Leisha Plant & Kitchen Alchemy · Evening reading, Day 2 of 7
One of seven evening readings from Plant & Kitchen Alchemy, a Living Ground workshop on soil, plants, microbes and food as medicine. Each piece stands on its own; you can also start from the beginning.
There are two white powders on almost every table in the world. One came out of the sea. The other grew in a field. They pour the same, sparkle the same, and if I handed you a spoonful of each in the dark, you would have to put them on your tongue to tell them apart.
We trust them both. We argue about both. We have been told to fear both. And here is the part nobody says out loud: you cannot live without either, and you cannot live with too much of either.
So let’s meet them properly. Salt and sugar.
Today, in our workshop activity, we shredded plants, scattered some salt, squeezed it with our hands, and liquid appeared. Nobody poured it in. This is nature’s way of sharing. We also made a plant sugar that will mature as the week progresses.
In the salt jar, remember that every plant cell holds a little sugar, and as the salt draws out the juice, the sugar comes with it. Bacteria already living on the plants begin to eat that sugar, and as they eat, they make acid. That acid is what turns plants into ferments. Salt holds the door shut against the bacteria we do not want. Sugar is the food of the ones we do. One restrains. One feeds.
We say that salt draws out water, as if it were pulling. It isn’t, really. Each cell is wrapped in a thin skin that lets water through far more easily than salt. Put salt on the outside, and the two sides are no longer equal, so water moves toward the saltier side, as water does, trying to even things out. The plant is not being robbed. It is being fair. It is sharing equally. The word for this is osmosis: nature sharing water equally.
Picture that skin as a doorway wide enough for water but too narrow for salt. Salt dissolves into tiny particles, and each one gathers a little crowd of water around it and holds on. Held water cannot wander, so more water drifts through from the fresh side than comes back, until both sides are balanced. Nothing pulls. Water simply has a better chance of going one way. You can watch it: salt a cut cucumber, zucchini or cabbage and beads of water appear within minutes. A plant cell is like a water balloon in a firm box, so when the water leaves, the pressure drops and the leaf goes soft. That is why your salted plants went limp.
Sugar does the same job, but salt does it with less. Salt splits into two small particles, while a sugar molecule stays whole, big and heavy. More particles, more pull. By weight, salt is roughly ten times stronger. That is why a ferment needs only a pinch, about 2 percent, while honey is about two-thirds sugar.
This is how both preserve. Microbes need water just as we do, and both salt and sugar take it out of reach and pull it out of the microbes themselves, so most troublemakers dry out. In a ferment, salt has a second trick: it favours the bacteria that can put up with it, the lactic acid bacteria, whose acid helps keep the jar safe. Not every microbe gives up, though. Some yeasts and moulds are tougher, which is why an opened jar of jam can still grow mould. When rendering jams, and things like whey, yacon juice or soap nuts, simmer all the water out to prevent future decay. And sugar has one more gift: it makes medicine easier to take.
Now lick the back of your hand. Are you sweet? No. There is a faint taste of the sea, carried on your skin. Maybe that is why we were told, “we are the salt of the earth.” And maybe that is why we say life is sweet. We are made of both. We are a jar too: a skin around salt water, with a teaspoon of sugar running through it.
The sea and the sugar in us
Cry, and you shed a little of that sea. Tears are about 0.9 percent salt, like a hospital saline drip and very close to your blood. An adult carries roughly 250 grams of salt, about 40 teaspoons, spread through every fluid. And not every tear is the same: there are tears that keep the eye moist, reflex tears that wash out smoke and onion fumes, and emotional tears, which carry more stress hormones along with a natural painkiller. A Dutch photographer, Maurice Mikkers, dried tears and looked at them under a microscope, and found a hidden world of salt crystals.
Sweat has its own little salt trick. It comes from tiny coiled tubes called eccrine glands, two to five million of them, buried deep in our skin and most crowded on our palms, soles and forehead. The gland makes the sweat salty, and then its duct takes most of the salt back before it reaches the surface. When that reclaiming fails, as in cystic fibrosis, the sweat stays salty, and some parents have noticed their newborn’s skin tasted salty when they kissed it. Can you lick yourself to test for it? No. Salty skin is normal after heat, a swim or a hard run. The real test is done in a clinic.
Sugar is quieter, but just as carefully guarded. Your whole bloodstream holds only about a teaspoon of it at any moment, and your body works constantly to keep that steady. After a meal, the pancreas releases insulin to help your cells take it in. When it drops, glucagon tells the liver to release its stores. The window is narrow: from the top of the healthy range to a diabetes diagnosis is only about a quarter of a teaspoon in your whole blood supply. And your brain, about 2 percent of your body weight, uses about 20 percent of your energy and runs mostly on sugar. It cannot store any, so it needs a steady supply every minute.
What they do to us
Salt holds the water balance of every cell, and with its partners carries the signals of your nerves and muscles. We lose it when we sweat, and we crave it when we run short.
And then there is the dose. Too much of either is the problem, and the health “authorities” have put numbers on it. They advise adults to keep salt below 5 grams a day, a little under a teaspoon, and the average person in the world eats about twice that. For sugar, they advise keeping free sugars, the ones added to food and drink or found in honey, syrups and juices, below 10 percent of your energy, ideally below 5 percent, about six teaspoons a day. The sugars inside whole fruit, vegetables and milk are not the target.
Not everyone agrees where the line belongs. Large studies such as PURE have found the lowest heart risk at about 3 to 5 grams of sodium a day, roughly 7.5 to 12.5 grams of salt, above the limit, with more risk both above and below. Other experts argue that the way intake was measured created that curve. People also differ: some are very sensitive to salt, others hardly at all. What nearly everyone accepts is where much of it comes from: in wealthier countries, as much as three-quarters of the salt people eat is added in food processing, not at home. Salt you ferment with, and sugar you stir into your own jam, are very different from what is hidden in a packet. If you have high blood pressure, kidney or heart disease, follow your own doctor’s advice.
Moderation is the key. Sugar can cause weight gain, insulin resistance, and sometimes even diabetes; Salt, though not harmful in its absolute necessity, tends to cause high blood pressure if consumed in large portions. Both are harmful in excess, and importance of balancing it becomes important here.
Salt and sugar in a plant
Most plants do not want much salt. Salt in the soil makes it harder for a root to take in water, for the same reason you saw in your jar, so a plant can be thirsty while standing in water. Salt also slips in through the door meant for potassium, and the plant must then manage the intruder, locking some away and pumping some back out.
A few plants, called halophytes, have turned this into a way of life. The common ice plant is covered in tiny balloon-like cells, salt bladders, so large they sparkle like ice crystals in the sun, and it pumps salt into them. Quinoa has them too. Mangroves push salt out through glands on their leaves.
Sugar goes the other way. A plant gets salt in by accident and gives sugar away on purpose. It makes sugar from sunlight, water and air, and sends a good share of it (up to 75%) down into the soil to feed the microbes around its roots. It sweetens its fruit and nectar to persuade animals to carry its seeds. Many seeds pack their food away as starch and turn it to sugar when water arrives, and here in Ecuador, women do the same with their mouths: they chew cooked cassava and spit it into a bowl, and the enzymes in their saliva turn the starch into sugar, which wild microbes ferment into chicha.
The alchemy of salt and sugar
The alchemist Paracelsus had a simple demonstration. Burn a piece of wood. The flame, he said, was sulphur, the part that burns. The smoke was mercury, the part that rises and changes. And the ash that was left was salt, the part that stays. He believed everything is made of these three, and that we are too: sulphur the soul, mercury the spirit, salt the body. Although not believed today, the image has staying power. What is it that stays?
The idea did not die with the alchemists. In the 1870s, a German doctor named Wilhelm Schüssler proposed that illness comes from an imbalance of twelve mineral salts, the ones left when body tissue is burned to ash. One of them is plain table salt. His remedies are made in homeopathic dilutions, 6X being one part in a million, and are best held as a tradition, not a proven medicine.
Paracelsus also wrote a line toxicologists still quote: all things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison. Salt and sugar may be the best examples we have. In your jar, salt holds its place, persuades the water to leave and keeps the troublemakers out, while the sugar already in the plant feeds the helpers. The alchemy is in the balance.
The cellar and the beet
In 1669, in Hamburg, a merchant and amateur alchemist named Hennig Brand went looking for the philosopher’s stone in urine, which is salt water too. He gathered more than fifty buckets, about 5,500 litres, carried them to his cellar, let them stand, boiled them down, and heated what remained until the glass glowed red. Glowing fumes filled the vessel, and a pale substance dripped out that shone by itself and burst into flames. About 120 grams of it. We call it phosphorus. He never made gold. He found one of the elements life is built from, hidden in the very thing we throw away, the same element a seed packs away and a sprout unlocks.
A lifetime later, a Berlin chemist named Andreas Marggraf simplified the way of making it. And in 1747 he wondered whether sugar might be hiding in plants closer to home than the cane fields. He boiled dried beetroot in alcohol and let it cool, and weeks later tiny crystals appeared. Under a microscope, beside cane sugar, perhaps the first time a microscope identified a chemical, they matched. His student, Franz Achard, built the first beet-sugar factory in the early 1800s. One man, a beetroot, a flask of urine and a microscope.
What it took
A burning log. A cellar and fifty buckets. A beetroot boiled in alcohol. Ordinary materials: wood, water, roots, salt, sugar, heat, time. Each discovery needed four things: the elements, something real and close at hand; curiosity, the question that started it; trial and error, including the attempts that failed; and participation, a person who was there, hands in it, noticing. None of it came from reading about the world. It came from doing something and watching carefully what happened.
Where science and faith meet
The old alchemists did not separate the two. Robert Boyle, whose book helped dismantle the alchemists’ three principles, was a devout Christian who saw no conflict between his faith and his experiments, and left money in his will for lectures on that very point. Gregor Mendel, who found the laws of inheritance in a pea garden, was a friar.
I don’t think we have to choose. Science tells us how: the heat, the microbes, the salt, the measured quantities. Faith, whatever name you give it, tells us the world is worth looking at closely, and is more than the sum of its parts. Science without wonder stops asking questions. Faith without observation stops learning. Where the two meet is where imagination happens, and imagination is where every discovery here began: someone who dared to picture gold hidden in a bucket, sugar hidden in a beet, or a whole world in a jar of salted cabbage.
