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I used to bristle when people described me as salt of the earth. I felt it pigeonholed me as common, unspectacular, even doltish. But after reading Salt: A World History (Walker, 2002, hardcover, $28) by Mark Kurlansky, I've relented. Considering salt has sparked revolutions; entranced queens; seduced sailors to travel the world; and impelled man to invent gunpowder, the drill, and Tabasco sauce, I'll take the remark as a compliment next time.

Kurlansky's premise is simple, yet dramatic: Without salt there would be no life. On a molecular level he's correct. It keeps the heart pumping, blood flowing, and neurons firing. The body doesn't produce sodium chloride, the chemical name for salt, and therefore we must always search for it. And it's this search for salt that is at the epicenter of Kurlansky's story. But there's a broader aspect to his thesis: Economics, religion, politics, foreign affairs, sex, and nearly every other social and cultural interaction has been influenced to some degree by salt.

How did a common pantry item come to wield such power? "Up until 100 years ago, salt was a highly sought-after commodity," said Kurlansky at a recent meeting of the Culinary Historians of New York in New York City. "People desperately needed it but didn't have the technology to mine it as effectively as we do now." But lack of technology didn't stop countries from trying to expand their size and wealth by the acquisition, use, and sale of salt.

Kurlansky undertakes the Herculean task of tracing the history of this edible rock from the mines of ancient China in 3000 B.C. to Egypt, where salt was essential for the mummification of royalty. He eventually heads to England with its sinkholes (a product of overmining) and America, whose very independence relied upon the availability of salt. Along the way, Kurlansky somehow manages to highlight just about every major empire and political power without losing this history-challenged reader. And he often dazzles. But it's not with the flurry of painstakingly researched facts and anecdotes he peppers throughout the book, but how he weaves this all together into a compelling story.

Salt is larger in scope than Kurlansky's previous works, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (Penguin, 1998) and The Basque History of the World (Fairmount Books, 1999), and at times he flirts with ov'rleaping ambition by trying to tackle over 5,000 years of history in 449 pages. But every time he's bitten off too much, he narrows the narrative to the individual, and the book is never more engaging than when it highlights the personal and the intimate.

For example, salt has had a long association with sex and fertility. Kurlansky says that the cause is multi-determined. First, pre-Darwinian thinkers concluded that because fish, which have copious offspring, swim in salted water, salt must be a fertility potion. Additional support for the erroneous theory came from sailors who worked on ships laden with salt. They noticed that the mice population grew exponentially when out at sea and came to believe that the rodents could reproduce without sex simply by being near salt.

Such beliefs influenced matrimonial customs as well. Bridal couples in the Pyrenées went to their wedding ceremony with salt in their left pockets to guard against impotence. German brides had their shoes lightly sprinkled with salt to assure a fertile marriage. The sex/salt connection even made its way into language: Romans called a man in love salax (in a salted state), which is the origin of the word salacious.

Great stories are great in part because they contain great characters. And Salt is not wanting for any. There's Li Bing, the beloved Chinese governor and brilliant engineer, who ordered the drilling of the world's first brine wells in 252 B.C. And Gandhi, who in 1930 led a salt march to the sea at Dandi and broke British law, which forbade the use of locally produced salt, by scraping up some encrusted crystals and holding them high as a symbol of Indian defiance. The list of U.S. players include the Civil War generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, who wielded salt (which was used to cure hides, provide nourishment to horses, and preserve meats for rations) as a weapon of war. Undoubtedly, the most colorful Americans were Pattillo Higgins and Anthony Lucas, who, against the advice of experts, drilled an East Texas salt dome and discovered an oil reserve so large "it spawned the age of petroleum."

But at its most fundamental, salt was indispensable in creating the foodways of the world. "The only way a perishable commodity could become a salable item was if it were salted, because until the middle of last century there was no refrigeration," said Kurlansky. "Salted foods got people through October to May in northern climates." And even today, although we don't need to preserve food in salt in order to survive fallow seasons as our ancestors did, we still love salted comestibles. Cod, herring, olives, and ham are just a few of the foods we find irresistible. A necessity for salted foods has now become a craving for them.

In a work as large and as comprehensive as this, there are bound to be some inconsistencies. For example, in one paragraph Kurlansky mentions that "butter was cheap food and was more popular with the poor than the rich." In the following paragraph he goes on to state that there was a movement afoot to make butter "more than a luxury for the rural elite...by trying to preserve it in salt." But such nitpicking is small-minded and misses the big picture: Kurlansky has extracted a surprisingly fascinating tale from one of the world's most taken-for-granted staples. And it is indeed a story worth its salt.

For more information, visit Salt: A World History.