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Pass Over the “Table Salt” PLEASE !
April 1995
We know our future by looking at our past. Even tiny things, we take for granted, have a huge importance in history. Something as simple as the crystals of table salt become a fascinating investigation into our present world as well as into our future.The first official business done in the new world by the English Crown was the license to make salt. Was making salt so important to be licensed? Yes, because highly mineralized salt is not only the essence of life, but also the backbone of a productive society.
Through the most basic fabric of life runs the thread of salt. The British knew importance of salt and often taxed it highly. Protesting the British tax on salt, Gandhi went to the sea to make salt.
Christ spoke to us saying, " Make yourself as the salt of the earth." Salt routes establish trade through out the world. At the penalty of death prisoners would smuggle salt to their fellow inmates who were deprived of salt as a punishment, because the pain of living without salt is unbearable.
Salt is one of the most vital ingredients for life. All life seeks out salt, but not just sodium chloride (common table salt). All life seeks out this particular powerful rich mineral substance called salt. The great alchemical laboratory of this world is the Ocean which day in and day out distills the mineral world into a concentrated complex liquid from which we all come and toward which we all want to return. The oceans are a complex mineral mirror of our world. We carry this very specific mineral combination around with us in our blood. If it is not exactly correct, we can become very sick. Thus the sun, the wind, the stars all dance with the action of great bodies of water to make the truly magic elixir of life - mineralized waters. Sea water is a complex combination of chemical constituents, not just sodium chloride, from which all life arises and toward which every living cell seeks to be in balance. Ranchers know that their animals do better when given mineralized salt instead of white blocks of iodized sodium chloride. Back in merry old feudal England, to denote class sitting was arranged above and below the salt. About the same time in feudal Japan there was a very strict class structure. Salt was so important that one's position in society meant access to either the Emperor's special mineralized salt, very good kiln dried salt, solar dried salt, salt collected off the beach or reliance on salt water. The people who lacked the vision to see more than a few days ahead were at one extreme. These people were called spider or spineless people because they seasoned their food with salt water. The magnesium content was too high and dissolved the calcium in their bones. They were deformed because they did not have good salt. At the other extreme, the Emperor and his court got the Royal physician's formula for a highly mineralized salt. It was thought the Emperor must have the food to sustain a vision that would last many centuries and provide for his people for many generations.Between the Emperor’s special salt and lowly salt water seasoning of the spider people were the top of the social structure, i.e.. the artisans and higher level bureaucrats who received, were allotted or had access to kiln dried salt. Next and closer to day to day struggles were the lower level bureaucrats and the wealthy farmers and land owners who spent their life's energies in commerce, administration or trade. They used a solar dried sea salt. Just above the bottom of the social order were poor farmers, low level businessmen, and simple trades' people who spent their lives scratching out an existence from one crop or project to the next. They got salt gathered from the beach, not cleaned nor complete in mineral balance yet with more power for life than salt water. As we look backward, salt was much more than sodium chloride.
Roman soldiers received a dear pay. Of course it was not gold that sustained these fighter's lives. It was salt that became their salary. So every day we reach for the salt. Yet, table salt will not solve this hunger, because table salt is not salt. Table salt is 99.999% Sodium Chloride and the salt of Christ is not 99.999% sodium chloride.
So how did we come to think of salt as Sodium Chloride? Science created the wheels of the industrial revolution. Intellectual research made the wheels turn. The world had begun to codify everything in more and more precise figures. Eventually the scientific community turned its microscopes toward food. Crude by today's standards, the focus of salt was largely sodium chloride and small amounts of trace elements (considered insignificant). This was great for the large scale production. Because mined salt or sea salt could be processed in huge quantities of Sodium Chloride. There must have been some stir over the quality that resulted and it seemed good to be able to produce huge volumes of cheap salt. The fast paced business at the turn of the century could produce goods and services for everyone in mass amounts.
Still the public needed standard terms, weights and measures, and quality control to assure that what they got is what they thought they brought. The government created the codex to categorize and define the public’s foods. From then on the Federal Government expected that flour was white and that salt was sodium chloride. Well, salt as sodium Chloride may have worked for the scientific model of the day, but the salt of life is not the simple chemical compound sodium chloride.
So at first the salt produced in large industrial settings was pure sodium chloride and when people used it they become sick. They got rickets. After people got sick from using early convenience foods, such as white flour which could be milled and travel across country without going rancid, and "table salt" which could be produced in large quantities, the government and the research community went back and added some of what had been taken away. So what was different between Sea Salt and "Table Salt." On the surface the answer was no iodine. Afterwards salt was iodized.
Laws passed. Unless licensed you could not add anything back to the salt. This created an interesting catch 22, because in order to produce large scale quantities of Sodium Chloride it is necessary to remove most of all the trace elements. For the times it was a very capital intensive large scale project to remove most all of the trace elements in ocean water or mined sea salt. The result was bad unionized salt. Thus in effect the large salt houses had a monopoly on cheap salt. They had the resources to accomplish the job of making large quantities of Sodium Chloride and then add a little something back. Hence we now universally have safe fortified flour and iodized table salt.Compromises were made at each turn of humankind's positive intention to make the world a better place. Reason out weighted intuition. Often quantity for quality was the bottom line. Sometimes science had not progressed enough to appreciate the atomic level details. If you take all the minerals out of the salt, people will starve in small ways. Always driven to find ways to get what it must have, life will push to survive, turning every stone in search of more minerals. Some argue that the harsh quality of salt drives a nation down ward. An old Japanese proverb states the first sign the society is detonating is the loss of the salt man.
What is Salt? According to the American Heritage Dictionary: salt (sôlt) n.
1. A colorless or white crystalline solid, chiefly sodium chloride, used extensively as a food seasoning and preservative. Also called common salt, table salt.
2. A chemical compound formed by replacing all or part of the hydrogen ions of an acid with metal ions or electropositive radicals. So is Salt Sodium Chloride? By definition the important word to remember is chiefly, because the salt we consume as food must be much more than just sodium Chloride or we become sick and die. The answer is what we take for granted is much more important than the majority ingredient of the salt's chemistry. Seeing the forest for the trees, we call sodium chloride "salt." Understanding that the Emperor's Salt is a highly mineralized low sodium sea salt, we can choose to have a brighter future with the highly mineralized emperor’s salt today.
Interested in obtaining Muramoto’s Salt or The Emperor's Royal Salt