In April, when my essay - Home away from Home Cookin' - appears in Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing, it will share ink with a poem by Michael McFee that, simply put, blew my doors off. Michael is a faculty member in the creative writing program in UNC-Chapel Hill's Department of English. Cornbread Nation 4 contains three of his poems. With Michael's permission, I share one of them with you. This, my faithful readers, taught me more about salt than all 465 pages of Mark Kurlansky's Salt: A World History.

Salt ... a darn good poem by Michael McFee

It was the taste their country tongues craved,
my parents and their parents and ancient kin:
not sour, not bitter, not funky umami,
not (like us, their spoiled television kids) sweet

but salt, pepper's twin, sugar's quiet cousin
seeping from fatback into simmered green beans
or pinched into steaming dishes by the cook
or flurried hungrily from our grainy shakers.

They'd even salt fruit, fat knife-sliced wedges
of an apple or (better) a juicy watermelon
on the picnic table, that seedy red meat sweaty
with melting crystals: summer in the mouth.

I'd pick up stray grains with a licked fingertip:
Who is the Morton Salt girl? Does she own a mine?
My mother just laughed and shook her head.
Our blood must have been briny as the Dead Sea.

There are five basic tastes in the human palate;
that salty umbrella girl never really existed--
now I know. Now I watch my sodium intake
as the doctors instruct. But how I crave it.

One day, like my parents and all their parents
I'll become the salt of the earth, pale seasoning
waking the hidden flavor of the family plot
until I too lose my savor, forgotten underfoot.