That explains why there are water shortages in nevada, but even in places that are close to the ocean (ie. logistics is a non-issue) there are water shortages. eg. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56798308
That requires vast quantities of space and a hot/dry climate to be done efficiently.
It certainly was done. Looking back at history, the places that could efficiently do so were major salt exporters; which rendered it uneconomical to do elsewhere.
Yes, but I think that maybe in colder regions it's probably not cost effective. Specially in winter. So that would kind of explain why the polish salt mine mentioned earlier was important
Digging the pan, hardening it (so it's relatively impermeable to sea water), and then repeatedly evaporating the water until you have a brine rich enough in salt to precipitate, and then massing that salt slush so it can completely dry, and then smashing it into a usable form.
You can look at salt pans on Google Maps. Here is one I have been to:
Obviously today this is done with gigantic machines, and the cost/kg is incredibly low to the point that locals do not pay for salt, but back before the advent of Caterpillar, I imagine harvesting salt this way was very labor intensive.
There is a documentary on Amazon called My Name is Salt about the salt harvest in India. It is quite good.
Well, if you go back long enough when you could use a larger area for a given output of salt, then - once you prepared your pan once, you could just let the water evaporate completely, and then scratch the salt of the surface. If your pan can be made of rocks than that should probably be even easier.
Other than needing some decent sunlight and not super-high humidity - what am I getting wrong?
Plenty of sunlight in the Mediterranean basin, most of Asia not including Siberia (not sure about Kazakhstan, Mongolia etc), the middle of the USA and due South from there almost all the way to Southern South-America.
Heavy rain would indeed wipe out all your work, which is why you would do it in the drier seasons.
Petty? I could see "cruel", or "clever", or strategic in their subjugation of other populations. It was a calculated tactic, not a petty one.
Here in the US, we mostly slaughtered the natives and forced the survivors into reservations rather than coming up with clever ways of controlling them. Is our way or the British way more petty?
Our way was murderous, maybe the worst way to do it. Maybe the only other case where it was worse was in New Zealand where the Māori people were almost completely decimated.
In comparision, the Britishers were saints. They did not perform genocide (until Churchill came around... that was the age of barbarians unfortunately)
I’m curious what were the dietary sources of salt say earlier than 10 thousand years ago. There’s the argument that goes “people never ate salt in modern quantities so evolutionary speaking this is a new shock to the system”. Do we actually _need_ all the extra salt we’re consuming nowadays? Is it good/neutral/bad for us?
> Do we actually _need_ all the extra salt we’re consuming nowadays? Is it good/neutral/bad for us?
Of course we don't need it, and too much salt is indeed bad for us [1] [2] (hence all the campaigns about eating less salty).
According to the references I've quickly found, for instance, an American consumes on average 3,400mg of sodium per day when the body needs less than 500mg (obviously this may be higher if you sweat a lot for some reason).
In relation to the commenter I was replying to the key is how much is actually needed. If you have more specific information on this that'd be great.
Your point seems only about how much really is too much and the article you linked to is suggesting that the WHO recommendation is very conservative. However, I'm not really clear why you think any of my previous comment or references were misleading: I don't think it is under debate that we do not need all the sodium we eat and that too much of it is indeed bad for health.
> Sodium intake was associated with cardiovascular disease and strokes only in communities where mean intake was greater than 5 g/day. A strategy of sodium reduction in these communities and countries but not in others might be appropriate.
Hence my previous comment you're 'replying' to: It's only arguing about how much sodium becomes really bad, which is at best peripheral to the what was discussed. What's your point?
How much you "need" varies tremendously based on body weight, genetics, climate, and activity. A roofer working outside in the Louisiana summer will need way more salt than a sedentary office worker in Oregon. Most people who are metabolically healthy and sufficiently hydrated can maintain a proper sodium balance with no negative health impacts even if they consume a little extra salt. But some fraction of the population will suffer hypertension and other conditions; this is usually a symptom of deeper underlying physiological problems.
> what were the dietary sources of salt say earlier than 10 thousand years ago.
For inland communities, meat and salt licks. For coastal communities, seawater.
> There’s the argument that goes “people never ate salt in modern quantities so evolutionary speaking this is a new shock to the system”.
These arguments are indistinguishable from those suffering from the naturalistic fallacy [1] (EDIT: appeal to nature). One can construct an argument in its form for and against virtually any behavior, depending on what evidence one considers (e.g. which populations one samples), assumptions one makes (interpolating the archaeological evidence) and how far back one looks (early civilization, early humans, early hominids, et cetera).
I think we can also safely assume that if proteins from salmon can be found up to 200 miles inland from their spawning grounds, that the salt and calcium from those fish also makes the same journey.
Arguing that our current lifestyle is not what evolution optimized for is not a fallacy. There is no "ought" or "good" in the original quote.
Many of the modern differences in environment from earlier humans would be considered "good" by most people. Extra salt is probably "bad" in most cases, but it is definitely different.
> our current lifestyle is not what evolution optimized for
It's not. But neither is a senior person living healthily and happily into their late years something evolution considered. We're trying our biology in ways evolution doesn't care for, aiming for goals it never considered.
Rhetorically, I can construct arguments for (coastal communities being historically healthy and consuming more salt) and against (ancient civilizations were chronically salt starved) modern salt consumption with this form of argument. There are too many degrees of freedom amidst sparse evidence in a diverse, heterogenous archaeological record.
> modern differences in environment from earlier humans would be considered "good" by most people
Those people tend to consider the nutrient-rich versions of plants we've bred for millennia while disregarding the toxins, pathogens and general wear-and-tear a Paleolithic human would have been subjected to.
> But neither is a senior person living healthily and happily into their late years something evolution considered.
People living into their late years was not uncommon historically. The huge changes to life expectancy in modern times are largely explained by so many fewer dying in childhood and child birth.
Are you sure that's what the naturalistic fallacy is? I've always understood the naturalistic fallacy to be that, for some things, it was fallacious to try and break them down into simpler parts. This idea is often invoked in the context of academic moral philosophy.
So far as I can tell, it seems like you are talking about something closer to "appeal to nature", and your own link even has a line urging people not to confuse one for the other.
>The naturalistic fallacy should not be confused with the appeal to nature fallacy, which is exemplified by forms of reasoning such as "Something is natural; therefore, it is morally acceptable" or "This property is unnatural; therefore, this property is undesirable."
I think the only first world people having any issues with salt consumption are folks trying to live entirely off the land, and vegetarian leaning. While looking for other things, I've found a couple of videos talking about what plants bioaccumulate salt and how to extract it. I think it depends on whether the plant is otherwise poisonous. If it's edible then clearly making broth out of it would be the most productive option.
Many of our biggest civilizations have access to the ocean or river deltas. They would have had access to salt. From what I understand, predators get their entire salt intake from the animals they eat (blood, in particular?), and when we ate the entire animal that probably would have worked for us as well.
If you're trying to get salt from plants it's because you don't or won't have other options. There was a time that discovering salt deposits within your kingdom had huge political implications.
It's actually relatively easy to be sodium deficient if you are physically active (as you shed sodium via sweat) and don't eat processed foods regardless of whether or not you are vegetarian. In my case the only significant source of sodium other than the salt shaker is cheese.
They were primarily animal sources of salt. Once agriculture developed, it became necessary to supplement that missing salt. From what I can find, that number is about 1/2 to 1/3 of what modern people eat.
That's not to say that's a good thing, sodium intake is a U-shaped curve. Too little is as bad as too much. Here [1, check figure 1] is a study comparing heart disease, stroke, etc. vs sodium excretion (as a proxy for sodium intake). The standard dietary recommendation is 2300mg, which is well below the minimum point in the graph.
And the 'high sodium diet' (3400mg) of average person is also below it, most people should probably be eating more salt, especially if they are sweating more from exercise or live in a hot climate.
If you dig deeper into the research behind most of the nutritional advice promulgated by health organizations you'll find that it doesn't actually meet modern evidence-based medicine criteria. And there's no reliable proof that publishing such advice has ever produced better public health outcomes.
But unlike with “don’t eat fat, eat sugar!” campaigns of the 80s, I can’t figure out who is profiting from increased salt usage. Is it other food producers whose product is improved with salt? Is Big Salt a thing?
My comment was general, not specifically about salt. The nutritional guidelines are mostly well intentioned rather than shilling for food producers, however the underlying science is shaky. So the recommendations continue more out of historical inertia and the bureaucratic imperative than anything else.
Yes, in general salt improves products in the sense that we do tend to be attracted to it and we like it so it makes food more attractive and thus increases sales.
It's the usual suspects really. Food/beverages are made to be sold at a profit so choice and proportion of ingredients usually comes down to either cost reduction or increased sales.
The study you link to makes no attempt to control for recent reduction of salt
intake because of an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
To put it plainly, people who consume abnormally low amounts of salt don't do it
out of choice - nobody enjoys eating their food without salt. They do it because
the doctor tells them that it's either that, or a heart attack.
It makes sense of course that cardiovascular events will be more prevalent in
this group than any other group.
Studies like the one you link to control for pre-existing cardiovascular
disease, but having CV disease doesn't mean you cut down on salt.
The same methodological flaw has previously caused studies to report that very
low alcohol consumption is better than moderate alcohol consumption for the
heart, for example. I have a link somewhere if you want.
Btw, the study you linked to used the data from two studies comparing two
anti-hypertensive drugs to each other or to placebo, so we know that basically
everyone in the study already had some kind of underlying disease. Additionally,
the study data included a one-time measurement, which significantly reduces its
statistical power, despite its large population (you gotta take multiple
measurements to minimise sampling error).
Off topic, but I visited the Atlas Obscura-worthy “Wieliczka” Salt Mine which is a short drive from Krakow. Incredible place.
I have been to my share of mines and caves but never to a salt mine. This mine is massive and has entire underground lakes and even a chapel, with a beautiful Last Supper relief and altar and chandeliers all hand-carved from the salt walls - by tradesmen no less, not artists. They actually have mass in the chapel every week.
The massive salt deposits were what enabled the Polish kingdom to even be a thing. It was a huge economic boom.
It smells incredibly clean. The air is very pure, apparently, and it's meant to be good for your healthm I noticed this - my cold cleared up while I was there (and started again soon after). There's a slight cave smell, but not really. I don't know what it's like to smell like being by tue ocean, but I don't remember it smelling much like british beaches.
This summer I visited the remarkable Slanic mine in Romania [1]. No matter how much you prepare, it's still breathtaking when you get there. The chambers I visited were all about 50 meters tall. You could have football fields in there, bleachers included. I took pictures, but I just don't know how to share them; still, I found this one [2] that gives a sense of the scale.
For anyone interested, they do tours in several languages.
Additionally, the tours have two sections - the first half that everyone does, and then they offer you the choice of going back up, or going to the museum area; definitely worth spending the extra time (particularly as it seems few people actually do it, so you'll have a chance to actually speak with the guide in more depth).
I've been twice and would happily go again - couple years ago now, so maybe things have changed.
I really should curate my photos - I took hundreds :)
The word "salary" has roots in salt, as well as "sauce".
Children in Slovakia all know a fairy tale called Soľ nad zlato ("Salt over Gold", translated as The Salt Prince) written by Pavol Dobšinský likely sometime in the late 1800's.
It was made into a film in 1983 which became somewhat known internationally.
In the story, the king gets offended in relation to salt, and bans it. Everyone in the land, as well as their livestock, gets sick in addition to having to deal with bland food and losing appetite.
From one full text on the web: "Pomaly odpadla ľuďom všetka chuť do jedenia. Len už tej soli aspoň ako márny mak si každý žiadal na jazyk. Ešte aj statok trpel. Kravy a ovce prestali dojiť, pretože nemali soli. Ľudia chodili ako omámení a upadali do chorôb. Kráľ a jeho dcéry vyzerali už len ako tône."
"Gradually, the people shed all their appetite. Everyonec craved even just a tiny smidgeon of salt on their tongues. Even the livestock suffered. Cows and sheep ceased to yield milk for lack of salt. People walked about as if drugged, and fell into illnesses. The king himself and his daughters looked but like shadows."
This reads a bit like those old filmstrips where some character gets annoyed at a common object like springs and then wishes them away, only for some supernatural cartoon character to grant their wish and show how the world would fall apart without that corporations product.
Salt is particularly important if you're exercising--it's the main electrolyte lost through sweat--and is thus probably especially important in a society heavily dependent on manual labor.
Howdy HN, while this is on page #1 I figure I should "strike while the iron is hot" and talk about the book club service that I recently launched on https://bookworm.club [1]. Long story short, instead of a traditional book club, where you get together and vote on what book to read next (or don't have any say in what the next book is) I wanted to build a service that would automagically match you with other people around the world who also happen to be reading the same book as you. I think it has the potential for some very interesting conversation and connection making! The way it works is you just tell us what you're reading (or let us track your currently reading list on Goodreads) and we match you up with anyone else also reading that and help you organize a meeting to discuss the book. Feedback welcome. And sorry if anything on the site breaks... I'm a technical writer by trade, not an engineer. Although I consider myself fairly technical this is probably one of the biggest technical projects I've created to date. An eye-opening experience! I have a little more information about the book club service at [3].
[1] As you can tell from the history of the site, I originally wrote the salt post in 2018 and then didn't do anything for a few years. I recently quit my job and took a 1-year sabbatical (which will probably end up being only 9 months) [2] and finally invested the time/energy to build the book club service I had been kicking around all this time. The blog is my place to discuss interesting ideas from whatever books I'm reading (such as this fascinating "resulting" idea [4] I learned from Thinking In Bets). If you would like to contribute to the blog I am open to that possibility (just dig around on the site or my personal site to figure out how to contact me).
Cool idea, I'll check it out! I've been looking for an online book club that indulges my more esoteric tastes (the last books I read were was a biography of a private mercenary, a sci-fi book, and now a book on the functioning of government) that I wouldn't get from a more traditional book club!
Yeah that's exactly my issue too. My interests are all over the board and I don't want to hound my friends into reading a book about a mercenary (to use your example). I just want to talk with other people who already find that topic interesting.
Thank you for signing up. In the spirit of MVP I am doing the matching manually now. If the service takes off I will automate that. I understand what you're saying about the need for UI around whether or not there are any matches.
Since the submission today has been on the front page, you should wait at least a few weeks before doing this, to let the hivemind caches clear. Follow-up posts shouldn't come too quickly or else they start having an anti-curiosity effect (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
If you want to send a draft to hn@ycombinator.com, I can help you edit it. The same offer goes for anybody. However: be aware that the inbox is brutal, my worst case latency is shit, and so you may end up having to wait a long time!
> But, if you stick a vegetable in salt water, a different class of bacteria breaks it down into stuff that we can eat. The "bad" bacteria that live in the air can’t grow in the salt water, whereas the "good" can.
Any clue why the bacteria that can survive the salt happens to be a "good" one? What has stopped "bad" bacteria that can survive the salt too from evolving?
I think the question you are asking is "why can lactic acid bacteria survive in a saline environment whereas some harmful bacteria types cannot?"
I believe the answer is that "bad" bacteria CAN oftentimes survive in environments with high-salinity [1], but struggle to compete with lactic-acid bacteria (i.e. "good" bacteria - LAB) in the presence of both a saline environment as well as a high ph environment. LAB also engage in antimicrobial activities within your gut [2] likely using bacteriocins as the mechanism.
Most people misunderstand the accounting part of why salt was important, everyone knows what salt looks like and how much it's worth. It's a value comparator = it's used to compare other products (for example if a sheep is worth say 750 grams and a cow is worth 850g then you can exchange sheep and cows with some salt to cover the difference) this is the most valuable characteristic of money, something universal to build trade from. Seashells also work well in some places, not as a store of value but as trade enablers. I'm guessing no exchange was ever made in the history of man without this kind of value comparative, long before the term money was even discovered.
Interesting. Along the same lines I would imagine it was one of the easiest “currencies” to confirm the authenticity of... a quick lick and you’ll know whether or not you’re being ripped off with a counterfeit.
One, then, has to wonder what the consensus algorithm was to determine the truthfulness of the taste (lick) test. Did they manage to put it on a blockchain?
> I'm guessing no exchange was ever made in the history of man without this kind of value comparative, long before the term money was even discovered.
I used to think this as well but it's apparently not true! In hunter gatherer tribes (and probably early agricultural groups) it sufficed for two parties to agree that one was getting the better deal and agree there was a debt. Then in a later transaction the debt would likely go the other direction, as the party in debt for the first transaction overpaid. This cycle seems to have repeated indefinitely if everyone stayed on reasonably good terms. Importantly, the stability of communities was the bedrock of these types interactions. Once communities got extremely large (1000s) or travelers became common place, the kind of comparative you're discussing seems to have become more important.
I'd recommend reading "Debt, the First 5000 Years" to learn more
I'd like to think that too, but realistically everyone has always known that debt was stupid, you never know when/how you'll get shafted, just like lying. Agreed, back then that was true all of the time, but all the better reason to not venture into that sort of crackpot system, specially when you have salt/shells just laying around...
In nature there is no such thing as borrowing from the future (natures favourite debt is borrowing from the past = chop wood 2 years before you're supposed to burn it to give it time to dry, plant months before you harvest, share discoveries without copyright/patent, that sorta thing), it's a purely human/predatory thing to think you can fool others into debt; sacrificing their own offspring like that: because either way you turn it you're probably not going to want to be around when it's time to pay the "real" price of debt = voluntary slavery, then energy collapse followed by a shitstorm of domino-effects! History rhymes they say.
I think all economic "professors", writing books about a past they have no clue about, probably suffer from this good old quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Eventually you'll see how biased/"sunk cost" David Graeber was to think that "stone-agers had debt too" like they would care... it was probably salt/shells as lubrication or smack them over the head before the deal was over.
The more I think about it the more I'm convinced debt only came with generalized written/read language and all the book-keeping crap the Italians discovered in the 14th century, about the same time the first Chineese dude forbid silver with punishement of death and started printing paper bills...
So yes, there was debt but not the kind of orderly debt you and I are thinking about, but rather the debt of people exploiting others for decades and almost getting away with it; "debt", those stories never seem to get fairy-tale endings though.
So what is really different this time? Nothing!
Trust me if it's one story that has been on repeat for the last 20-30 centuries it's monetary inflation, and energy inflation never seems to agree with that; because you can't print energy: all revolutions are monetary, but before that they are increase in entropy!
Seen that we're on the peak of the largest possible energy bubble, by time of storage (millions of years of sunlight creating coal, oil and gas), powering the largest fictionary money/debt bubble any monkey could be fooled into believing, I would say it's time to talk to David Graeber about what really happened in the past!
The real connection is violence! Debt is voilence postponed; salt means peace, atleast for now!
> I'd like to think that too, but realistically everyone has always known that debt was stupid, you never know when/how you'll get shafted, just like lying.
That may be true with one-off interactions, but in smaller communities or with individuals that you have regular (trading) contact with, screwing someone over would make you into a social pariah.
Theories are great, but really if you live in a village of 100 people I don't think you need theories to understand that you have to behave to survive.
Between two tribes of 100 I'm pretty sure it was permanent war; unless they where symbiotic, in which case I would call them one tribe of 200.
Energy (heat, water, food) where really scarce when you hadn't figured out coal, oil and gas yet or now after those discoveries of reserves have peaked.
I think it requires atleast one day of cold, thirsty, hunger to be able to understand what social in those days felt like.
As for game theory it's just a pretentious labeling of "force the hand" incentives when many people are involved, you don't need a theory for that, it's allready proven.
Basically it's why debt (as inflation = negative real rates) works in the first place: somebody gives you an incentive to not give a damn about your own kids future by pointing at theories that have failed over and over again in history but somehow they still manage to "socially" convince you that it's ok because everyone is doing it!
Everything in life is a pyramid scheme, but most things end up being ponzi schemes, you just have to learn to see the difference.
"Between two tribes of 100 I'm pretty sure it was permanent war; unless they where symbiotic, in which case I would call them one tribe of 200"
Well you would be wrong to call them one tribe. The US and Mexico have a symbiotic relationship, are they one country?
And it's good that you are "pretty sure" it would be war, but would you like to post any sources at all? Or is this just your gut feeling?
"Basically it's why debt (as inflation = negative real rates) works in the first place: somebody gives you an incentive to not give a damn about your own kids future by pointing at theories that have failed over and over again in history but somehow they still manage to "socially" convince you that it's ok because everyone is doing it!
Everything in life is a pyramid scheme, but most things end up being ponzi schemes, you just have to learn to see the difference."
You have gone really off topic here and I am struggling to see what this has to do with the original topic. You also seem to have an agenda that isn't really related to the topic of debt in the ancient world.
Debt doesn’t have to be seen as borrowing from the future, it can also - depending on culture- be seen as borrowing from the past.
I give you the difference of a cow and a sheep now, and next year when I need it, I will have a claim that may help me survive.
Even today that attitude exists in some cultures and some families.
What you just described is debt from the view of the lender, it's still debt.
Now imagine if the lender could just print cows! Now you know how the current clown show is run (debt = inflation, as real interest rates go below zero)!
And by failing to understand it you are punishing your own kids.
I see that you are just making it up as you go along.
We have physical documents recording debts well back into the Sumerian period. At the time, financial records were inscribed in clay and stored in government buildings. When a city was sacked, these buildings would be torched, baking the clay tablets to ceramic, and then burying them under ash, preserving them for the ages. We have tens of thousands of these documents.
So, no, finance was not, in fact, invented in 14th-century AD Italy. And, no, formal, legally-binding debt existed long before there was currency.
The economies of scale in salt (and hot sauce baffle me). Let me use the hot sauce example, because it's a little more fun, but all the ideas apply equally to salt. How is it that I can buy a big jar of Crystal's hot sauce for like $2? Someone had to plant those peppers, produce vinegar, bottle it, transport it to San Francisco, let the grocery store mark it up, and it still only costs $2???
Ditto. It also blows my mind how stores operate. I think how can they offer so much verity and stay in business? They paid for all this food and its all going bad or out of season, how?
I don't know specifically about Crystal, but when I went to Avery Island a couple hours away I saw Tabasco/McIlhenny had whole warehouses of drying and pickling peppers - I imagine they can control supply as needed and keep the wholesale price where they want.
Think about it this way. It is about margin (where the profit comes from). Keep that marginal cost equal to your marginal rev and you are doing good. Stray too far and you are leaving money on the table or maybe taking a loss. Control a couple of key aspects of production and your marginal cost can be low. In this case I would say the jar and lid is probably the most expensive bit and the salsa is probably made by the barrel full. Also most grocery stores do not set the prices or own goods on the shelves. The wholesalers/vendors typically do and the grocers rent out the shelves to them based on location in the store, height off the floor, and length/depth of shelf needed.
We also live in an era of cheap energy. 'Astonishingly cheap' doesn't even begin to describe how much more we have to work with than our ancestors did. It enables modern economies of scale and things like buying imported prosciutto from Italy rather than just buying some preserved ham from the local farmers market.
I saw a video that suggested that the sriracha guys have an area roughly 1/3rd the size of manhattan under cultivation.
Nobody cares what those peppers look like, and the tilling, planting, and harvesting, washing, and crushing are all pretty automated. Vinegar and salt are also pretty cheap, as is bottling equipment.
people fail to recognize that people ate a lot less back in the days that salt was so precious. they also ate a lot more fat. eating less and having more protein and fat meant that they had less insulin in their blood and also more ketones in their blood. insulin tells your body to hold on to things including water and when you dont have a lot of insulin you lose more water and sodium with it. and ketones are a diuretic which promote the loss of water even more.
sodium replaces insulin because it also causes your body to hold on to water. so it was very important because you needed it to offset lower insulin and also because you were losing it much more. if you didnt have access to salt back then you would have become very ill.
a modern person who eats almost nothing but sugar in one form or another and in enormous quantities has so much insulin that they barely need any sodium unless they drink large amounts of water. we even tell people to have less sodium. but earlier people werent that way.
Can confirm from personal experience. I've been strictly eating a very low carb diet for almost four years now and require significantly more salt than I ever did previously. I also drink a lot more fluids. The only downside is that I need to pee more often but the upsides in my health, fitness, energy levels and even emotional stability have been so dramatic I've stuck with it for years after it helped me go from obese to well below my 'dream' weight goal.
Probably the most important invention ever by humanity was the refrigerator. Once we had refrigeration, meat could be kept fresh or frozen for very long periods of time. So could fish.
Till refrigeration came along, the most important usage of salt was in preserving food. In wars like the US Civil War for instance, special missions were undertaken by the Union to destroy the Confederacy's Salt Works. That then meant that the Confederates could not preserve sufficient food, and therefore the Confederate soldiers had problems with malnutrition, one of the reasons the Confederacy lost the US Civil War.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadIt certainly was done. Looking back at history, the places that could efficiently do so were major salt exporters; which rendered it uneconomical to do elsewhere.
You can look at salt pans on Google Maps. Here is one I have been to:
https://goo.gl/maps/uN968Stn6kPHnH6E7
Obviously today this is done with gigantic machines, and the cost/kg is incredibly low to the point that locals do not pay for salt, but back before the advent of Caterpillar, I imagine harvesting salt this way was very labor intensive.
There is a documentary on Amazon called My Name is Salt about the salt harvest in India. It is quite good.
Other than needing some decent sunlight and not super-high humidity - what am I getting wrong?
And that heavy rain (monsoon, etc) will wipe out all your work.
Heavy rain would indeed wipe out all your work, which is why you would do it in the drier seasons.
Then, once you have done that, transporting it from coastal areas was also a big undertaking.
Here in the US, we mostly slaughtered the natives and forced the survivors into reservations rather than coming up with clever ways of controlling them. Is our way or the British way more petty?
In comparision, the Britishers were saints. They did not perform genocide (until Churchill came around... that was the age of barbarians unfortunately)
Of course we don't need it, and too much salt is indeed bad for us [1] [2] (hence all the campaigns about eating less salty).
According to the references I've quickly found, for instance, an American consumes on average 3,400mg of sodium per day when the body needs less than 500mg (obviously this may be higher if you sweat a lot for some reason).
[1] https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-education-resources-mater...
[2] https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Your point seems only about how much really is too much and the article you linked to is suggesting that the WHO recommendation is very conservative. However, I'm not really clear why you think any of my previous comment or references were misleading: I don't think it is under debate that we do not need all the sodium we eat and that too much of it is indeed bad for health.
The point being in general we do eat much more sodium than we need (which, to re-centre things, was the original question).
For inland communities, meat and salt licks. For coastal communities, seawater.
> There’s the argument that goes “people never ate salt in modern quantities so evolutionary speaking this is a new shock to the system”.
These arguments are indistinguishable from those suffering from the naturalistic fallacy [1] (EDIT: appeal to nature). One can construct an argument in its form for and against virtually any behavior, depending on what evidence one considers (e.g. which populations one samples), assumptions one makes (interpolating the archaeological evidence) and how far back one looks (early civilization, early humans, early hominids, et cetera).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy
Many of the modern differences in environment from earlier humans would be considered "good" by most people. Extra salt is probably "bad" in most cases, but it is definitely different.
It's not. But neither is a senior person living healthily and happily into their late years something evolution considered. We're trying our biology in ways evolution doesn't care for, aiming for goals it never considered.
Rhetorically, I can construct arguments for (coastal communities being historically healthy and consuming more salt) and against (ancient civilizations were chronically salt starved) modern salt consumption with this form of argument. There are too many degrees of freedom amidst sparse evidence in a diverse, heterogenous archaeological record.
> modern differences in environment from earlier humans would be considered "good" by most people
Those people tend to consider the nutrient-rich versions of plants we've bred for millennia while disregarding the toxins, pathogens and general wear-and-tear a Paleolithic human would have been subjected to.
People living into their late years was not uncommon historically. The huge changes to life expectancy in modern times are largely explained by so many fewer dying in childhood and child birth.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...
So far as I can tell, it seems like you are talking about something closer to "appeal to nature", and your own link even has a line urging people not to confuse one for the other.
>The naturalistic fallacy should not be confused with the appeal to nature fallacy, which is exemplified by forms of reasoning such as "Something is natural; therefore, it is morally acceptable" or "This property is unnatural; therefore, this property is undesirable."
Many of our biggest civilizations have access to the ocean or river deltas. They would have had access to salt. From what I understand, predators get their entire salt intake from the animals they eat (blood, in particular?), and when we ate the entire animal that probably would have worked for us as well.
If you're trying to get salt from plants it's because you don't or won't have other options. There was a time that discovering salt deposits within your kingdom had huge political implications.
That's not to say that's a good thing, sodium intake is a U-shaped curve. Too little is as bad as too much. Here [1, check figure 1] is a study comparing heart disease, stroke, etc. vs sodium excretion (as a proxy for sodium intake). The standard dietary recommendation is 2300mg, which is well below the minimum point in the graph.
And the 'high sodium diet' (3400mg) of average person is also below it, most people should probably be eating more salt, especially if they are sweating more from exercise or live in a hot climate.
[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1105553
That's a very dangerous advice to give loosely based on one paper and against the advice of about all health organisations worldwide...
It's the usual suspects really. Food/beverages are made to be sold at a profit so choice and proportion of ingredients usually comes down to either cost reduction or increased sales.
To put it plainly, people who consume abnormally low amounts of salt don't do it out of choice - nobody enjoys eating their food without salt. They do it because the doctor tells them that it's either that, or a heart attack.
It makes sense of course that cardiovascular events will be more prevalent in this group than any other group.
Studies like the one you link to control for pre-existing cardiovascular disease, but having CV disease doesn't mean you cut down on salt.
The same methodological flaw has previously caused studies to report that very low alcohol consumption is better than moderate alcohol consumption for the heart, for example. I have a link somewhere if you want.
Btw, the study you linked to used the data from two studies comparing two anti-hypertensive drugs to each other or to placebo, so we know that basically everyone in the study already had some kind of underlying disease. Additionally, the study data included a one-time measurement, which significantly reduces its statistical power, despite its large population (you gotta take multiple measurements to minimise sampling error).
> Do we actually _need_ all the extra salt we’re consuming nowadays?
Nyet! I almost got a heart attack after eating a way too salty jambalaya my roommate brought back from a party.
I have been to my share of mines and caves but never to a salt mine. This mine is massive and has entire underground lakes and even a chapel, with a beautiful Last Supper relief and altar and chandeliers all hand-carved from the salt walls - by tradesmen no less, not artists. They actually have mass in the chapel every week.
The massive salt deposits were what enabled the Polish kingdom to even be a thing. It was a huge economic boom.
Highly recommend a visit if you are in the area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wieliczka_Salt_Mine
You can lick the walls and they taste like salt.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sl%C4%83nic_mine
[2] https://www.romania-insider.com/planetarium-slanic-salt-mine
Additionally, the tours have two sections - the first half that everyone does, and then they offer you the choice of going back up, or going to the museum area; definitely worth spending the extra time (particularly as it seems few people actually do it, so you'll have a chance to actually speak with the guide in more depth).
I've been twice and would happily go again - couple years ago now, so maybe things have changed.
I really should curate my photos - I took hundreds :)
Children in Slovakia all know a fairy tale called Soľ nad zlato ("Salt over Gold", translated as The Salt Prince) written by Pavol Dobšinský likely sometime in the late 1800's.
It was made into a film in 1983 which became somewhat known internationally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Salt_Prince
In the story, the king gets offended in relation to salt, and bans it. Everyone in the land, as well as their livestock, gets sick in addition to having to deal with bland food and losing appetite.
From one full text on the web: "Pomaly odpadla ľuďom všetka chuť do jedenia. Len už tej soli aspoň ako márny mak si každý žiadal na jazyk. Ešte aj statok trpel. Kravy a ovce prestali dojiť, pretože nemali soli. Ľudia chodili ako omámení a upadali do chorôb. Kráľ a jeho dcéry vyzerali už len ako tône."
"Gradually, the people shed all their appetite. Everyonec craved even just a tiny smidgeon of salt on their tongues. Even the livestock suffered. Cows and sheep ceased to yield milk for lack of salt. People walked about as if drugged, and fell into illnesses. The king himself and his daughters looked but like shadows."
Same as the expression "(not) worth one's salt". Roman soldiers used to get paid in salt instead of money a lot of the time.
Basically long form marketing for your product.
[1] As you can tell from the history of the site, I originally wrote the salt post in 2018 and then didn't do anything for a few years. I recently quit my job and took a 1-year sabbatical (which will probably end up being only 9 months) [2] and finally invested the time/energy to build the book club service I had been kicking around all this time. The blog is my place to discuss interesting ideas from whatever books I'm reading (such as this fascinating "resulting" idea [4] I learned from Thinking In Bets). If you would like to contribute to the blog I am open to that possibility (just dig around on the site or my personal site to figure out how to contact me).
[2]: https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical/prologue
[3]: https://bookworm.club/about/
[4]: https://bookworm.club/blog/resulting/
I only see how to add books to my account or to connect GoodReads (which I don’t use).
How can I see what other people are reading or if I have any matches? I don’t even see anything like “zero matches”…
Since the submission today has been on the front page, you should wait at least a few weeks before doing this, to let the hivemind caches clear. Follow-up posts shouldn't come too quickly or else they start having an anti-curiosity effect (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
If you want to send a draft to hn@ycombinator.com, I can help you edit it. The same offer goes for anybody. However: be aware that the inbox is brutal, my worst case latency is shit, and so you may end up having to wait a long time!
Any clue why the bacteria that can survive the salt happens to be a "good" one? What has stopped "bad" bacteria that can survive the salt too from evolving?
I believe the answer is that "bad" bacteria CAN oftentimes survive in environments with high-salinity [1], but struggle to compete with lactic-acid bacteria (i.e. "good" bacteria - LAB) in the presence of both a saline environment as well as a high ph environment. LAB also engage in antimicrobial activities within your gut [2] likely using bacteriocins as the mechanism.
Salt generally inhibits fungal growth though.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/femsle/article/243/2/373/495985
[2]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15374659/
I used to think this as well but it's apparently not true! In hunter gatherer tribes (and probably early agricultural groups) it sufficed for two parties to agree that one was getting the better deal and agree there was a debt. Then in a later transaction the debt would likely go the other direction, as the party in debt for the first transaction overpaid. This cycle seems to have repeated indefinitely if everyone stayed on reasonably good terms. Importantly, the stability of communities was the bedrock of these types interactions. Once communities got extremely large (1000s) or travelers became common place, the kind of comparative you're discussing seems to have become more important.
I'd recommend reading "Debt, the First 5000 Years" to learn more
In nature there is no such thing as borrowing from the future (natures favourite debt is borrowing from the past = chop wood 2 years before you're supposed to burn it to give it time to dry, plant months before you harvest, share discoveries without copyright/patent, that sorta thing), it's a purely human/predatory thing to think you can fool others into debt; sacrificing their own offspring like that: because either way you turn it you're probably not going to want to be around when it's time to pay the "real" price of debt = voluntary slavery, then energy collapse followed by a shitstorm of domino-effects! History rhymes they say.
I think all economic "professors", writing books about a past they have no clue about, probably suffer from this good old quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Eventually you'll see how biased/"sunk cost" David Graeber was to think that "stone-agers had debt too" like they would care... it was probably salt/shells as lubrication or smack them over the head before the deal was over.
The more I think about it the more I'm convinced debt only came with generalized written/read language and all the book-keeping crap the Italians discovered in the 14th century, about the same time the first Chineese dude forbid silver with punishement of death and started printing paper bills...
So yes, there was debt but not the kind of orderly debt you and I are thinking about, but rather the debt of people exploiting others for decades and almost getting away with it; "debt", those stories never seem to get fairy-tale endings though.
So what is really different this time? Nothing!
Trust me if it's one story that has been on repeat for the last 20-30 centuries it's monetary inflation, and energy inflation never seems to agree with that; because you can't print energy: all revolutions are monetary, but before that they are increase in entropy!
Seen that we're on the peak of the largest possible energy bubble, by time of storage (millions of years of sunlight creating coal, oil and gas), powering the largest fictionary money/debt bubble any monkey could be fooled into believing, I would say it's time to talk to David Graeber about what really happened in the past!
The real connection is violence! Debt is voilence postponed; salt means peace, atleast for now!
That may be true with one-off interactions, but in smaller communities or with individuals that you have regular (trading) contact with, screwing someone over would make you into a social pariah.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory#Infinitely_long_ga...
Between two tribes of 100 I'm pretty sure it was permanent war; unless they where symbiotic, in which case I would call them one tribe of 200.
Energy (heat, water, food) where really scarce when you hadn't figured out coal, oil and gas yet or now after those discoveries of reserves have peaked.
I think it requires atleast one day of cold, thirsty, hunger to be able to understand what social in those days felt like.
As for game theory it's just a pretentious labeling of "force the hand" incentives when many people are involved, you don't need a theory for that, it's allready proven.
Basically it's why debt (as inflation = negative real rates) works in the first place: somebody gives you an incentive to not give a damn about your own kids future by pointing at theories that have failed over and over again in history but somehow they still manage to "socially" convince you that it's ok because everyone is doing it!
Everything in life is a pyramid scheme, but most things end up being ponzi schemes, you just have to learn to see the difference.
Well you would be wrong to call them one tribe. The US and Mexico have a symbiotic relationship, are they one country?
And it's good that you are "pretty sure" it would be war, but would you like to post any sources at all? Or is this just your gut feeling?
"Basically it's why debt (as inflation = negative real rates) works in the first place: somebody gives you an incentive to not give a damn about your own kids future by pointing at theories that have failed over and over again in history but somehow they still manage to "socially" convince you that it's ok because everyone is doing it!
Everything in life is a pyramid scheme, but most things end up being ponzi schemes, you just have to learn to see the difference."
You have gone really off topic here and I am struggling to see what this has to do with the original topic. You also seem to have an agenda that isn't really related to the topic of debt in the ancient world.
Now imagine if the lender could just print cows! Now you know how the current clown show is run (debt = inflation, as real interest rates go below zero)!
And by failing to understand it you are punishing your own kids.
We have physical documents recording debts well back into the Sumerian period. At the time, financial records were inscribed in clay and stored in government buildings. When a city was sacked, these buildings would be torched, baking the clay tablets to ceramic, and then burying them under ash, preserving them for the ages. We have tens of thousands of these documents.
So, no, finance was not, in fact, invented in 14th-century AD Italy. And, no, formal, legally-binding debt existed long before there was currency.
Nobody cares what those peppers look like, and the tilling, planting, and harvesting, washing, and crushing are all pretty automated. Vinegar and salt are also pretty cheap, as is bottling equipment.
sodium replaces insulin because it also causes your body to hold on to water. so it was very important because you needed it to offset lower insulin and also because you were losing it much more. if you didnt have access to salt back then you would have become very ill.
a modern person who eats almost nothing but sugar in one form or another and in enormous quantities has so much insulin that they barely need any sodium unless they drink large amounts of water. we even tell people to have less sodium. but earlier people werent that way.
Till refrigeration came along, the most important usage of salt was in preserving food. In wars like the US Civil War for instance, special missions were undertaken by the Union to destroy the Confederacy's Salt Works. That then meant that the Confederates could not preserve sufficient food, and therefore the Confederate soldiers had problems with malnutrition, one of the reasons the Confederacy lost the US Civil War.