Although salt is a fundamental requirement in human biology, societies
differ in the access they have to salt and in their attitudes toward
it. This article uses the Human Relations Area Files to explore
the relationships among diet (operationalized by a scoring system
that identifies the customary diet as primarily derived from the
plant kingdom [PK] or primarily derived from the animal kingdom
[AK], or some variation thereof), use of salt, and positive and negative
valuation of salt (operationalized by a scoring system applied to
explicit or implicit statements about the value of salt). |