Start Date
28-5-2024 11:45 AM
End Date
28-5-2024 12:00 PM
Description
I explore how some of my childhood memories were inspired by salt and preserved by it, from Star Trek to salt and vinegar potato chips. Once so valued as to be considered “white gold”, in the era of the ultra-processed industrial food that dominates contemporary North American food, salt has become more like “white death.” (“Pass the white death” is a joking request for the salt shaker.) A road salt shortage during Toronto’s icy winter of 2018-2019 inspired a joke about how the mayor will be forced to use Toronto’s expensive, Himalayan table salts to ice the roads! In a kind of infrastructural irony, in ancient times, roads were built to transport salt, now road salt itself is essential to safe auto-travel, at least in Northern winters. Humans need the edible mineral, salt, to live. Although salt in previous centuries was valued for preserving fish and meat for transport, the high sodium content in contemporary packaged food is held to be related to afflictions like strokes and high blood pressure. As iodized table salt is now cheap and ubiquitous, we have seen a rise in entrepreneurs focusing on reclaiming and preserving sea salt’s rich histories and distinctive tastes. Rather than the commensurable anonymous industrial table salt, there is a move to the incommensurable hand harvested sea salt, indexing the qualia of place, taste, crystalline shape, and sometimes colour. Instead of “terroir”, we hear of “meroir,” the taste of the sea.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21427/cvsg-6097
Life, Death, Salt: Salty Memories
I explore how some of my childhood memories were inspired by salt and preserved by it, from Star Trek to salt and vinegar potato chips. Once so valued as to be considered “white gold”, in the era of the ultra-processed industrial food that dominates contemporary North American food, salt has become more like “white death.” (“Pass the white death” is a joking request for the salt shaker.) A road salt shortage during Toronto’s icy winter of 2018-2019 inspired a joke about how the mayor will be forced to use Toronto’s expensive, Himalayan table salts to ice the roads! In a kind of infrastructural irony, in ancient times, roads were built to transport salt, now road salt itself is essential to safe auto-travel, at least in Northern winters. Humans need the edible mineral, salt, to live. Although salt in previous centuries was valued for preserving fish and meat for transport, the high sodium content in contemporary packaged food is held to be related to afflictions like strokes and high blood pressure. As iodized table salt is now cheap and ubiquitous, we have seen a rise in entrepreneurs focusing on reclaiming and preserving sea salt’s rich histories and distinctive tastes. Rather than the commensurable anonymous industrial table salt, there is a move to the incommensurable hand harvested sea salt, indexing the qualia of place, taste, crystalline shape, and sometimes colour. Instead of “terroir”, we hear of “meroir,” the taste of the sea.