Salt is a dietary mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride that is essential for animal life, but toxic to most land plants. Salt flavor is one of the basic tastes, and salt is the most popular food seasoning.Fact: date=May 2008 Salt is also an important preservative. This mineral is very popular, in science projects performed by middles schoolers.

Salt for human consumption is produced in different forms: unrefined salt (such as sea salt), refined salt (table salt), and iodized salt. It is a crystalline solid, white, pale pink or light gray in color, normally obtained from sea water or rock deposits. Edible rock salts may be slightly grayish in color due to this mineral content.

Chloride and sodium ions, the two major components of salt, are necessary for the survival of all known living creatures, including humans. Salt is involved in regulating the water content (fluid balance) of the body. Salt cravings may be caused by trace mineral deficiencies as well as by a deficiency of sodium chloride itself. Conversely, over consumption of salt increases the risk of health problems, including high blood pressure.

History

main: History of salt Human beings have used canning and artificial refrigeration for the preservation of food for approximately the last two hundred years, however, in the millennia before then, salt provided the best-known food preservative, especially for meat. The harvest of salt from the surface of the salt lake Yuncheng in Shanxi, China dates back to at least 6000 BC, making it one of the oldest verifiable saltworks. rp: 18–19

Salt was included among funereal offerings found in ancient Egyptian tombs from the third millennium BC, as were salted birds and salt fish.rp: 38 From about 2800 BC, the Egyptians began exporting salt fish to the Phoenicians in return for Lebanon Cedar, glass, and the dye Tyrian purple; the Phoenicians traded Egyptian salt fish and salt from North Africa throughout their Mediterranean trade empire.rp: 44

Along the Sahara, the Tuareg maintain routes especially for the transport of salt by Azalai (salt caravans). In 1960, the caravans still transported some 15,000 tons of salt, but this trade has now declined to roughly a third of this figure.

Salzburg, Hallstatt, and Hallein lie on the river Salzach in central Austria, within a radius of no more than 17 kilometres. Salzach literally means "salt water" and Salzburg "salt city", both taking their names from the Germanic root for salt, salz. Hallstatt literally means "salt town" and Hallein "saltwork", taking their names from hal(l)-, a root for salt found in Celtic, Greek, and Egyptian.Fact: date=July 2008 The root hal(l)- also gave us Gaul, the Roman exonym for the Celts, Halle and Schwäbisch Hall in Germany, Halych in Ukraine, and Galicia in Spain: this list of places named for Celtic saltworks is far from complete.