Le seul minéral que nous mangeons

The only mineral we eat

Halite is a rock: naturally formed, inorganic, crystalline, of defined composition. We eat no other.

I'd like to start with the strangest thing I know about salt, and which is almost never said.

Everything you eat was once alive. Flour comes from a seed, oil from a fruit, meat from an animal, honey from a flower that passed through a bee. Take any ingredient from your kitchen and trace its history: you always arrive at something that has breathed, grown, or circulated.

Except one.

Salt has never been alive. It is a mineral in the strict sense that geologists give to this word: a naturally formed, inorganic substance, with a crystalline structure and a defined chemical composition. In a museum display case, halite — that's its scientific name — is placed alongside quartz and pyrite. It has a hardness on the Mohs scale, a crystalline system, a refractive index. It's a rock.

And it's the only rock we put in our mouths.

It took me a long time to understand what that meant. We are a species that, every day, without thinking, swallows a piece of rock. Not by accident, not as an exotic deficiency: out of absolute necessity, several times a day, all human beings on the planet, forever. There is no other comparable eating behavior in the living world—and yet we find it so commonplace that we have put the mineral in a plastic salt shaker, placed between the pepper and the napkins.