June 17, 2026–What substance found naturally on earth caused mankind to go to war, forge new trade routes, and walk past chocolate chip cookies in a bakery?
I give you salt.
This substance must once have seemed to hold magical properties. It could be used to enhance the flavor of food. Or mask the taste of bad food. It preserved meat. It was an essential nutrient to sustain animal life. It was so valuable that it was used to pay workers. Its very name became the basis for our word “salary.”
This chemical compound was mined from the earth, gathered from evaporated seawater, and gleaned from mineral springs. Over the years it became available in such abundance that it is now a commodity. No one wants to be paid in a pile of salt.
Salt apparently has become so cheap and ubiquitous it is shoveled onto everything we eat.
I have become reluctant to eat in restaurants because every item is oversalted. I come back from a fine high dollar meal, and for the next 8 hours I need to drink pints of water to rid my mouth of the salty aftertaste. I don’t do movies because theater popcorn is equal parts kernels and crystals.
Perhaps my tolerance is just different than other people’s. But several restaurant workers confirmed my suspicions. During their kitchen training, they were told to add salt to their taste, and then to add more, since most diners expect a saltier experience.
I am the opposite. I never add salt to anything I prepare, not even popcorn, if you can comprehend that blasphemy. One morning I couldn’t find our salt and pepper shakers as I fixed breakfast, so I had plain scrambled eggs. Know what? I didn’t notice any difference. The salty bacon sufficed.
But my rant is not with everyday table salt. One day some health influencers decided they needed to ruin seasoning by dressing it in bougie pzazz, and introduced the culinary world to such abominations as pink salt, black salt, grey salt, Himalayan Mountain salt, fleur de sel, and that curse coating the candy aisle like a Yukon winter storm–sea salt.
First of all, the idea of sea salt is silly. Salt is salt. Whether it comes from the sea, the ground, or the armpit of your T-shirt, the formula is NaCl. Calling it pink Andean salt mined from the Urubamba River does not a health food make.
When and why did they start putting sea salt into everything sweet? I am familiar with the penchant for a sweet/salty mix that started with the chocolate covered pretzels you find at every convenience store. But it still startles me when I am enjoying an exquisite European chocolate and suddenly encounter a slab of raw salt allegedly mined from the shores of the Dead Sea. I was trying out a popular bakery the other day that sold some delicious-looking chocolate chip cookies, my favorite. But I noticed a white foreign substance scattered on their surfaces. When I asked, sure enough, they proudly informed me it was sea salt. No thank you, I am not the neighbor’s cows that jump over a cattleguard just to lick the ground where the water softener drains, and I care not to eat a cookie that was dragged along the beach.
I lay the blame for this fixation on salt at the sandaled feet of Pliny the Elder, who in 77 A.D. originated the phrase “take it with a grain of salt” when describing an antidote to poison.
He could not have foreseen the day would come when salt became the poison.