ELI5: How does salt enhance foods that are supposed to be sweet?

Yes. Grain is easy to get because it grows on the floor.

I met a man a couple months back, his occupation is inconsequential busy work. His wife is a first-generation Thai immigrant. Her family owns and works farmland consisting of rice paddies. They produce roughly 150 koku (an antiquated Japanese measurement I am using as an example for convenience that equates to the amount of rice one man eats in a year as a subsistence diet) per harvest. It takes them a week to plant, it takes them ten days to harvest. This is ten people, spending seventeen days a year, to produce a crop that will feed one hundred fifty people who eat rice as their sole source of grain, planted, grown, harvested, threshed, bagged, and sold by hand.

Salary refers to the the amount of money given to a Roman soldier to buy salt.

Salt is plentiful and freely available, but can be time consuming to produce and distribute by ancient methods. The distribution labor is the sole reason that salt was considered expensive. It was already valuable, intrinsically, being a building block of human nutrition, and the prices were escalated à la cartels.

If you're going to feign ignorance, try to have a basic knowledge of the subject, first.

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