By the fourth month of my first Eskimo winter I was looking forward to every meal (fresh or high), enjoying them all, and feeling comfortable between times. But I kept thinking the cooked fish would taste better if only I had salt to use with it….The Mackenzie Eskimos, Roxy[Stefannson’s host Eskimo who had worked as a cabin boy on a whaling ship for a few years as a young man] told me, believe that what is good for grown people is good for children and enjoyed by them as soon as they get used to it. Accordingly, they[the Eskimos] teach the use of tobacco when a child is very young. It then grows to maturity with the idea that it can not get along without tobacco. But, said Roxy, the whalers have told that many whites get along without tobacco, and he had himself seen white men who never used it, while of the few white women who had been in this part of the Arctic, wive: of captains, none used tobacco. (This, remember, was in 1906.) Now Roxy had heard that white people believe salt is good, and even necessary for children; so they begin early to add salt to the baby's food. The white child then would grow up with the same attitude toward salt that an Eskimo child has toward tobacco. However, said Roxy, since the Eskimos were mistaken in thinking tobacco so necessary, may it not be that the white men are equally mistaken about salt? Pursuing the argument, he concluded that the reason why all Eskimos dislike salted food, though all white men like it, is not racial but due to custom. You could, then, break the salt habit with about the same difficulty as the tobacco habit, and you would suffer no ill result beyond the mental discomfort of the first few days or weeks...Roxy did not know, but I did as an anthropologist, that in pre-Columbian times salt was unknown, or the taste of it disliked and the use of it avoided, through much of North and South America. It may possibly be true that the carnivorous Eskimos, in whose language the word mamaitok, meaning "salty," is synonymous with "evil-tasting," disliked salt more intensely than those Indians who were partly herbivorous. Nevertheless, it is clear that the salt habit spread more slowly through the New World from the Europeans than the tobacco habit through Europe from the Americans. Even today there are considerable areas, for instance in the Amazon basin, where the natives still abhor salt. Not believing that the races differ in their basic natures, I felt inclined to agree with Roxy that the practice of salting food is with us a social inheritance and the belief in its merits, at least to some extent, a mere part of our folklore…..Through this philosophizing I was somewhat reconciled to going without salt; but I was, nevertheless, overjoyed when one day Ovayuak, my new host in the eastern delta, came indoors to say that a dog team was approaching which he believed to be that of Ilavinirk, a man who had worked with whalers and who possessed a can of salt. We went out to receive the visitor and, sure enough, it was Ilavinirk. He was delighted to give me the salt, a half-pound baking powder can about half full, which he said he had been carrying around for two or three years, hoping sometime to meet someone who would like it for a present. He seemed almost as pleased to find that I wanted the salt as I was to get it . I sprinkled some on my boiled fish, enjoyed it tremendously, and wrote in my diary that it was the best meal I had had all winter. Then I put the can under my pillow, in the Eskimo way of keeping small and treasured things. But at the next meal I had almost finished eating before I remembered the salt. Apparently, then, my longing for it had been what might be called imaginary. I finished that meal without salt, tried it once or twice during the next few days, and thereafter left it untouched. When we moved camp the salt remained behind. Page 50-51
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