Salt has been prized for millennia, and not just because it can make food tastier. In small quantities, salt is an essential part of the human diet. It has also been used to preserve many different kinds of food for long term storage, but there’s one really surprising use for salt that has been important in history too – did you know that salt was used for currency and trade for a long time?
Salt was used as a method of trade and currency in places as diverse as Tibet, ancient Greece, even Ethiopia. In some places, people would even lick a salt block to make sure it was real!
Salt is so ubiquitous in our lives that it has become part of several idioms. To “not be worth his salt” is quite the insult, but being “the salt of the earth” is high praise. If you “take something with a grain of salt,” you shouldn’t be too quick to believe it.
The very word “salary” comes from the Latin word “salarium.” This might have referred to the money soldiers were given to buy salt, or it might have been the salt itself!
