Quarantine chronicle from Choachí: How to make salt from grass (while making smokeless tobacco)

During the time of quarantine, writer and translator Jimmy Weiskopf used his spare time to make his own ambil, black tobacco paste, together with the vegetal salt that needs to be mixed with it, which is a custom of the Murui, an Amazonian group. He resorted to the published texts of an anthropologist friend and tell us the story of his experience. He concludes his account with a eulogy of vegetal salt as a proof of the ingenuity of humankind in difficult circumstances, which is as timely now as ever and as a corollary, the manner in which a combination of trial-and-error, intuition and a close observation of our natural surroundings can compensate for the gadgetry of experimental science.