Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [14]
RETURN OF THE ARTISANS
All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened. —Maya Angelou
A shift in consumer values has begun to reverse the dominance—or at least the unquestioned allure—of industrialized salt. The shift is occurring as part of a much larger movement in food awareness. Whole foods are gaining appeal over packaged foods. Produce grown with fertilizers and insecticides is avoided in favor of organically grown options. We pay attention to the types of feed our livestock is raised on. Local food is appreciated for its freshness and for the regional character of the varieties grown. By extension, farmers are again seen as important members of the community. We even think of the environmental impacts of monoculture farming, packaging, refrigeration, and long-distance transport.
Salt was a latecomer to this renaissance. In the West, interest in artisan salt was sparked by the revival of artisan salt making in France, a revival that began in Guérande. Sensing that there would soon be nobody left to continue the ancestral ways of salt making (and also desperate to fend off the imminent destruction of sensitive, culturally unique marine wetlands by real estate developers), a small group of artisans in the almost completely abandoned salt marshes of Guérande banded together. Their idea was to promote salt just like wine: call attention to its terroir and meroir (the special taste of sea in the area); celebrate its artisan roots; and make it an icon symbolizing the rejection of industrialized food production.
In 1972, these artisans formed Le Groupement des Producteurs de Sel, or the Salt Producers’ Group; in 1979, they established a center to train new salt makers. Taking the economic operations of their collaboration into their own hands, they formed an agricultural cooperative in 1988 that buys the salt produced by its members according to a price the workers themselves establish at the beginning of the season. Other traditional salt-making centers along France’s west coast rallied as well, and today Ile de Noirmoutier and Ile de Ré, to the south, are major producers of artisan salt. Untold acres of coastal wetlands were preserved in the process. The entire region has become a haven for bicycling eco-tourists seeking a summer of birdwatching, oyster eating, and wine drinking.
The Guérande cooperative did more than just elevate and promote artisan salt, it brought international attention to the merits of reviving ancestral salt fields; salt making could preserve cultural heritage, provide a noble and rewarding occupation, promote the natural beauty of a region, catalyze new economic activity through tourism, and offer a viable alternative to destroying natural coastlines. Salt makers in central and southern Portugal, in Spain, in Italy, in Africa, and elsewhere have applied both the salt-making expertise and the business strategies of the Guérande cooperative to their own salt fields.
A similar story took place in the Land of the Rising Sun. The Japanese government placed a monopoly on salt production after 1905 in order to offset the costs of the Russo-Japanese War and pump money into its industrial salt infrastructure. In 1971, the already constrictive reign of the government monopoly delivered a devastating gut check to artisan salt makers by banning production on all coastal salt fields. Ancient saltworks were bulldozed for development. The government mandated production standards, and a process called ion exchange membrane electrodialysis was instituted, more or less at a national level. Ion exchange membrane electrodialysis concentrates and extracts sodium and chlorine atoms in seawater or from brine discharged from a reverse osmosis seawater desalination plant, forming a salt in excess of 99.5 percent NaCl purity. This salt was advertised as safer than traditionally produced salts thanks to the elimination of contaminants, which,