a pinch of salt

Imagine a world where salt is so valuable that it is used as the currency. There was a time when this was true. The Greeks, Romans, Ethiopians and the Tibetans, all are known to have used salt as currency at some point in history. In fact the word Salary, is derived from salt, it literally means to give a person salt. And sayings like "worth his salt" are a byproduct of the times when salt was the currency. The Greeks would trade slaves using salt, and a good slave was considered worth his salt, or worth the value paid for him.

Today although salt has around fourteen thousand uses, currency is not one of them.

I know the culinary uses of salt, but I have always wondered what would world be like if salt was the currency.

So in today's world if we got rid of the paper notes and got back to salt, how different would things be? If salt costed what it did during the Roman times, we would be paying around eighty dollars per pound of salt. I did not come up with this figure, I found it in a very interesting article online, and believe that a lot of research went behind it.

But getting back to a scenario where salt is the currency, imagine going to Macy's and getting a gorgeous Ralph Lauren dress for a sack of salt, or going to your local bank with a can of salt and coming back with salt cubes in change or getting salt bars for your salary.

All the places near sea shore would be controlled by the government. There would be no celebrity sightings at Malibu and no vacations in carribbean or Hawai. I guess bikini would have never been born. In all likelihood we would not be using salt in preparation of food and would have come up with some substitute. Pepper would be standing alone on table tops. Perhaps there would be fewer people with blood pressure problems.

Chances are salt would come in different colours of different value. A bizarre scenario would be that salt would be somehow waterproofed.

Well life would certainly be very different from what we know now, and perhaps some one would be blogging about the times when paper was used as currency, fantasizing about going to Macy's and buying a designer dress for a sheet of paper.