Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [12]
The sophisticated artisanal techniques developed over millennia to cope with the considerable topographic and climatologic constraints of northern Europe were no match for such economies of scale. By the end of the 1800s, artisan salt making was in rapid decline in Europe; by the 1960s, mechanized salt producers had obliterated most small-scale saltworks around the globe. In 1857, the three primary salt-making centers of western France produced 208,000 metric tons of salt—half of all French sea salt. The other half came from the Mediterranean saltworks of Aigues-Mortes and Salin-de-Giraud in the Camargue, and from inland salt deposits in eastern France. The mechanized salt-making operations of Camargue and elsewhere soon flooded the market in cheap salt, and, by 1949, salt production in western France had fallen to 90,000 metric tons. Salt produced by traditional means reached its nadir in 1987, when the small handful of remaining salt makers produced 7,000 metric tons.
The story was much the same for salt makers elsewhere in the world. Wealthier countries transitioned first, either shutting down small-scale saltworks while expanding those with the greatest potential or turning to cheap imports and abandoning salt making altogether. Artisan salt makers in poorer countries struggled against the vast white wave of cheap salt from the industrialized producers. Sometimes they rallied. More often they vanished. In the span of the last century, tens of thousands of small salt makers around the world found themselves out of business. Efficiency was the name of the game. From the time of the civil war to today, the number of salt workers in the United States tripled—but salt production increased one hundred-fold.
Yet mechanized manufacturing and transportation of salt was outpaced by new industrial demand. In 1861, the Belgian chemist Ernest Solvay invented a process for making soda ash (sodium carbonate) from salt brine. By applying heat to limestone, which contains calcium carbonate, the process released carbon dioxide. Combined with ammonia and sodium chloride, this made one of the major chemical feedstocks of the industrial revolution. Used to make glass and as a precursor for a host of other chemical manufacturing processes, the world produces about 90 billion pounds of soda ash a year, or about 13.5 pounds for every man, woman, and child on earth.
Soon the chloralkali process emerged as an even larger industry using salt. When electricity is passed through salt brine (often with the aid of mercury), two major chemical products are produced: caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) and chlorine. Today, chloralkali processing is the largest single consumer of salt. Rayon, explosives, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, shampoos, soaps, skin lotions, dry bleach, surgical cautery, gasoline refining—about fourteen thousand other products and processes all require these chemicals or the chemicals made from them. Between the Solvay and chloralkali processes, salt is the second biggest chemical feedstock after petroleum.
In the 1950s, the United States and other industrial countries began building freeways, and then needed salt to keep them clear of ice. Industrial salt found another megamarket, demanding many millions of tons of salt a year.
Food uses for salt have also increased exponentially over the last century and a half. Even as the reliance on salt for preserving foods fell with the advent of refrigeration and high-speed transportation, demand for salt for food manufacture grew. Modern transportation and food-processing technologies allowed single companies to funnel the agricultural productions of entire regions through consolidated processing centers—canning, pickling, and curing everything from peas to pigs. Ironically, the same industrial revolution that brought fresh seafood a thousand miles inland also converted modern people into consumers of more salt-processed