things I'm learning from reading "Salt" by Mark Kurlansky

Or, more accurately, things that had never occurred to me before:
* The main reason salt earns itself a book about its historical importance is historically, salt was the only way to preserve food.
* The above fact is fairly obvious when you stop to think about it; refrigeration has only been widespread for less than a century. However, according to the book the practice of canning is only about 200 years old. Growing up, my mom canned fruit andtomatoes every summer. My grandmother canned in greater quantities. Canning was a big part of homestead histories of the U.S. frontier. I had always assumed it would have been in revolutionary times, as well. Nope.
* I'd heard of food being preserved by salt before refrigeration. I didn't realize this meant it was often pickled. Or smoked dry along with the heavy salting. I also never bothered to think about the end result, the fact that salted meat required boiling or soaking in fresh water before eating.
* As it's hard for me to think of salt's place in a world without refrigeration, it's similarly hard for me to think of salt production in a world without large-scale commercial salt factories. Today the industrial production and easy transportation makes it impossible to think of salt as a scarce commodity. But when you're forced to get it by evaporating salt water in large ponds, and you're in a rainy climate, it starts to become a lot harder to get salt in large quantities.

I'm becoming a big fan of books with a single noun as the title. "Stiff". "Rats". "Salt".