Sugar, Spice, and Salt Are the Biggest Proof That We Are Not Satisfied with the Natural Order of Things

Sugar

Spice

Salt

The three Ss

The trinity of human dissatisfaction.

They reveal humanity's defining characteristic: we cannot accept things as nature provides them.

Every other species eats food in its natural state, but humans must season, sweeten, and spice up everything.

This seems like a minor quirk of human behavior until you realize that our inability to be satisfied with natural flavors is so acute it literally shaped world history.

A tomato exists perfectly well as a tomato, but we need to add salt.

Meat comes from animals that other predators eat raw, but we marinate and season it beyond recognition.

Even water isn't interesting enough for us in its pure form.

This restlessness with natural states goes so deep that we built empires around it.

We still call our wages "salary" because Roman soldiers were once paid in salt (sal in Latin).

An empire that conquered half the known world considered salt valuable enough to use as currency.

The compulsion to modify food's natural taste became so powerful that nations traded entire territories for seasonings.

When the Dutch and British negotiated in 1667, the Dutch traded away Manhattan, an entire island that would become New York City, in exchange for Run, a tiny speck in Indonesia that produced nutmeg.

They valued access to a spice more than one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in human history.

Think about that calculation: an island that would become the center of global finance was worth less to them than the ability to make food taste different.

Sugar rewrote political geography even more dramatically.

The Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States and fundamentally altered North American history, happened because Napoleon needed money after losing Haiti's sugar plantations.

He sold a million square miles of territory because sugar production collapsed. A sweetener determined the borders of nations.

The spice trade drove European exploration and colonization.

Wars were fought over access to pepper. The British Empire's expansion followed sugar and tea.

The slave trade existed largely to support sugar plantations.

Our inability to eat food as nature provides it became the economic engine behind centuries of human conflict and exploitation.

This reveals something profound about our species.

We are so fundamentally dissatisfied with natural states that we'll cross oceans, conquer nations, and reshape entire continents just to modify how food tastes. Everything must be improved, enhanced, transformed according to our preferences.

Every time we reach for salt, sugar, or spice, we're participating in humanity's oldest rebellion against accepting reality as given.

And that rebellion literally built the modern world.