Welcome to The Salt Quest.
My fascination with salt (NaCl – sodium chloride) has so far been a 30 year journey as both a consumer and food manufacturer. This relationship has developed into an admiration for the physical beauty of the crystal forms of various colour and mineral composition, through to the multitude of applications across all elements of human and animal life.
My journey started as a young 20 something venturing out into my first business – a pickle manufacturing facility. We produced a range of vinegar and oil based vegetable pickles, packed in quaint glass jars. Business was good as we secured listings within all our local supermarket chains and even had export orders to a UK supermarket chain. We had great on shelf facings, mostly in the sweet spot of consumer head height – every consumer brand owner’s dream.
The product was produced using an initial brining process which involved using tons of salt. In fact, salt was the most critical component of this preparation stage as the vegetables underwent the partial fermenting stage. As we procured so much salt, it was impossible to analyse every batch, thus our QA processes relied on both an internal batch testing process plus our supplier’s technical analyses. Nevertheless, we received a batch of contaminated salt, that caused a reaction in the finished products. This reaction caused these quaint glass bottles to explode within a few weeks of being sealed. Can you imagine……
At the height of our new found success, everything came crashing down when we received multiple calls on the same day from extremely annoyed retail managers, locally and abroad, informing us that customer and staff safety were in danger due to exploding pickle bottles at face height….pickles, oil, broken glass in Aisle number 5….what a mess!!! Anyhow the long and short is that the recovery and clean up process put us into liquidation and we learnt some very hard lessons.
Since those bittersweet days, I have discovered how ignorant we are about the benefits and uses of salt from biological, chemical, nutritional and symbolic standpoints. This passion has allowed me to travel to many extraordinary places to observe and study the different kinds of salts, applications and processes.
From the home of Fleur de Sel in Castro Marim (Portugal), to the salt marshes of Geurande (France), across the State of Utah to the Great Salt Lake and Red salt mines of Redmond (USA), to the Bohai Gulf of Shandong Province (China), over the ocean to the saline aquifers of the Murray Darling basin (Australia) and to the ancient salt deposits of Himalayan salt mines, Warcha and Khewra (Pakistan).
This project therefore exists to share insights and learnings about salt from its abundance on mother earth, to the history of salt through the ages, to the fundamental necessity for salt in the optimal functioning of human and animal life and many other ways in which salt benefits our daily lives across the globe.
I will be drawing on my own experience but also referencing the works and studies of many scientists, authors and philosophers.
I hope you will enjoy this Salt Quest.