Customer Reviews

Salt: Grain of Life

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Even if it's here as a cooking book it'snot one. The writer is a french scientist whose speciality is chemistry. The book deals with the history of salt through economy, epistemology, proverbs and everyday life.

Very enjoyable.

Salt, A Grain of Life, by Pierre Laszlo, provides an in-depth look into the world of salt. Laszlo, a professor of chemistry at the University of Liège in Belgium and the École Polytechnique in Paris, veers away from the more structured, scientific look at salt, and chooses to explore how salt production, uses, and conflicts surrounding the mineral have affected history. Though the technologies surrounding salt is more suited towards a reader who enjoys biology and chemistry, Pierre Laszlo does a very good job of tying the humanistic side of salt for those readers who are more interested in how this mineral affects us, mankind.

The author breaks his book down into seven different chapters with various subheadings within each chapter and provides a concise conclusion. Each chapter addresses a certain aspect of salt, from salt cured foods and conflicts concerning salt to the biology and harvesting of salt. The chapter that really brings the book together is a chapter entitled "Abuses of Power". This chapter opens with an explanation of the technology of producing and transporting salt. Laszlo provides numerous case studies to illustrate his point. All of which are very interesting.

After reading all 169 pages of Lazlo's work, there are only a couple of complaints a reader may have about this book. The first being if you decide to read the book in English and not in its original French, you may find the translation somewhat difficult to read because the language comes of very stiff. The second would be the organization of the book in general. The chapters themselves are very compelling, but one forgets what they've just read because there is not cohesiveness to the entire book. But overall, the information provided in this book was incredibly interesting and gives a new twist on the everyday mineral that is salt.