I've only read a third of the way into it, but (at least for now) I haven't gotten the impression that he's following historical conflicts through a single commodity. So far, he hasn't really discussed many conflicts or war fought over salt. He has been zeroed in on salt among the Chinese, the Romans, the Greek, the Vikings, etc. He does a little very ancient history, considering how people extracted salt from mines, water, etc. looking at archaeological evidence -- pottery, tools, and the the how much salt was in the diet. He considers various recipes uncovered in the research. Writes about how slaves were used in mining. He's interested in the need for salt as impetus to technological development: the tools and machines devised to extract and make salt. The emphasis on wars, so far, is minor. But I'm guessing that it becomes a bigger factor later in the book, from what John Thornton said about an excerpt he read.
Basically, it's a Buddy Freddy's Buffet style of a book. There really is no thesis, other than to follow salt in whatever historical era it manifests in a particular culture or nation. You know: a little mound of tossed salad here, a honkin pile of mashed potatoes and gravy there, some sliced meat, and a dab of fruit salad. Pick and choose as you please.
I'd peg him as a kind of "progressive" *spit* in his views when he writes, in the intro:
:For millennia, salt represented wealth. Carribbean salt merchants
stockpiled it in the basements of their homes. The Chinese, the Romans, the
French, the Venetians, the Hapsburgs, and numerous other governments taxed
it to raise money for wars. Soldiers and sometimes workers were paid in
salt. It was often used as money.
In his 1776 treatise on capitalism, The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith pointed out that almost anything of value could be used for money. he cited as examples tobacco, sugar, dried cod, and cattle and stated that "salt is said to be a common instrument of commerce and exchanges in Abyssinia." But he offered the opinion that the best currency was made of metal because it was physically durable, even if its value was as ephemeral as other commodities.
Today, thousands of years of coveting, fighting over, hoarding, taxing, and searching for salt appear picturesque and slightly foolish. The 17th-century British leaders who spoke with urgency about the dangerous national dependence on French sea salt seem somehow more comic than contemporary leaders concerned with a dependence on foreign oil. In every age, peope are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value.
The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of the quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of mirage."
pp. 12-13
In that, he's very much a bourgeois historian.
That's about as close to a thesis statment you get. Earlier on, he reveals his passion in the opening of the book, describe a rock of salt he purchased from a merchant hawking salt rocks from the salt mountain of Cardona. After describing why he was fascinated by the behavior of the rock (drying out then puddling up when humid; forming a green crust as it sat on a copper plate and polishing the copper with the brine), he writes:
"My rock lived by its own rules. When friends stopped by, I told them the rock was salt, and they would delicately lick a corner and verify that it tasted just like salt.
Those who think a fascination with salt is a bizarre obsession have simply never owned a rock like this."
The reason why he's focused on food is because he was once a chef:
"Mark has a long-standing interest in food and food history. He worked as a professional chef and pastry maker in New York and New England and currently writes a regular column about food history for Food & Wine magazine. (one of these was included in Best Food Writing 2000). His book Cod (1997) received the James Beard Award for Excellence in Food Writing, The Glenfiddich 1999 Food and Drink Award for Best Book, and was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the Best Books of 1997. Cod was also a New York Times Business Bestseller and a Boston Globe Bestseller. The Basque History of the World (1999) underscored Mark's passion for immersion in cultures struggling to preserve, or define their identity, and was published to similar acclaim."
As to James' interest in this genre, I think it's a fetishization of food based on the elitist foodie culture that has emerged as part of the widening gap between the haves and have nots in the u.s. I also think it's a very gendered phenom: men discover the kitchen, start watching the Food Channel, and start making a big deal out of the things that peple have been doing for ages without making a big to-do out of it.
Another thing I found extremely annoying about Pollan. The guy makes a meal, turns it into a big whoopdedoo project, and then looks down his nose at folks who, gosh, just make a meal and eat. It has to be a production for him to be worth his while.
Consider how he makes corn. Most people remove the husk and throw it in a pot of boiling water. Add butter, salt and pepper, done deal. Oh no. Not Pollan. Pollan has to rub it with olive oil, salt and pepper, wrap it in husks against, and roast it over a wood fired. *rolls eyes*
Like I said: it is the conceit of turning everything into an event-experience, as men have often done when they fetishize barbecuing or making upthe one special dish they've become famous for in the family. I suspect this is because Pollan is over fifty.
He is, in other words, Martha Stewart for hipsters. But no one is going to knock him for that, because he's a guy. Martha Steward was criticized for turning the work of "home making" into an elaborate production, setting higher and higher standards for what counted as "home making" -- especially for the hipster set where the women drop out for a while. This standard is then popularized making women who can't afford to spend inordinate amounts of time flower arranging and grinding their own nutmeg.
But Pollan isn't seen in that light because his influence is probably very much on how _men_ perceive their relationship to their stainless steel appliances and granite countertops and wine coolers.
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)