Act I: The Rise and Branding of Big Salt

The foundation of American Big Salt was built on strategic transportation advantage. The Morton Salt Company was founded in 1880 by Joy Morton, a Detroit-born former railroad employee. Morton began working for E. I. Wheeler and Company in Chicago, which acted as an agent for Onondaga salt companies, selling their product in the Midwest. Morton invested his entire savings of $10,000 and acquired a fleet of lake boats to deliver a year’s supply of salt inexpensively to midwestern centers during the ice-free summer months, giving his company a competitive advantage in the expanding market.

By 1910, the company incorporated, having purchased saltworks to become both a distributor and a producer. Morton introduced key innovations that defined the modern household product:

  • Anti-Caking: In 1911, Morton added magnesium carbonate to table salt to prevent the crystals from sticking together, allowing the salt to pour freely. This compound was later replaced by calcium silicate.
  • Iodization: In 1924, following a recommendation from the Michigan Medical Association, Morton produced the first commercially available iodized salt.

The company successfully launched the first nationwide advertising campaign for salt, hiring the advertising firm N. W. Ayer. Although the original slogan was “Runs freely,” it was replaced by “When it rains it pours,” a backup idea featuring a little girl in the rain with an umbrella and spilling salt. The successful campaign led to widespread brand recognition: a 1940s poll found that 90 percent of 4,000 housewives recognized the Morton brand.

Act II: The Global Industrial Footprint

The modern salt industry is characterized by massive volume and global reach, often treating common sodium chloride as a necessary byproduct for the extraction of more valuable minerals.

Morton’s Global Production: In 1955, Morton bought the saltworks on Great Inagua Island in the Bahamas, a British colony at the time. The island’s saltworks, which utilize 38,000 acres of evaporation ponds, produce 1 million tons of salt per year. This output is primarily crude road deicing salt, industrial grade salt for water softeners, and fishery salt for customers like Iceland’s cod fishermen. Morton also expanded by purchasing historic foreign salt centers, including the saltworks at Aigues-Mortes, France, and Sfax, Tunisia, in the 1990s.

Cargill’s Mega-Mines: Cargill is another major force in modern salt. They operate a rock salt mine 1,200 feet below the city of Detroit, covering more than 1,400 underground acres with fifty miles of roads. Cargill also leases and operates the mine beneath Avery Island, Louisiana, extracting 2.5 million tons of salt annually. In this Avery Island mine, the salt is used for road deicing, pharmaceuticals, and industrial purposes; table salt production stopped in 1982 because the energy cost of running the vacuum evaporators was too costly.

The Dead Sea Nuisance: The Dead Sea Works in Israel exemplifies how common salt has become industrially redundant. The company’s primary focus is extracting more lucrative minerals from the hyper-saline waters. It produces 10 percent of the world’s potassium chloride (potash), a product heavily in demand for fertilizers. The company is also heavily invested in magnesium production, a metal seven times stronger than steel. In this environment, the natural precipitation of sodium chloride, the common salt, has become a nuisance because it constantly raises the height of the pond bottoms, leading to tensions with the surrounding tourism industry by flooding hotel basements.

Act III: The Retreat to Artisan Methods

Contrasting sharply with industrial volume is the modern phenomenon of the artisanal salt revival, driven by consumer demand for traditional methods and purity.

The French Revival: The traditional salt makers of the Guérande region in Brittany, known as paludiers (swamp workers), suffered severely when Napoleon eliminated their exemption from the gabelle in 1804. However, in the late twentieth century, traditional salt making experienced a significant revival. This revival was fueled by a modern hunger for a sense of the artisan and tradition.

  • Cooperative Efforts: In Noirmoutier, a salt cooperative was formed in 1995 to restore traditional salt making, resulting in about 160 workers now operating the island’s salt ponds.
  • A New Generation of Paludiers: Guérande’s 300 paludiers represent a demographic shift; today, only 20 percent are locals, while about one-third are younger than thirty-five, often people who left cities to pursue an agricultural way of life.
  • The Price of Quality: These traditional producers command high prices for their handmade product. They produce coarse gray salt and fleur de sel (flower of salt). The light, brittle crystals of fleur de sel, painstakingly skimmed from the surface, are ten times more expensive than the costly gray salt. This commercial success has even led to legal battles, with Guérande suing Aigues-Mortes—which was bought by the “Americans” (Morton)—over the correct use of the term fleur de sel.

The Chinese Persistence: Even in China, the site of ancient ingenuity, there is a longing for irregularity. As China modernized, its salt became modern salt—uniform small grains with iodine added. However, consumers, wary of chemical additives, have started longing for less pure salt. This distrust is evident in the controversy over iodized salt; for instance, many Chinese consumers insist that iodine gives salt a peculiar taste. Small, independent salt producers often fear that bans on noniodized salt, such as the one in China decreed by the prime minister, are government conspiracies to restore a state monopoly.

An enduring example of artisanal persistence is the Lezhi Fermented Product Corporation in Sichuan. After the state nationalized and then abandoned the factory, ten workers used their severance pay to buy the company. Lacking capital, they reverted to making soy sauce (a salt-fermented product) the traditional, labor-intensive way, using fresh whole beans instead of factory refuse. This artisan product is even sold the old-fashioned way, with customers bringing their own bottles to be ladled out of crocks.

Act IV: From Necessity to Delicacy

With salt no longer a critical preservative, salted foods became high-priced delicacies. The saltiness, once a necessity, is now part of the flavor profile.

Cured Delicacies: The Jewish delicatessen in North America remains a “citadel” of salt-preserved foods, featuring items like pastrami (dried, spiced, and salted beef), corned beef, and pickled items. Lox (Yiddish for salmon), traditionally cured in salt, has been almost entirely abandoned for Nova, a lighter cure that is soaked in brine and then smoked. Modern consumers often find traditional lox “too salty”.

The Gourmet Chef: Modern chefs are increasingly focused on salt as a textural and finishing element, utilizing large crystals. Cooking fish or meat in a thick salt crust has become a stylish trend. This method, which seals the food and prevents salting the flesh, is actually ancient, attributed to the Cantonese and Hakka people. Restaurants in the old Guérande salt port of Le Croisic now specialize in sea bass baked in a salt crust, a style of cooking only possible in a modern age of inexpensive salt.

An Enduring Sweetness: The traditional use of salt in baking continues, especially in Brittany, where local baking relies on salt to bring out the flavor of butter. A popular Breton butter cookie, galette fine, requires 1 kilogram 200 grams of salt for every 55 kilograms of flour, alongside 20 kilograms of butter, illustrating the persistence of this flavor combination.

The twenty-first century sees salt existing in two parallel worlds: the industrial behemoth, symbolized by the vacuum evaporator, supplying millions of tons of road deicer and industrial feedstock, and the artisan who, using the same manual rakes as those seen in eighteenth-century postcards, sells a pinch of unique salt as a premium, handmade luxury.