I just made some dinner and was thinking about how salt and spices^[1] now are dirt cheap, but throughout history they were precious and expensive. I did some digging and apparently low and middle class people didn't even really have access to spices. It was more for the wealthy.

Salt was important mainly to preserve food. They didn't have fridges back then! So even poor people usually had some amount of salt to preserve small quantities of food, but they had to be smart about how they allocated it.

In researching this I came to realize that throughout history, food was usually pretty gross. Meats were partially spoiled, fats went rancid, grains were moldy. This would often cause digestive problems. Food poisoning was a part of life.

Could you imagine! That must have been terrible!

Meanwhile, today, not only is it cheap to access food that is safe to eat, it's cheap to use basically as much salt and spices as you want. Fry up some potatoes in vegetable oil with salt and spices. Throw together some beans and rice. Incorporate a cheap acid if you're feeling fancy -- maybe some malt vinegar with the potatoes or white vinegar with the beans and rice. It's delicious!

I suppose there are tons of examples of how good we have it today, and how bad people had it throughout history. I like thinking about this sort of thing though. I'm not sure why, exactly. I think I feel some sort of obligation. An obligation to view these sorts of things as they actually are rather than how they compare to the Joneses, and to appreciate when I truly do have it good.

1. ^{^}

   It feels weird to say the phrase "salt and spices". It feels like it's an error and that I meant to say "salt and pepper". Maybe there's a more elegant way of saying "salt and spices", but it of course isn't an error.

   It makes me think back to something I heard about "salt and pepper", maybe in the book How To Taste. We often think of them as going together and being on equal footing. They aren't on equal footing though, and they don't always have to go together. Salt is much more important. Most dishes need salt. Pepper is much more optional. Really, pepper is a spice, and the question is 1) if you want to add spice to your dish and 2) if so, what spice. You might not want to add spice, and if you do want to add spice, pepper might not be the spice you want to add. So maybe "salt and spices" should be a phrase that is used more often than "salt and pepper".