Salt as a preservative

Historically, whether food was hunted, gathered, or grown and harvested, food supply was rarely available year-round to all members of society. Yet, effective, year-round, reliable food storage was vital, especially for non-nomadic agricultural communities. Today, to maintain reliable food supplies to our ever-expanding urban populations, we refrigerate, freeze-dry or can our food. Food preservation problems seem trivial to most consumers in the developed world, outside of the world’s war zones. But, before the 19th century, effective food storage often made the difference between life and death to large segments of the world’s human population.

In arid climates, food can be effectively stored by drying. But in more humid temperate climates, fungus and bacteria rapidly destroy stored and cellared food. Even where food can be stored in winter ice, it quickly rots when spring thaws set in. 

Nick Brandt unexpectedly found the dead animals that had washed up on the shore of Lake Natron in Tanzania, preserved by the high content of salt in the lake. He posed them as they had been in life. The photographs, taken between 2010 and 2012, appear in Brandt’s book Across the Ravaged Land (available from <http://www.nickbrandt.com>).

Documents from northern Europe give some clues about the severity of the problem and its solution. In medieval societies, with relatively poor transportation systems, villages and counties had to be close to self-sufficient in food. If a bad harvest occurred, then to mitigate a potential disaster, there had to be enough food stored to tide over until the next harvest. Medieval Europe offers an example of how agricultural societies dealt with food security. Good-quality arable land was scarce and had to be used for crops. That meant that grazing and foraging animals, mainly cattle and pigs, were turned out into the local woodlands for the summer to forage for grass, roots, and nuts. Any relative shortage of winter fodder, in turn, meant that surplus animals would best be butchered before cold weather drove them indoors. In medieval England, the annual slaughter was traditionally around Martinmas, St Martin’s Day (10 November), but it was earlier in the colder climes of Sweden. In turn, that meant that fresh meat was readily available only at that time and that fresh protein in the form of milk and butter was only available in winter from cows kept in shelter. In addition, taxes were often paid in kind rather than money, and that meant that the landlord had to be given foodstuffs that could be stored.

Salting fish for its preservation