Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [15]
The Japanese point out that beyond the basic differences in the level of salinity, the mineral content of seawater and of human body fluids are closely correlated, and believe natural salts are an important source of the sea’s bio-available minerals. A movement to revive natural salt was founded with the establishment in 1972 of the Investigation on Dietary Salt as a nonprofit research group. Following a wave of popular sentiment in favor of whole, unrefined salt, the government repealed the salt monopoly in 1997. Since then there has been an explosion in artisan salt production in Japan, with more than 700 Japanese salt producers marketing more than 1,500 varieties of salt. The Japanese example testifies to the ability of the marketplace and popular opinion to reconstitute an artisan economy out of seawater.
Guérande remains a bridge from the most distant past to the present: a financially profitable, environmentally sustainable industry that produces one of the most widely celebrated foods in the world. Several saltworks reputedly dating from the Carolingian dynasty (mid-eighth to late tenth century) are still making salt in Guérande.
In 1840, 2,350 paludiers (salt workers) of Guérande cultivated 255,577 salt crystallizing pans, called oeillets, in a great network of interlinked channels and ponds. By 1934, just 370 workers remained, operating 19,907 oeillets. By 1980, just 8,476 oeillets remained and only 202 paludiers were still at work. By 1994, the salt fields had shrunk to just 5,650 oeillets, but the century-and-a-half-long decline in the number of paludiers had stopped, with 215 men and women tending the marshes. Today about 300 paludiers work some 20,000 oeillets in the Guérandais salt marshes. Our resurgent appetite for food tied to a land, a sea, a people; for food bound with strong and vibrant ties to our common and personal heritages; for a quality of food that tastes great, has resuscitated artisan salt. Salt has emerged once again as a food uniquely representative of its era.
SCIENCE: MIND, BODY, SALT, OCEAN
He who modeled us, considering these things, mixed earth with fire and water and blended them; and making a ferment of acid and salt, he mingled it with them and formed soft and succulent flesh. —Plato
For hundreds of thousands of years, salt has been the glittering, often elusive object of our desire. Its powers bordered on the mystical. It nourished. It healed. It purified. It preserved. And it tasted fantastic. Then, about two hundred years ago, we began to analyze those powers.
THE ORIGIN OF SALT
First, we described salt’s chemical components: primarily an electrically neutral crystalline substance produced by the reaction of a base—sodium—and an acid—chloride. Technically, salt is any compound formed when a cation (a positively charged ion) combines with an anion (a negative ion) to become electrically neutral. A salt dissolved in water is called an electrolyte because it conducts electricity. Salts come in every imaginable color, and indeed are often used as pigments. Manganese dioxide is a bottomless black. Ferric hexacyanoferrate is Prussian blue. Potassium dichromate is a brilliant orange-red.
The sea is the biggest repository of salts. Its untold trillions of tons of salt water are 3.5 percent salts. Of that 3.5 percent, sulfate ions make up 7.68 percent, magnesium 3.68 percent, calcium 1.18 percent, potassium 1.11 percent, bicarbonate 0.41 percent, bromide 0.19 percent, and 0.13 percent are other ions. But most of the salts in the ocean are chloride (55.03 percent) and sodium (30.59 percent), which crystallize into the salt sodium chloride (NaCl).
Once humans started researching the way salt performed its myriad roles, we began manufacturing its chemical components on an industrial scale. Pure sodium chloride soon became the primary feedstock of a budding chemical industry and a commodity on store shelves. We grew to think of it as an industrially manufactured chemical. By the time supermarkets