I was also wondering how much plastic is coming from things like conveyers and packaging - salt is immensely abrasive and much harder than most plastics.
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now awaiting the hard-core-DIY articles on making your own salt…
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The Himalayan stuff is mostly inauthentic
Can you elaborate on this? I’m quite interested to learn more about this as I started to use the Himalayan stuff.
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Most table salt is produced by pumping fresh water into rock salt deposits and then performing a series of vacuum evaporations on the brine, followed by centrifuging to remove the last of the water.
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I was wondering the exact same thing; it violates none of the terms or the CoC, as far as I can tell.
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It was considered content less
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Himalayan rock salt is just salt containing a tiny percentage of iron oxide particles to produce the pink colour. This isn’t particularly unusual in rock salt deposits as iron oxide is a common mineral in rocks formed in desert environments - exactly where rock salt forms. For instance the rock salt mined in Carrickfergus Northern Ireland is a striking orange pink colour - most of which goes on to roads and for industrial purposes.
As for the ‘Himalayan’ salt you’ve been overpaying for - first of all it has no significant chemical differences from regular sea salt (which also contains magnesium and potassium chloride which give it a distinctive taste), but it almost certainly came from the Khewra mine in Punjab, Eastern Pakistan which is most assuredly not near the Himalayas.
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That’s the automated system message you got?
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The Himalayan stuff is mostly inauthentic.
Whaaat? You mean the “Himalayan Sea salt” I see advertised doesn’t come from the, um, Himalayan Sea?
Apparently a lot of fake Himalayan salt products are being sold. Which makes sense, as the whole thing is a scam anyways - it’s just regular salt with trace amounts of contaminants (including, according to the proponents of the stuff, radium, uranium and thallium, etc.) you don’t need or even want in salt. Traditionally I don’t think it was used for cooking.
Probably not much - the things I’ve read indicate that the origin of the salt is tied to the quantity of microplastics (e.g. salt from parts of the world with the most ocean plastics have the highest contamination levels). Also I recollect reading an earlier article that the microplastic particles were of varying types. (Also, of course, studies have been done looking at the microplastic count in various quantities of sea and fresh water.)
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It’s pretty, and expensive and Asian. Yuppies like stuff like that.
Some places build the walls of their curing rooms with the stuff, shipped in from India, Nepal. It’s never explained what it is supposed to impart, other than some visible justification of why they charge the pricing they do for their cured meats.
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For those curious about the measurements and methodologies:
A wide range of MP [microplastics] content (in number of MPs per kg of salt; n/kg) was found: 0–1674 n/kg (excluding one outlier of 13 629 n/kg) in sea salts, 0–148 n/kg in rock salt, and 28–462 n/kg in lake salt.
and
A total of 39 brands of commercial table salt were collected from the supermarkets of 17 different countries on four continents…. The analysis of MPs in salts [procedure was that], a 250 g unit sample was digested and dissolved using 17.25% H2O2 solution and filtered through a filter (GF/D; ø 2.7 μm; Whatman), and all of the MP-like particles on the filter were analyzed using microscopic and spectroscopic analysis.
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Plastic particles in salt? Not in my salt, buddy: I use light table salt.
Yeah, it’s the new marketing thing: making everything light. Even salt.
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I’m curious what additives you think are in table salt that are not disclosed. Most of the additives I’ve heard of people being worried about are disclosed in the ingredients. In Googling I mostly came across fears of iron ferrocyanide and silicas but nothing undisclosed on packaging.
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According to the abstract of the paper:
A total of 39 different salt brands produced at geospatially different sites, including 28 sea salt brands from 16 countries/regions on six continents, were investigated. A wide range of MP content (in number of MPs per kg of salt; n/kg) was found: 0–1674 n/kg (excluding one outlier of 13 629 n/kg) in sea salts, 0–148 n/kg in rock salt, and 28–462 n/kg in lake salt. Relatively high MP content was identified in sea salts produced in Asian countries/regions. The abundance of MPs in unrefined sea salts ( n = 25) exhibited significant linear correlations with plastic emissions from worldwide rivers ( r 2= 0.33; p = 0.003) and with the MP pollution levels in surrounding seawater ( r 2= 0.46; p = 0.021) in the published literature.
Does that help? (oops, I see @copykate mentioned that first.)
Plastic is in everything now.
The article is headlined as being about drinking water but it also lists other studies showing microplastics in honey, sugar, beer, fish, the air.
Basically everything that has been tested now contains measurable levels of microplastics.
Yup, that’s what the abstract says.
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So you get to read the packaging every time you use table salt? When at a restaurant. Or using salt packets from a fast food joint. Or from plastic utensil kits.
Yes you know what’s in it in theory when you purchase the container at the grocery store. But anywhere you go it’s usually just a glass jar of salt. How are you going to know what is in there?
And finely ground salt does have additives based on the process to help it not cake up and flow properly which are stated on the packaging. When I read something as generic as “anti caking agents” I make no assumptions about what may be included in that statement.
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I don’t really use those at restaurants (just because food is plenty salty at restaurants), but if you’re at a restaurant, there’s likely already salt and all manner of undisclosed ingredients in your food, so it’s kind of a weirdly specific concern at that point. And salt is pretty cheap when you don’t have to add stuff. When we buy lab-grade sodium chloride at 98.5% purity, it’s pretty much the cheapest thing in the lab after tap water and fart jokes (actually, sand might be cheaper? I’d have to check), though it clumps something fierce. Meaning that the sophistication and quantity of anticaking agents is pretty low among pinchers of pennies.
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This Comment Portion Relevant Only to Americans and Residents of the United States ~~~~
Additives in salt are governed by the FDA, so some assumptions can be made unless your salt never had to cross state lines. Obviously a manufacturer could just be dumping rat feces in your salt in flagrant violation of the law, but if that’s going to be an eternal concern, you may as well live off the grid, grow your own sandals, 3D print your food, and start your own theme park with blackjack and homemade artisanal rat feces in every salt shaker.
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But mostly, I just wanted to know what you thought was in salt that might be undisclosed and why you’d want to avoid it. If it’s completely nonspecific, that’s fine. I’m just a curator of food folklore, attitudes, and beliefs and was wondering if this was related to substance I hadn’t heard of being the object of concern before.
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So. Talk to any chef. Most of us dont use standard iodized table salt for anything except brining. And even then I personally used kosher instead.
As someone in this thread said already sure I’m a salt elitist prick. What the fuck ever. It’s my food I’m cooking. It’s my body I’m putting it in. No one gets to tell me what I can’t do and I really don’t care if someone chooses that as the means to insult me (not saying you were doing that).
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This explains a lot. Table salt often not a good choice for a lot of culinary applications. I wasn’t really focused on your salt snobbery. Like I said, I curate food memes, and especially those around adulteration so my ears perked up at the “undisclosed” and so I thought there was more to it than there was.
Well…
There’s no need to get salty about it.
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