[eli5] how do vegetables like carrots have salt in them?

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Is there salt in the soil that the plant absorbs? If I understand chemistry even a little bit, you would need to have sodium present in the ground at least, right?

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Yes you’re right. The ground does indeed have sodium in it. And magnesium, potassium, and iron, and all the other elemends in all the vitamins and minerals in *any* food. Think about it – everything you eat ultimately came from the ground. Even when you eat meat – all the atoms in the meat *had to* come from what the animal ate and drank, right?

And if the amount of sodium in a carrot already has you thinking, hold on to your pants because all the salt in the oceans came from the ground too! The ground has salt in the soil, naturally ocurring. When it rains, the rain dissolves some salt, and this mildly salty water is carried through rivers to oceans. But when water evaporates, it’s pure water turning to gas, and the salt is left behind. The ocean is the final resting place of all the salt that’s ever been carried into it by all the rivers over millions of years. That’s why it’s so salty! And there’s still enough left on land to go into the carrots too. It’s wild.

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