Salt: An Afterword

The Somerset village of Bruton is home to the internationally renowned Hauser and Wirth art gallery. Opposite the entrance to the gallery’s restaurant stands a large glass-fronted box, eight feet high and 15 feet wide, in which hang huge sides of meat. The back wall of the box consists of 500 blocks of pink Himalayan salt, ‘highly valued for their purity’, quarried from the Salt Range in Pakistan. The salt wall helps to ‘dry-age’ the meat, to preserve it and impart flavour. ‘This is not artwork’, explains the caption on the glass. ‘This is art as food’. In this decidedly un-Gandhian setting, subcontinental salt represents sophistication and exoticism, cosmopolitan chic and costly culinary essence—salt less as nature than as artifice. I have that rose-tinted contemporary image in mind as I think about this timely and thought-provoking set of essays.