of its own or at least an important element to trade.

Salt’s impact went beyond just preservation and currency, it extended even linguistically as it made its way into words like salary and salad and soldier. Probably the biggest thing readers learn in this book is that after all this immense history and reliance on salt, today it is mass manufactured, commoditized and mostly taken for granted.

I was really looking forward to this book and did enjoy it to an extent, but ultimately felt bogged down by how much meandering and repetition there was. The framing device of seeing the history of the world from the point of view of Salt is interesting, but perhaps this could have been condensed by about 40%.