On Salt đ§
and the impossible pursuit of food sanctity.
What do I know about food if I didnât know that Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt has been owned by Cargill since 1997? Perhaps nothing.
I think I just found out that I am, on this matter, very trusting: I trusted my mother, whoâs always had the red box in the kitchen; I trusted even chefs, whom Iâve read and heard swear by it over the last couple of decades; I trusted the hype, the normalization of this salt.
Trust of this sort goes against pretty much everything I claim to think about food: Iâm supposed to question everything; Iâm supposed to consider all the angles. Thereâs a very good reason I am hesitant to ever name a brand: Theyâre almost always disappointments. But I have been disabused of this specific salty trust in recent months, and now I have to relearn how to cook.
Itâs not an exaggeration to say that watching how someone salts their food tells you quite a bit about their entire cooking philosophy, and with Diamond Crystal, fingers have been trained to use quite a bit of it. As the common refrain goes, it is the least salty salt and dissolves readily in liquid, giving the cook quite a bit of control. Lately, thereâs been more discussion about salt: The L.A. Times decided to call for Diamond Crystal explicitly in savory recipes to avoid confusion, while the Washington Post decided to move toward fine sea salt for everything. To be honest, I watched the headlines pass through my Twitter feed but didnât think much of it, because I donât really follow recipes anyway. I cook to the crystallization of my own salt, or something like that.
Then, finally, someone told me the true bad news: Love for this brand supports Cargill, an agribusiness horror show of food contamination, deforestation in the Global South, dumping of toxic waste, and generally wielding its massive wealth and power for evil-doing in the many nations in which it operates. There is absolutely no reason to trust this company, which came to its fame with grain and now is one of the worldâs biggest meat producers and processors, for which itâs under investigation about the scale of COVID-19 infection among workers. Theyâre getting into the plant-based meat game, too, of course, as they see the writing on the wall. Iâm sure their operations in that sector will meet the same labor and environmental standards for which theyâve become known.
Itâs also not like there isnât already a robust salt selection in my pantry rack: Thereâs fine sea salt, usually used in salad dressings, as well as a bucket of Maldon that finishes nearly everything I make, plus fleur de sel for delicate dessert finishing. I love the black lime chile salt from Burlap & Barrel, too, especially to sprinkle on fruit.
But the salt in the cellar next to the stove is Diamond Crystal, though soon that will change. I began reading Mark Kurlanskyâs best-selling book Salt: A World History yesterday while standing and sprinkling the last of it, making a breakfast hash of onion, potato, arugula, and cherry tomato, finished with local eggs, so the pages of its introduction are sprayed with oil and dotted by the water in which I boiled the potatoes. He writes, âWithout water and saltââthe latter of which as a chemical compound is estimated to have at least 14,000 usesââcells could not get nourishment and would die of dehydration.â I know this a bit more viscerally now that I live in the tropics. I feel my bodyâs need for salt.
Kurlansky goes on to write, âSalt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.â Which is always a signal to source an ingredient with care.
Iâve already started to reach for fine sea salt more often. I am hesitant with it, fearful of oversalting. There is no coming back from oversalting. But thatâs really the only adjustment, Iâve come to understand.
âI always say, âIâll try to shame my customers into not using Diamond Crystal because it comes from Cargill,ââ Jim Dixon of Wellspent Market based in Portland, Oregon, told me over the phone, and his own journey away from it wasnât too bumpy. âOccasionally youâll oversalt something,â he says matter-of-factly. I shouldnât be afraid of that.
Dixon was the first person to reach out to me in this trying time of discovery, and he has done deep research into the matter after falling in love with a Portuguese fine sea salt; before that, though, heâd get whatever sea salt was at the grocery store and use Diamond Crystal, too, because it was just what everyone did. This Portuguese salt, though, changed everything for him.
But to Dixon, who started his business out of an initial appreciation for good olive oil, if you have really good olive oil and salt, you can otherwise eat pretty cheaply, and so it makes sense to take extra care with these ingredients.
âMost of my diet is beans and cabbage,â he says. âI love to eat that kind of stuff. You can spend your money on the things that are important like olive oil, salt, you know, that kind of ingredients that really can add a lot of flavor and then eat the rest of stuff can be fairly inexpensiveâbeans, potatoes, onions, cabbage, carrotsâand those are available pretty much everywhere, and they're inexpensive.â
Here I realized that the dependence I thought I had upon Diamond Crystal was just a vestige of the same type of nostalgia I tell other people not to let drive their food lives, whether itâs because they really like peanut butter with palm oil in it or a cheap hamburger. How sanctimonious Iâve been while using Cargill salt! There will always be something, try as I might to be a saint of consumption, as though there could ever be such a thing in this fucked-up world. But I liked being reminded by Dixon of my own food philosophy about eating simply and trying to source the best, and that this kosher salt doesnât fit it. We live; we learn; we pick a different salt. Without it, after all, we die.
This Fridayâs paid-subscriber interview will feature Erin Alderson, of the blog Naturally Ella, who just launched her new zine project of California-inspired vegetarian meals: Cook Casual. We talked about the lifestyle blogging sphere, how she decided to take on this new project, and her love of pizza-making.
Annual subscriptions are $30; monthly, $5.
Published:
Nothing! But the piece about sugar that Iâve been talking about nonstop will be out in the next issue of Bitch, whose theme is âWild.â Itâs the best thing Iâve written in 2021 and was really carefully edited by their now-former EIC Evette Dionne.
Reading:
Finishing My Struggle Book 3 and reading Rachel Signerâs forthcoming memoir You Had Me at Pet-Nat to interview her about natural wine and moving to Australia.
Cooking:
Fettuccine with some nice fresh tomato sauce. Grated raw tomato on toast. Not much else!
I grew up with Morton's - and in fact, I still have a couple of boxes of Morton's in the house! I never bought kosher salt - I did not do 'koshering' of meat and plain non iodized Morton's salt was fine for making chutneys and pickle. But after living in France (cliche incoming) I discovered a whole new world of salt, that it was harvested and mined locally and can influence the taste and feel of food. And then buying a bag of salt from the shores of West Africa, from where my ancestors came, was very potent.
It was really awesome to see that you got to speak to Jim Dixon! One little bit that I would have is that vegetables, roots, grains and seeds are seemingly sold cheaply- but they are truly not cheap. Vegetable foods, the foundation of our diet, is inherently precious! I have been growing a lot of my own veg and gleaning fruit from byways here in Portland, and let me tell you, there is real labor there. If anything, the big salads, minestrone type soups, stews and veg forward mains are all the more precious.
I've never used Diamond Crystal - maybe b/c we just had Morton's iodized growing up, and then I lived in Chicago so I guess that's why I switched Morton's Kosher? But, I went to Wellspent yesterday & bought olive oil & Chinese snacking nuts & some fun wines and it made me feel like I have a really nice life. Screw Cargill!