Thursday 08 December 2016


Super savour

Profile: Salt

Salt is a killer, but it is a fraudster, too. Its trick is to persuade you that it makes food taste better. Wars have been fought for it, civilisations raised on the back of it, and clever people conned by it throughout history. Homer called salt "a divine substance", but the chances are his blood pressure was higher than the topless towers of Ilium. You can't fool New Labour, though, and now salt is in big trouble.

Here's how it works: salt is edible rock - the only non-biological foodstuff humans regularly or intentionally eat. When the tongue comes into contact with it, the brain receives an urgent message that something unnatural is being eaten.

So the brain orders the nose to investigate, and the odour receptors that largely control our sense of taste are reset to a heightened state of sensitivity. Diligent in its duties, the nose - now checking for every whiff of flavour - starts to perceive innocuous or even bland food as interesting and flavoursome. All is well. The brain relaxes. Until, one day, it gets a message from the heart: "Arrrrrghhh!!"

A not-too-dissimilar cry of anguish arose last week from the British food industry. In these days of crazed do-goodism, smart people take health alerts with, well, a pinch of salt, but a report issued last week by the Department of Health made genuinely scary reading.

It alleged that the food industry and the major supermarkets had repeatedly reneged on promises to reduce the salt content in our national diet, and claimed that some popular edibles such as crisps are actually saltier today than 25 years ago. A single Safeway Chicken Caesar sandwich was found to contain 5.9 grams of salt - more than a teaspoonful, and virtually the entire recommended daily amount for an adult.

At this kind of dosage, salt isn't a condiment but a WMD. No wonder Melanie Johnson, the Public Health Minister, is steamed up and threatening legislation. A serious taste for sarnies like this would give you the highest salt content since Lot's wife. Why, though, at a time when our national diet has never been more varied and abundant, is there so much salt around?

"It's to disguise the lack of taste," says Anton Edelmann, a former head chef at the Savoy hotel. "It makes up for poor ingredients. It also works as a stabiliser with some foods; it retains moisture and helps keep things going a little longer."

What it doesn't do is keep the consumers going longer. Salt is estimated to kill around 35,000 Britons a year, mostly as a result of strokes and heart attacks brought on by high blood pressure. All this, Ms Johnson and her ilk are always ready to remind us, is very costly to the NHS.

Salt may be a villain, but its role as an elemental force in human history makes the shrill denunciation of it by a junior Labour minister somehow unseemly. It has been a precursor to civilisation from earliest times - at the core of everything from religion to engineering to literature. Animals made trails to salt-licks. Men followed them, turned the trails into roads and built their first settlements along the way. This was how London, a stopping point on the salt route from Cheshire to the south coast, first became a town.

Salt has been used to clean chimneys, weld pipes, glaze pottery and treat toothaches. It was recognised as a valuable commodity in China 4,000 years ago and taxed as such. The ancient Egyptians used it in mummification. The Roman legions of Caesar (not the one responsible for the sandwich) were paid monthly in salt, bequeathing us the word "salary".

By the Middle Ages vast caravans, sometimes consisting of 40,000 laden camels, were crossing the Sahara bearing salt to be traded for slaves. Without the discovery that salt could preserve food the great early journeys of exploration would never have been possible. The early Basque mariners realised, as long ago as the 11th century, that cod, dried and salted, could facilitate voyages of once unthinkable duration. Not only that but the fish tasted better than when it was caught. A thousand years later brandade de morue - salted cod - remains a popular bistro dish on the Continent.

The world's demand for salt fashioned politics, financed empires, triggered insurrections and led to the development of modern societies. In 18th-century France, the gabelle, or salt tax, powerfully fuelled the resentments of the masses and became a crucial link in the chain of events that culminated in the Revolution.

In India, more than a century later, the Raj's harsh control of the pricing and manufacture of domestically produced salt led to Mahatma Gandhi's celebrated 1930 "Salt March" to the Arabian Sea, and a hastening of the movement towards full independence.

As the mineral's mystique grew, ever more wondrous properties were attributed to it. In many cultures it was taken for granted that salt was essential to a satisfactory sex life. The Romans had coined the expression salax (salted) to described the more libidinous of their number, from which we have the word salacious.

Pre-Darwinian biologists, awed by the fecundity of sea creatures - a cod can produce nine million eggs in a single spawning - were convinced that salt provided the explanation. Sailors noticed to their dismay that rats on a ship appeared to multiply far faster than they did on shore, and reached a similar conclusion. Even today brides in Germany traditionally sprinkle their shoes with salt to assure fertility.

Given that salt has done so much for us, can it really be as harmful as the health lobby likes to make out? Well, yes and no. And then only when you get 5 grams of it in a single can of baked beans. An excess of salt causes the body to retain fluid, putting an increased circulatory burden on the heart. Most of us are consuming double the recommended amount of 6 grms a day.

Salt - sodium chloride - is essential to life. It is needed in every part of our bodies and present in everything we emit from tears to semen. It keeps our hearts ticking, our blood flowing, our muscles moving, our neurons twitching. Without salt we would die. But since the human body - bafflingly in the light of the otherwise comprehensive maintenance system bestowed upon us by nature - lacks the capacity to manufacture salt for itself, we have to rely on external sources of supply. And that is where the trouble starts.

Today, salt is too abundant, too cheap, but as artful as ever in its manipulation of our senses. Generations of us have grown up accustomed to its presence on the table, and we heap it on regardless of whether we need it. Nico Ladenis, the virtuoso London chef, once banned salt shakers from his restaurant, and threatened to throw diners who asked for them onto the street, but the bafflement and occasional antagonism of his customers forced him to back down.

Nico's dilemma - albeit at the other end of the gustatory spectrum - is precisely that of the bulk food manufacturers in the face of the Government's complaints. If customers don't like the taste of something, they won't buy it. And while the better-educated middle classes, according to Edelmann, are slowly wising up, millions more of us, especially children (of all classes), associate saltiness with taste.

Which is why a single slice of white bread contains 500 mgs of salt, a bowl of cornflakes 750 mgs, and a typical children's meal from a fast food joint well over 3 grams.

Martin Paterson, the deputy director of the British Food and Drink Federation, claims the industry is getting an unfair rap. The customers go where their tastes direct them he says, and there is only so much any food company can do if it wants to stay solvent. "A reduced salt product which is left on the shelf, or to which people add salt at the table, will not benefit anyone," he says.

It's a bleak prospect. The consumers like the taste, and the industry likes the business. Which leaves Ms Johnson and her team from the ministry with the job of casting sodium into odium.

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