Salt in Mother Nature's Wound
When I travel I usually pick up something for my kitchen. A special
spice or something along those lines. My kitchen cupboard is bulging with various exotic food products and I fear that I wont be able to use it all up before it goes bad.
There is no doubt that we live in a society of excessiveness. We simply
have too much money to spend on things that we don't really need. Who suffers from all of this? Mother nature! Most of the things we buy need to be produced, transported, packaged, and if we then end up throwing them without first using them it was a waste from start.
I hadn't really thought that much about how excessive we are until I stood
one day in Meny (grocery store) next to my house. I had managed to forget my keys on a rainy day and with some time to spare until rescue arrived I started exploring the shelves. When standing in front of the spice shelve I noticed something odd and started counting. I realized it was possible to buy no less than 20 different types and sizes of salt...
The spice shelf with 20 different types/sizes of salt
Ok, so salt is quite basic. I remember a fairy tale when I was a kid which
recounted a story about a king that said salt was more important than his daughter. Everyone thought he was cruel until they were served meat without salt and understood...
I wont try to claim that the only spice we had when I was a kid was salt (though it would have made a better story). It was however the most prominent spice in my mom's kitchen. I can clearly picture before me my moms kitchen table with cooked lamb meat, potatoes, and a lonely worn white and blue salt shaker. On some other days the meat was substituted with some fish but those were the three basics.
Not the original salt shaker but one very similar
Salt is quite basic indeed but do we really need all these different types of salt? I will admit that having one fine and one coarse is quite handy. But buying some special White Flake salt for 665 NOK/80 EUR a kilo feels pretty wasteful. How much taste difference can there really be?
Fancy smancy White Flake Salt
If you think this salt excessiveness must have been a special case at Meny I dare you to count the types of salts in your regular grocery store. I have been making a habit of that lately and trying to remind myself that at least I don't need to have many types of the same thing no matter how tempting it is :) .
Note: this woe of mine excludes chili as it is quite essential to buy and try every type there is...
Did you know
Zozo Harris has 4 kinds of salt in her kitchen
Sweet salt, oh bitter reality
On the good hand, pure salt doesn't go bad. You should be able to store it in a dry place for .. well, at least 10 years without it losing its saltiness or becoming a health risk. However I'm afraid a few of those salts have some other ingredient or chemical mixed in (iod for example), which may shorten the shelf life somewhat.
I have like two kinds of salt at home, but I believe they both are mostly identical. Well, I have a small bag of natrium bensoat too, whether that chemically classifies as a salt or not. Perhaps it is more of a carbonate? It was too many years ago I took a proper chemistry class to remember all the different categories.
But yes, it is quite interesting that you don't quite have as many products which are purely sweet, sour or bitter. Sure you have a few different brands of sugar, honey and so on but probably not 20 in the store. You have lemons and other sour products but those combine many different tastes so it is not 100% sourness, the same goes for bitter stuff. If you think about it in this way, salt gets a very unique promotion but as Jeremy writes, it is not only a basic taste but also a preservative.
Not doing much perserving
But salt isn't really used much as a preservative by the regular Joe on the street. Only by big meat producers and such.
And now I need to go and count types of honey in my store... this is gonna turn into a obsession soon :)
While i am not usually one to
While i am not usually one to be so pedantic, i am in an odd mood and for that i apologise. But yeah, at best Salt is a seasoning, at worst its a preservative. Either way i wouldn't consider it a spice!
But now thats out the way, i totally agree that it does seem kind of excessive to have so much selection in the salted world, although of course there is a big difference between natural salt and manufactured salts in my opinion.. although maybe i've just turned fancy schmancy
Krydd equals everything in Icelandic
I guess this happens when you come from a culture far away from all exotic spices. You lump everything (the few) under one umbrella and word. I will try to remember next time :)
But how many types of salt do you have in your cupboard Mr. Fancy Schmancy?
Salt?! SALT?!
My home, i think i have just the two, sea salt for seasoning food and manufactured salt for cooking with.. as a very rough overview that is.
Though i imagine my family house has at least 4 types upwards! I will check next time i am at home
By the way, i only correct you because your English is already almost perfect, i assume you can take it and will also appreciate it!
Girly pink salt
I appreciate it. It just annoys me that I can never get these things right. Wish English was my native language!
I need to count but I think I might have 2-3 regular types of salt and then some pink salt that is not really salt.