Why you should store salt in your pantry supplies

Josh CentersContributor - June 10, 2021

Salt is a surprisingly important food to stock if you’re preparing for longer-term scenarios. It has many uses that people have depended on for thousa
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Do not… DO NOT… equate curing salts with table salt. It is poisonous if eaten raw and is only safe if cured in meats or cooked. It’s the product that makes cured meats safe, what gives bacon it’s pink color and distinctive flavor. But it IS NOT salt that is interchangeable with sodium chloride (NaCl). 

 

Yes, good point. That isn’t the stuff you should sprinkle on your popcorn.

 

interesting article, thanks for summarizing. it is helpful that salt is so easy and stable to store.

what do you think of adding a section to the article on _how much_ salt to store? this would be helpful if i want to calculate a storage target. e.g. if i want to store salt in my pantry, how much do i need to cover supply per person per day? do you have a recommendation?

Data

with some very light research, the following sources suggest a recommended daily value of sodium:

1. min: 0.5g of sodium (1.25g of salt, 1/4 teaspoon). American Heart Association. https://www.livescience.com/61855-how-much-salt-do-you-need.html
2. daily: 1.5g of sodium (3.75g of salt, 2/3 teaspoon). American Heart Association https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-smart/sodium/how-much-sodium-should-i-eat-per-day
3. daily: 1.5g of sodium (3.75g of salt, 2/3 teaspoon). National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health-topics/dash-eating-plan
4. daily: 2.0g of sodium (5g of salt, ~1 teaspoon). Australia Ministry of Health https://www.nrv.gov.au/nutrients/sodium
5. max: 2.3g of sodium (5.7g of salt, 1 teaspoon). National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health-topics/dash-eating-plan
6. max: 2.4g of sodium (6g of salt, 1 teaspoon). UK NHS https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/salt-nutrition/

Conversions

using these sites for converting between milligrams of sodium, grams of salt (40% sodium), metric, and imperial units

• https://www.inchcalculator.com/convert/gram-salt-to-teaspoon-salt/
• http://www.worldactiononsalt.com/less/how/labels/

these numbers seem to assume that you are getting zero sodium from other sources in the diet, which may be unlikely.

Target Storage Amount

if we take a target of the minimum: 0.5g of sodium (1.2g of salt, 1/4 teaspoon) per day for an adult. 1oz of salt equals 5 teaspoons. that suggests:

• a 1kg bag of iodized table salt would last 1 human adult for 2.2 years (833 days)
• a 26oz salt container lasts 1 adult 1.4 years (520 days).

does that match your storage targets?

 

This is a great suggestion brownfox-ff. 

I looked into it a little as well and found another large international study that said that people who consumed between 3000-6000mg of salt a day had a lower risk for cardiovascular diseases. But those who had less or more than that amount had a higher risk. 

The average american consumes 3,400mg a day, so within that safe range. Which surprisingly is only 60% of a teaspoon. I would have thought that I have much more than that.

Good to know that a bag of salt will be plenty to meet my daily requirements during a disaster. Many survival and prepping foods are heavily salted though as a preservation method, so we might not even have to tap into the bag of salt for quite some time.

One of my favorite parts in Josh’s article up above was this paragraph “If you are in the wild and don’t have access to salt, your best bets for natural sodium sources are roots, especially dandelion roots, and wild animals. Blood and organ meats are rich in sodium.” This helps me to realize the importance of storing a basic bag of salt in my food storage, because I do not want to result to drinking animal blood for my source of salt.

 

Thanks for the numbers. In retrospect, I wish I’d included targets in the original article.  I might write that up later. In our house, we just buy salt until it seems as though we have “enough,” because it’s cheap and goes a long way.