The "The International Commission for the History of Salt"
http://www.uibk.ac.at/sci-org/salt-history/index.html

recently had their meeting in WEIMAR Germany
Did anyone attend ?


Dear Halophiles
My apologies for not joining you earelier
As you surely have discovered, few are interested
in salt - [until perhaps they consider
some basic facts].
But even then, salt is looked upon
as any other commodity.

May I say welcome
to all you HALOPHILEs and ask you
to consider discussing salt as one of the
four essential elements of animal life which
today we take for granted:
eg:
# air - oxygen [still available - for breathing ]
# water [becoming more limted - for drinking ]
# protein proteios [inspite of BSE - for developing physique]
# salt [ physiological electrolytes -
today in unlimited supply]

Until the Industrial revolution things
were very different - Of these four
critical "elements" , salt was at
times in such short supply that the
resulting protection systems for
those few known sources - the monopolies
that we have since inherited in so many
spheres , might be said to have been
the direct cause of much of our civil
unequality and resulting violence

Salt supplies were extremely limited
at times and its manufacture depended
on primitiive fuels or on sea shore
evaporation systems.
To be fair to the historians there
were short periods of tranquility and
of liberal civilisation Democratic
ideology left us with the hope that
we were again moving towards the legendary
equality of those elite societies,
- but no historian has suggested that
the freedom from such monpolies was
initially the free access to salt, .





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