Eben van Tonder and Kristi Berger, 1 Feb 2025
Introduction
Saliva participates in the nitrate–nitrite–nitric oxide pathway via oral bacteria, and fasting saliva contains measurable nitrate and nitrite that rise substantially after dietary nitrate intake [7]. This biochemical activity makes saliva an unexpected candidate for a role in early meat preservation, a connection that bridges food science, ethnography, and cultural history. The focus of this article is that intersection: whether and how a natural bodily fluid could have contributed to the earliest human efforts to preserve flesh, and how such a contribution, however incidental, may have shaped the symbolic significance that saliva holds across a wide range of cultures.
Saliva in Meat Preservation
Saliva contains enzymes, nitrates, and microorganisms capable of chemical transformations that directly parallel those exploited in meat curing. Beyond its digestive function, saliva provides a biochemically active interface between the human body and the food it handles, a fact that has only recently been examined in food science but that may reflect practices far older than the scientific vocabulary available to describe them.
Biochemical Role in Curing
Oral bacteria reduce nitrate to nitrite, which generates nitric oxide that reacts with myoglobin to stabilise a pink cured colour and inhibit certain spoilage microbes. This process underlies the nitrite curing of meat and is well established in food science [24]. Reported saliva values include nitrate at approximately 9–19 µg mL⁻¹ and nitrite at approximately 3.5–5.3 µg mL⁻¹ at baseline, with nitrite rising substantially after dietary nitrate intake. These values derive from secondary compilations rather than primary peer-reviewed saliva studies and should be treated as indicative. The claim that saliva can carry nitrite into contact with meat under certain conditions is chemically plausible but has not been experimentally demonstrated in food systems.
For saliva to exert a measurable curing effect, several factors must align. The meat surface must remain moist and slightly warm, around 25–40 °C, a range favourable for bacterial nitrate reduction. A mildly acidic to neutral pH of 6.0–6.8 permits nitric oxide to form and bind to myoglobin, yielding the stable pink nitrosomyoglobin pigment. Conditions of low oxygen diffusion, for example in wrapped or partly buried meat, allow the pigment to persist before oxidation reverses the effect. Natural reducing sugars and amino compounds in muscle further sustain the reaction. Where human diets were rich in nitrates from leafy vegetables or from water drawn from nitrate-bearing soils, the nitrate concentration in saliva would rise, providing more substrate for nitrite formation [7]. These circumstances could permit short-term surface preservation, particularly on small or thin cuts subject to repeated handling, though the claim remains biochemical reasoning in the absence of direct historical documentation.
The structure of the meat and its microflora also influence the outcome. Fresh, myoglobin-rich meat from game or free-ranging livestock would show colour change more visibly than pale meats. Early drying or mild fermentation stabilises surface proteins so the nitrosyl complex endures longer. Low water activity from salting or partial dehydration restrains spoilage organisms while allowing limited bacterial and enzymatic activity to continue. These parameters match those known to affect modern curing, though saliva’s role in such systems has not been recorded in any historical source.
Symbolic Interpretations
The visible reddening of meat following contact with saliva would have been striking to early observers. Flesh that appeared to regain its colour and freshness could be read as restored to life through human essence. Many early cultures associated breath, blood, and spittle with vital forces, so the act of applying saliva, whether deliberate or incidental, could embody both nourishment and renewal. Over time, such observations may have acquired ritual meaning, forming the foundation for beliefs linking bodily fluids with vitality and the cycles of decay and renewal. When medieval writers described the resurrection of cured meat at Easter, or when folk custom associated spitting with blessing and protection, they echoed this broader pattern. The interpretative link is supported by folklore evidence, but its direct origin in observation of meat reddening remains a hypothesis requiring further corroboration.
On the Possible Use of Bodily Fluids in Early Curing
The deliberate use of saliva as a meat-curing agent in prehistoric communities cannot be confirmed from the available record. The Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens describes saliva as a vital substance and occasionally as a medium for fermentation, for example in the tradition that Odin’s saliva caused beer to ferment, but it does not record any deliberate application of saliva to meat [2]. Such an inference therefore remains a hypothesis pending archaeological or textual corroboration.
Urine, by contrast, is well documented in ancient and medieval sources as a chemical agent in medicine, cleaning, tanning, and bleaching. Aged urine, rich in ammonium carbonate and ammonia, was used for degreasing fabrics, softening hides, and fixing dyes (Pliny, Natural History 28.52; Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 12.3.9). Both saliva and urine were classed among the humores viventes, living substances thought to carry restorative force. Saliva was prescribed for ailments from eye infections to warts and appears in the Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens as a component of healing charms and sympathetic medicine (vol. 1, pp. 290, 352) [2]. Chemically, saliva contains nitrate, nitrite, and enzymes that generate nitric oxide under mildly acidic conditions, stabilising myoglobin and suppressing certain spoilage bacteria: the very chemistry exploited in nitrite curing.
Ancient technological progress characteristically moved from medicine to food. Nitrate salts were used therapeutically before their adoption in deliberate curing during the later Middle Ages. Given the documented medicinal uses of both saliva and urine, household-level experimentation with saliva in food contexts cannot be ruled out. The notion remains speculative but is consistent with observed animal behaviour: wounds are instinctively licked across all mammalian species, and meat that regains a reddish hue under low-oxygen storage conditions would have reinforced the belief that saliva carried transformative force.
When early people saw dull brown meat regain redness, particularly if kept in cool, oxygen-limited surroundings such as clay pits or hide wrappings, the apparent return of colour would have confirmed what other experience already suggested: that saliva, like other bodily fluids, contained something alive. The modern understanding of nitric-oxide-based colour stabilisation provides the biochemical explanation for what ancient observers interpreted as preservation of vitality.
A Reconstruction from First Principles: Fresh Meat, Blood, and the Action of Saliva
The most plausible pathway by which saliva came into regular contact with raw meat in prehistoric food preparation was not deliberate application but a behaviour so ordinary that it has largely escaped scholarly attention: the licking of blood from a newly cut surface. Fresh meat bleeds. Blood is protein, iron, and fat-soluble vitamins, all nutritionally costly to waste. Across the oldest documented hunting and herding cultures, blood was a food, not a by-product. The Maasai draw blood directly from the jugular of living cattle and drink it fresh, mixed with milk [20]. Inuit and other Arctic peoples consumed raw meat and blood as a matter of nutritional necessity and cultural practice, documented by early ethnographers including Stefansson [19]. The Old Testament prohibition on consuming blood (Leviticus 17:14) is itself evidence that blood consumption was common enough to require explicit formal prohibition across the ancient Near East. In pre-agricultural and early agricultural communities, it is reasonable to infer that a woman receiving a portion of freshly killed meat would have licked blood from its surface, and that her children would have done the same. This is not a speculative act but the most parsimonious behaviour given the nutritional value of blood and the universal human inclination not to waste it.
The biochemical consequences of this ordinary act fall into two categories. The first is enzymatic and antimicrobial. Saliva contains lysozyme, which disrupts bacterial cell walls; lactoferrin, which sequesters iron and deprives spoilage organisms of a critical nutrient; histatins, which are antifungal peptides; and secretory immunoglobulin A, which inhibits microbial adhesion to surfaces [16, 17]. A thin coating of saliva on a meat surface would have created, transiently, a mildly hostile environment for the spoilage organisms that colonise fresh meat immediately after slaughter. The effect would have been modest and short-lived, but not negligible.
The second category of compounds is more directly relevant to what any attentive observer would have seen. Oral bacteria of the genera Veillonella, Rothia, and Neisseria carry nitrate reductase enzymes that convert dietary nitrate to nitrite. At a dietary nitrate intake consistent with ancient plant-rich diets, saliva contains nitrate at 9–19 µg mL⁻¹, with nitrite rising substantially [7]. Where this nitrite-bearing saliva contacts myoglobin under conditions of low oxygen and mildly acidic pH, nitric oxide forms and binds to the iron centre of the myoglobin molecule, producing nitrosomyoglobin: the stable, bright red pigment associated with cured meat [23].
Fresh meat exposed to air turns brown within minutes as myoglobin oxidises to metmyoglobin, a change that signals deterioration to any attentive observer. A surface that had been licked, and then held in low-oxygen micro-conditions such as the underside of a cut laid on a stone or meat stored in a clay vessel, could have maintained or partially restored its red colour measurably longer than an adjacent unlicked surface. The licked surface would also have remained moist, slowing the desiccation that accompanies browning. Both effects, sustained colour and sustained moisture, would have been simultaneously visible and tangible to anyone comparing the two surfaces. The observer’s conclusion would have been empirically grounded: the mouth touched this meat and it remained red; the mouth did not touch that meat and it changed.
This observable difference establishes the context in which deliberate experimentation becomes conceivable. The evidence that ancient peoples applied saliva to food substrates in order to produce transformation is among the most thoroughly documented records in the anthropology of food technology. In the Andes, women chewed and spat corn into fermentation vats to produce chicha, a practice traceable to at least 5000 BCE [13]. In Japan, shrine maidens chewed and spat rice to produce kuchikamizake for Shinto ritual, a method that pre-dated koji fermentation by centuries [9]. In the Amazon basin, cauim was produced from chewed manioc, and in Panama the Kuna produced inna by the same method [13]. In the Germanic tradition, the Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens preserves the belief that Odin’s saliva caused beer to ferment [2]. In each case, people understood without formal vocabulary that saliva introduced into a food substrate caused a transformation: the substrate became something nutritionally and spiritually different from what it had been.
The technological extrapolation from fermented grain to treated meat follows the same logic as every comparable technology transfer in food history. The same salt that cured meat preserved fish; the same acid that fermented grain soured milk. A population that had observed saliva transforming grain into an intoxicating drink had every experiential basis for applying saliva to other food substrates and observing the results. The colour response of licked meat surfaces, operating through the nitrosomyoglobin pathway, would have provided exactly the kind of visible, repeatable outcome needed to reinforce such behaviour across generations.
The question of whether saliva appeared in traditions associated with longevity or bodily preservation is illuminated by the Daoist record. The Huangdi Neijing and later Daoist inner-alchemy texts describe the deliberate swallowing of accumulated saliva, referred to as yuye or jade juice, as a practice for preserving jing, the vital essence, and extending life [21]. The fourth-century CE writer Ge Hong describes the circulation and swallowing of saliva as among the foundational practices of those seeking long life. The logic was consistent: saliva was understood as a concentrated form of the body’s vital substance, and retaining or directing it prevented depletion. In Egyptian mythology, the god Ra is recorded in the Pyramid Texts as having fashioned humanity from his tears and spittle [22]. The Gospel of John (9:6) records Jesus healing a blind man by mixing spittle with clay and applying it to his eyes, an act embedded in a Mediterranean world where the therapeutic use of fasting spittle was an established practice documented by Pliny and Galen. These traditions are independent of one another, separated by geography and belief system, but they share a common underlying structure: the fluid of the mouth is generative, preservative, and in some sense alive. Each represents a different cultural encoding of a pattern whose empirical basis lay in daily observation.
Three conclusions can be responsibly drawn from this reconstruction. First, the incidental licking of blood from fresh meat surfaces is a behavioural premise supported by ethnographic parallels and nutritional logic. Second, the biochemical consequences of that licking, colour maintenance through nitrosomyoglobin formation and transient antimicrobial action, are real and would have been observable under the storage conditions of deep prehistory. Third, the extrapolation from observed colour effect to deliberate application follows the same logic as the known and documented history of salivary fermentation technology across multiple continents and independent cultures. The ancient meat-handler did not understand nitrite curing. She understood that where her mouth had been, the meat stayed red.
Reciprocal Exchange Between Medicine and Food Preservation
The relationship between food preservation and medicine was not simply linear. Archaeochemical and textual evidence from the Mediterranean and Near East shows that mineral salts, vinegar, honey, and nitrate-bearing earths were used both to preserve meat and to treat wounds and ulcers (Pliny, Natural History 31; Dioscorides, De Materia Medica V). The overlap was functional rather than chronological: food preservation demonstrated decay arrested and flesh restored, while medicine adopted the same agents to cleanse and heal the living body.
Within this shared framework, the medicinal use of urine for cleansing and bleaching, and the ritual or therapeutic use of saliva understood as Seelenstoff or vital substance [2], make it plausible that both fluids were occasionally applied to meat. The chemistry of saliva, containing nitrate-reducing bacteria and active enzymes, could promote mild curing reactions on meat surfaces. This interpretation fits the broader pattern in which substances that preserved food and substances that healed living tissue were understood as expressions of the same vital principle.
Saliva in Alcoholic Drinks and Fermentation
The most extensively documented evidence for the deliberate use of saliva in food transformation comes from the production of fermented drinks, and this evidence is central to the wider argument about meat. Human saliva has been used in carbohydrate fermentation on account of its amylase content, the enzyme that breaks starch into fermentable sugars, across cultures separated by the full width of the Pacific Ocean and with no documented contact with one another.
In the Andes, chicha is among the most thoroughly documented cases of salivary fermentation. Its origins have been traced to at least 5000 BCE by pottery evidence. Brewers, almost exclusively women, chewed ground cornmeal until salivary amylase converted the grain’s starches into fermentable sugars. The chewed mass was spat into earthenware vats, boiled, strained, and fermented over several days [13]. Microbiological studies of Ecuadorian chicha have confirmed the dominance of human oral streptococci in such preparations, consistent with the ethnographic record [8]. The word chicha itself derives from indigenous terms for saliva or to spit, making the oral origin of the process not incidental but definitional [15].
Among the Inca, the brewers were a group of chosen women known as aclla cuna, the Virgins of the Sun, whose ritual status elevated the act of chewing and spitting into a sacred office [12]. In Japan, miko, shrine maidens of formal religious standing, chewed rice and spat it into communal vessels for use in Shinto ritual, producing kuchikamizake, a practice that pre-dated the use of koji mould as a saccharifying agent by centuries [9]. In both cultures, on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, young women of consecrated status chewed a starch-based food, spat it into a communal vessel, and produced a fermented drink understood as a vehicle of connection between the human and the divine. The mechanism was identical, the symbolic logic was identical, and the social framing was identical. The two traditions arose independently, in cultures with no documented contact.
The technique was not confined to these two cases. In the Amazon basin, Indigenous peoples of Brazil produced cauim from chewed manioc. In Panama and Colombia, the Kuna produced inna, a mouth-fermented maize drink used in female initiation rites. Masato, a chewed yucca beer, continues to be made by Amazonian communities today. Finnish folklore records the use of bear saliva and honey as a fermentation starter. What emerges from this global distribution is convergent independent discovery: wherever people encountered a starchy food and wished to produce a fermented drink, the mouth provided the most immediately available enzymatic tool, and the transformation that followed was invariably invested with ritual significance [8, 13].
This record of deliberate, widely distributed, and well-documented salivary food technology provides the most important context for evaluating the possibility that saliva was applied to meat. It establishes that ancient peoples were not passive observers of saliva’s effects on food but active experimenters who recognised its transformative capacity and applied it systematically. The visible colour response of licked meat surfaces through the nitrosomyoglobin pathway represents exactly the kind of repeatable and observable outcome that would have encouraged the extension of this technology from one food substrate to another.
Love Rituals, Oaths, and Protective Uses
The Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens documents saliva extensively in healing, apotropaic, and love-magic contexts [2]. Girls in Styria mixed saliva into a man’s drink or bread to ensure fidelity; in Baden, young men placed saliva in a beloved’s wine as a binding act. The Church treated both as serious offences punishable by years of penance, which is itself evidence of the practices’ prevalence. Saliva was treated as an extension of the self, embodying vitality and intent, and ingesting it was understood to establish a bond between persons.
Pliny the Elder documents therapeutic and protective uses of spittle in classical antiquity, including the use of a fasting woman’s spittle to treat bloodshot eyes, indicating that saliva was regarded as a potent substance in ancient medicine across the Mediterranean world (Naturalis Historia XXVIII).
The ethnographic record from sub-Saharan Africa provides some of the clearest surviving documentation of saliva as a carrier of blessing and vital force. Among the Maasai of Kenya and northern Tanzania, spitting is one of the most significant expressions of respect and social bond. Greeting involves spitting on the palm before a handshake. Parents, family members, and friends spit on newborn babies to wish them long life. At weddings, a father blesses his daughter by spitting on her forehead and breasts before she departs with her husband [11]. These are central practices in a nomadic pastoral culture whose entire economy depends on the health of its cattle, and in which the relationship between human bodies and animal bodies is immediate and daily. As pastoralists in close contact with livestock, the Maasai represent a cultural form closely analogous to the ancient nomadic herding peoples of West Africa whose cattle provided the oldest preserved meat traditions on the continent. Comparative data from the Human Relations Area Files identify spitting as a medicinal or blessing act among Maasai and Somali groups [14]. Among Yoruba-speaking communities in Nigeria, spit directed at the ground before an oath reinforces the binding force of the spoken word. The pattern across the African continent is consistent: saliva marks transitions, seals bonds, and transfers vital force from the body of the giver to the body or substance it touches.
Instincts, Medicine, and Wound Care
Wound licking is among the most ancient and universal mammalian behaviours. Every mammal licks its wounds: dogs, cats, rodents, primates, and humans. The instinct is biochemically justified. Saliva contains epidermal growth factor, which accelerates epithelial healing; histatins, which stimulate wound closure and are antifungal; opiorphin, a natural analgesic; tissue factor, which promotes clotting; and multiple antimicrobial peptides including lysozyme and lactoferrin [16, 17]. Wounds in the oral mucosa heal significantly faster than equivalent wounds at other body sites, a difference now understood to reflect the biochemical composition of saliva. The ancient Greeks applied snake saliva to open wounds in the expectation of healing; rats permitted to lick burn wounds show measurably enhanced healing compared with controls [17].
In ancient Egypt, temples dedicated to Anubis kept dogs trained to lick the wounds of the sick, based on the understanding that canine saliva carried healing properties; the practice was adopted at temples of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine, where trained dogs were a standard part of the healing establishment [17]. The Roman Emperor Vespasian is reported to have healed a blind man with his saliva. Pliny the Elder recorded the use of fasting spittle for eye infections and skin conditions across multiple classical sources. These records are the accumulated documentation of a practice with genuine biochemical basis, observed and repeated across species and across millennia.
For any population that processed animal carcasses, the connection between wound licking and meat handling would have been immediate and experiential. The same fluid that kept a wound red and clean, that a dog applied to its injury and that a mother applied to a child’s cut, was the fluid that hands and faces came into contact with when handling a fresh carcass. The transference of its observed effects from living tissue to dead tissue would not have required a conceptual leap. It would have required only observation and the habit of mind that subsistence living enforces: the careful attention to food that comes from knowing the consequences of misreading it.
The Norse Myth of Kvasir
After a long conflict between the Æsir and Vanir, the two divine tribes of Norse mythology, the gods agreed to make peace. As a lasting sign of this reconciliation, each god spat into a shared vessel. The mingling of their saliva expressed the joining of their powers. From this vessel they created Kvasir, who embodied the combined wisdom and unity of both divine groups [4].
Kvasir could answer every question posed to him. His name derives from kvas, meaning pressed juice or fermented liquid, related to the making of mead, which links him from the outset to the ideas of transformation and refinement that occur when raw matter becomes something enriched [18]. While travelling among gods and mortals, Kvasir was killed by two dwarves, Fjalar and Galar, who drained his blood and mixed it with honey to create the mead of poetry, a drink that gave wisdom and eloquence to whoever drank it. The essence of Kvasir, born from divine saliva, became a substance that transmitted the creative gift of the gods to humankind.
The myth encodes the practical as well as the symbolic. Scholars including Rudolf Simek have argued that Kvasir’s creation from communal spittle corresponds to the actual practice of producing fermented berry juice by chewing and spitting into a vat, a technique documented across early Northern European communities [18]. The name Kvasir is linguistically related to the Norwegian kvase and the Slavic kvas, both referring to fermented beverages produced through salivary action. The customs of mixing spittle and communal drinking of intoxicating beverages are, as Simek observes, well rooted in traditional peacemaking and group-binding customs among ancient peoples. There are also strong structural parallels between the Norse Kvasir myth and the Sanskrit tale of the theft of Soma by Indra, parallels that point to a common Proto-Indo-European basis [18]. The sacred association between saliva, fermented drink, and the acquisition of wisdom or divine power is therefore not a Norse invention but the survival of a shared tradition of considerable antiquity.
The Kvasir myth encodes three functions of saliva within a single narrative: the social-binding function of shared spitting, the generative function of creating a new being, and the transformative-fermentative function of producing the Mead of Poetry. In this it mirrors, in mythological register, exactly the technological and cultural logic that chicha and kuchikamizake express in practical form. Saliva is the active principle. The mouth is the instrument of transformation.
Conclusion
Across the biochemical, ethnographic, historical, and mythological record, saliva emerges as a substance whose contact with meat, whether incidental or deliberate, would have produced observable changes in colour, moisture, and surface stability that any attentive practitioner of food preparation could have noticed and interpreted. The nitrosomyoglobin pathway, operating through oral bacteria and salivary nitrate under the low-oxygen storage conditions of prehistoric food handling, provides a mechanistic basis for the colour effects that ancient observers would have associated with preservation and vitality. The antimicrobial proteins of saliva provide a further basis for the observed connection between the mouth’s fluid and the maintenance of flesh.
The global distribution of deliberate salivary fermentation, from the Andean aclla cuna to the Japanese miko, from Finnish bear-saliva mead to the Germanic tradition recorded in the Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, establishes that ancient peoples not only observed saliva’s transformative effects on food but acted on those observations systematically across substrates. This record makes the extension of salivary technology to meat, whether as an incidental product of blood-licking or as a deliberate experimental act, a reasonable and economical inference. Modern research on the enterosalivary nitrate cycle provides physiological grounding for effects once attributed to vital force and sacred essence. The two descriptions refer to the same phenomenon, one in the language of biochemistry, the other in the language of meaning.
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