Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  Under the rules of colonialism, everything goes to and comes from the mother country. In 1870, the colony of Turks and Caicos was asked to send a crest to England so that a flag for the colony could be designed. A Turks and Caicos designer drew a crest that included Salt Cay saltworks with salt rakers in the foreground and piles of salt. Back in England, it was the era of Arctic exploration, and, not knowing where the Turks and Caicos was, the English designer assumed the little white domes were igloos. And so he drew doors on each one. And this scene of salt piles with doors remained the official crest of the colony for almost 100 years, until replaced in 1968 by a crest featuring a flamingo.

  In the nineteenth century, Salt Cay had 900 residents. In 1970, three years after the salt industry died, fewer than 400 remained. At the turn of the twenty-first century, 62 adults and 15 children were the only legal residents. Many of the 62 are retired, and the island would have a labor shortage were it not in the sea path between the island of Hispaniola and Florida. Many illegal Haitians and Dominicans land here, sometimes by mistake, and some find work and stay. If nothing else is available, money can always be made by taking rocks off the dikes and sea walls of the saltworks and sitting on the pile, smashing them one by one with a hammer into gravel for building material.

  When the salt business died, the remaining merchants still had stockpiles of salt, often in the bottom floor of their homes. Eight- or nine-man Haitian sailboats arrived at the Turks and Caicos to sell mangoes and other items. Before returning home, they would stop off at the abandoned saltworks of South Caicos, Grand Turk, or Salt Cay, where mountains of salt remained, and scoop out a load.

  The last powerful hurricane to hit Salt Cay, in 1945, destroyed all but three of the great houses where wealthy salt-trading families lived with their salt stored in the basement. In the late 1990s, one of the remaining three salt houses collapsed from termite damage, exposing its cache of salt. This unprotected, graying, and rain-eaten iceberg is the last of Salt Cay salt, except for a small crusty pile left slowly melting from humidity in the basement of one of the two great houses still standing.

  An early twentieth-century postcard showing salt raking in Grand Turk.

  Turks and Caicos National Museum, Grand Turk, B.W.I.

  Native Salt Cay residents are called “belongers.” Many of the belongers were salt workers, who left for merchant marine service in World War II, stayed on until their retirement, and then returned home, not seeming to realize that in the meantime everyone else had left and the island had turned into a desert.

  The trees had been cut for the saltworks, and without trees there was little rain and the earth dried out. The landscape is arid, with desert bushes clawing up from sandy, barren soil. Cattle and donkeys seeking the scarce shade from midday sun seem to be hiding silently behind every bush. The nights are starlit and cooled by an easterly breeze, with no sounds but the rolling sea and the occasional rustle of a wandering cow.

  Adolphus Kennedy, born in 1915, lives on Salt Cay with his wife, who is three years younger. They are alone. Their four children and many grandchildren have all left. A soft-voiced man with a gentle manner, he recalls loading salt onto fourmasted schooners. Mostly he remembers the weight of the sacks. The pay?

  “Oh, there was no pay. They paid us nothing. The big company kept all the money.”

  It is easy to be romantic about the vanished Caribbean salt trade, but in truth it was similar to the history of sugarcane on other islands. Salt was built on slavery, and many thought that abolition in 1836 would mean the end of salt. But the salt merchants survived for a time because they could still get workers for near slave wages. There was no other work.

  Most of the old belongers remember working for one shilling sixpence a day, less than a dollar. “That’s right,” said Kennedy. “One shilling sixpence for a nine-hour day.” He smiled. “But not every day. When ships were in and there was work. It was slavery,” he said, revealing no bitterness in his voice.

  “Of course you could buy some food for a shilling. There was rain in those days, and they could use the land. Grew corn and beans and cucumbers.” Today, the land is too dry for such gardens. With no salt, little work, and less agriculture, the aged belongers live on government assistance. The Turks and Caicos is still a British colony.

  The sluices are kept open and the ponds get seawater at high tides, so most are not evaporating. A few have evaporated into sand and salt crystal. In low tide, one of the canals that brings in seawater exposes two eighteenth-century cannons, weapons of war brought here to guard British salt from the Spanish, now rusting in the saltwater.

  THE UNITED STATES is both the largest salt producer and the largest salt consumer. It produces over 40 million metric tons of salt a year, which earns more than $1 billion in sales revenue. The production leaders, behind the United States, in order of importance are China, Germany, Canada, and India. France has fallen to eighth place and the United Kingdom to ninth.

  But little of this is table salt. In the United States, only 8 percent of salt production is for food. The largest single use of American salt, 51 percent, is for deicing roads.

  American salt sources are many and varied. The Great Salt Lake, which is the fourth largest lake in the world without an outlet, produces salt, some by Morton. Cargill operates a rock salt mine 1,200 feet below the city of Detroit. It covers more than 1,400 underground acres and has fifty miles of roads. The mine began with a disaster. In 1896, a 1,100-foot shaft was sunk but then became flooded with water and natural gas killing six and losing the investors their money. But in 1907, the mine was successfully started up.

  Cargill also operates the mine on Avery Island. The McIlhenny and Avery families lease the salt mine to Cargill, the oil and gas to Exxon, and they still make the pepper sauce themselves. Paul McIlhenny, president and CEO, is the great-grandson of Edmund, who had come home from New Orleans with the seeds. He inherited Edmund’s robust round features and rugged friendly eyes. “We are lucky to be in a place that not only supports agriculture but has oil, gas, and salt,” he said.

  The agriculture he referred to is for Tabasco sauce, which has developed into a successful international family-owned business. The peppers grown today on Avery Island are only used for seeds that are planted in Central America, where pepper picking is still cost effective. Not only does the picking require skill, since each pepper must be picked at its moment of optimum ripeness, but it is painful, backbreaking work. The powerful capsaicin can burn hands, or if the picker is careless, the face and eyes. Experiments with machine harvesting failed, and the McIlhenny family refused to experiment with chemicals that would make all the peppers ripen simultaneously. So in the 1970s, when it started to become difficult to find people in southern Louisiana willing to pick peppers, the solution was to reverse history and take seeds from Avery Island back to Mexico and Central America every year.

  After one post–Civil War failure, salt mining began in earnest on Avery Island in 1898. Cargill took over in 1997. The current operation can mine nineteen tons of salt in a minute and a half and takes 2.5 million tons a year. Down in the mine more equipment is seen than actual miners. Bulldozers, tractors, jeeps, pickups, trucks, train carts, tracks, and other equipment are brought down piece by piece in a five-by-seven-by-ten-foot shaft elevator and assembled in the mine. Below, it looks like a busy nighttime construction site. A scaler, a huge machine that resembles a brontosaurus, steadily munches away at the white walls. When equipment is no longer useful, it is not considered cost effective to take it apart and bring it back up, so the mine leaves a trail of abandoned equipment, a junkyard on the side of some of the wide shafts. Salt mining has always been like that. The horses used in Wieliczka, and the mules lowered by rope underneath Detroit, never came back up either.

  One of the older miners said that his father had worked fifty-two years under Avery Island, carrying salt blocks and loading them on mules. Today, the salt is trucked to crushers that break it into small enough pieces for t
he conveyor belts to move the salt to barges that carry it along the bayou and up the Mississippi River. A barge will hold 1,500 tons of salt.

  The mine is dug in rooms called benches that are 60 feet by 100 feet with 28-foot ceilings. Once a bench is mined, a road is dug through the floor down to another level and another bench. The salt dome that is being mined is a column of solid sodium chloride, crystal clear, thought to be 40,000 feet deep—almost eight miles. The floors, the walls, the ceiling, and the uncut depths below are all between 99.25 and 99.9 percent pure. Under the miners’ lamps—the first miner’s safety lamp was invented by Humphry Davy—the benches appear to be black rooms. But a freshly cut bench, without the soot of machinery, is crystalline white, a room of pure salt crystal.

  The vehicles are all four-wheel-drive, because the salt floor is as slippery as ice. Driving jeeps and trucks deep in the earth is like driving through a snow blizzard, at night. But it is darker than night. “It’s so dark it hurts your eyes,” one miner said.

  The mine is currently operating at a depth of 1,600 feet, and with 38,400 feet to go, it might seem that this salt dome is an inexhaustible resource. But as the miners dig, to withstand added stress from the weight above them, the benches must be made smaller. Another problem is that salt is a good conductor of heat. The earth gets hotter closer to its center, and as they dig deeper into the earth the temperature will rise from the current ninety degrees. The heat will require more ventilation and more efficiency in machine-cooling systems. Also, the conveyor belt will get longer and longer. So the deeper they go, the more expensive the salt becomes, and salt must be cheap to be profitable. It is thought that the dome will offer another forty or fifty years of cost-effective mining, but that is a guess.

  The salt is used for road deicing, industry, and pharmaceuticals. Table salt production stopped in 1982 when the energy cost of the vacuum evaporators was judged too costly. The Chinese might think that a salt dome full of oil and natural gas would have no problem with cheap energy, but in this case, the salt and the gas are operated by two separate companies that never arrived at the simple solution of ancient Sichuan.

  In nearby New Iberia, a town canaled by bayous and draped in swaying moss, Avery Island salt used to be the salt of Cajun food. Ted Legnon’s father was a salt worker on Avery Island, and he brought home blocks of salt for boudin sausages and cured meat. Now Ted is a butcher, and he still makes boudin, though he now makes it without hog’s blood because the health department stopped the local slaughtering practices. He also uses Morton’s and not local salt.

  One pound of salt is used for 250 pounds of boudin, along with ground pork meat, pork liver, cooked rice, onions, bell peppers, and powdered cayenne pepper. It is all stuffed in hog’s intestine and gently poached. Legnon’s Butcher Shop in New Iberia sells 300 pounds of this boudin blanc per day, except between Christmas and New Year’s, when sales rise to 500 pounds per day.

  IN RECENT YEARS, scientists and engineers have been drawn to the ability of salt mines to preserve, because they usually have a low and steady humidity, and if not drilled too deep, an even, cool temperature. Also, salt seals. Crystals will grow over cracks. This was how the Celtic bodies had been sealed in the mine at Hallein. It is also why soy sauce makers formed a crust of salt on the top of the barrel, to make a perfect seal.

  In March 1945, American troops passing through the German town of Merkers discovered a salt mine 1,200 feet underground. In it was 100 tons of gold bullion, twenty-nine rows of sacks of gold coins, and bails of international currency, including 2 million U.S. dollars. They also found more than 1,000 paintings, including Raphaels and Rembrandts. Among the booty were things of little value, such as the battered suitcases of people deported to concentration camps. The total value of the treasures, preserved in the perfect stable environment of a salt mine, was estimated at $3 billion 1945 dollars.

  Because of the sealing ability of salt, it has also occurred to engineers that salt mines might be the safest place to bury nuclear waste. A Carlsbad, New Mexico, mine is being prepared for plutonium-contaminated nuclear waste that will remain toxic for the next 240,000 years. Salt will close over fractures, but how do we warn people 100,000 years from now not to open the mine? What language can be used? Suggestions include a series of grimacing masks.

  The U.S. government has also stored an emergency reserve of petroleum in salt domes throughout the Gulf of Mexico area. The idea of a strategic oil reserve was first proposed in 1944. In the 1970s, it was decided to store at least 700 million barrels of oil in a select few of the 500 salt domes that have been identified in southern Louisiana and eastern Texas. But, ominous for the nuclear waste program, the domes don’t always seal. The Weeks Island salt dome, not far from Avery Island, was part of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve until signs of water leakage led to fear of flaws in the dome. The oil was pumped out and the dome abandoned.

  THE OWNERS OF the Dürnberg salt mine in Hallein, Austria, which has been hosting visitors since at least 1700, decided in 1989 that salt was no longer profitable and closed down the mine. But it still earns money from 220,000 visitors each year, taking them on rides on the steep, long wooden slides that were built to transport miners.

  In the nineteenth century, when health spas became fashionable, many of the old brine springs saw a more lucrative alternative to making salt. In 1855, a bath was started at Salies-de-Béarn. In 1895, a red stone pseudo-Moorish palace was built to house the baths, which, in spite of continued salt production, became the town’s leading economic activity. The baths are said to be beneficial for gynecological problems, rheumatism, and children with growth problems. Today, only about 750 tons of salt are made in Salies-de-Béarn every year, but this is enough to ensure that the tradition of jambon de Bayonne continues.

  Nineteenth-century salt making at Salies-de-Béarn. Marcel Saule

  The part-prenants are still organized and entitled to their share of the salt production, but today, rather than being paid in large buckets of brine, they are paid in money. Each of the 564 remaining part-prenants receives approximately thirty dollars per year.

  The claim that millions of years ago, algae in the brine left bromides, iodine, potassium, and other minerals, is the basis of the town business in Salsomaggiore, outside of Parma. A spa palace was built from 1913 to 1923 by architect Ugo Giusti and decorator Galileo Chini. It is considered the greatest example of Liberty architecture, the Italian version of art nouveau. Marble columns line the halls, huge staircases climb to floors of marble mosaic with wicker furniture. Murals in gold leaf on the theme of water fill the huge, high-ceilinged walls.

  The brine at the spa is said to be especially helpful to those suffering from rheumatism, arthritis, and circulatory ailments. Each year, 50,000 people go to Salsomaggiore to sit in a deep turn-of-the-century tub in a tiled room and be cured in brine like a herring.

  The town is a collection of 1920s and 1930s hotels and cafes, resembling a faded, out-of-fashion Riviera resort without a beach. The well-dressed clientele arrive in trickles, not waves. The spa business has been struggling of late because the Italian government has stopped covering health spas in its national health plan.

  Meanwhile, the famous prosciutto di Parma are now cured with salt from Trapani. A crossbred pig has been developed that has less fat and more weight, and it is still fed on the whey from Parmigiano cheese. The pig produces a huge, round, meaty leg. The designated area for prosciutto di Parma is about forty square miles, centered on the rolling, black-soiled farmland of Langhhirano, which means “lake of frogs,” originally a marsh. The popularity of these hams has turned prosciutto into a huge business, and the hundreds of thousands of hams produced every year are now cured in climatized rooms that derive no advantage from the dry winds.

  FASHIONABLE PEOPLE ARE now divided into two camps. One is passionate about being healthy and eating less salt, the other is passionate about salt. The argument has been continuing since ancient times between those who think salt is health
y and those who think it is unhealthy. They both may be right. Unarguably, the body needs salt. A great deal of research indicates a relationship between high blood pressure and cardiovascular problems and eating large quantities of salt. The Yellow Emperors Classic of Internal Medicine, a Chinese book from the first or second century A.D., warned that salt can cause high blood pressure, which can lead to strokes. Not coincidently, one of the fatal symptoms of salt deficiency is low blood pressure. But there are also studies that refute a link between high salt intake and high blood pressure. Some studies even indicate that low-salt diets are unhealthy. The kidneys store excess sodium, and in theory someone with healthy kidneys could eat excessive salt with impunity. Sweating and urination, by design, relieve the body of salt excesses. The problem lies in the balance of sodium and potassium. But it seems that an imbalance cannot be adjusted simply by eating more or less potassium-rich vegetables versus sodium-rich salt.

  The theoretical debate continues, but clinical evidence shows that people who consume large quantities of salt are not as healthy as those who don’t.

  Meanwhile, fashionable chefs are cooking with more salt—or more noticeable salt. It has become stylish to serve food on a bed of salt, cook it in a crust of salt, make it crunchy with lots of large crystals. More than 1,000 years ago, the Chinese were cooking in a salt crust. Chicken cooked in a crust of salt is an ancient recipe attributed to the Cantonese, though it may have originated with a south China mountain people known as the Hakka. Today, fish is cooked this way in Italy, France, Spain, and many other places. Even a fish farmer with a small restaurant by the Dead Sea in Israel cooks his fish in a salt crust. The salt seals, in the same way that cooking in clay does, but it does not make the fish or chicken salty. French chefs sometimes leave the fish unscaled to avoid salting the flesh.