Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Salt!

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

Alex Schmidt, Katie Goldin, and special guest Jason Pargin explore why salt is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5(Alex’s old podcast hosting service required a minimum of 5 characters per episode title, and he's keeping that going for fun. So that’s why this episode’s title has an exclamation point) MaxFunDrive ends on March 28, 2025! Support our show now and get access to bonus content by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Table salt, known for being salty, famous for being Morton brand. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why table salt is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm very much not alone. I'm joined by my cohost Katie Golden. Katie, hey.

Hello. Alex. By the way, I'm gonna save it for the middle of the episode. Me and Katie will talk about it. It's the maximum fun drive right now. We depend on your support to make this podcast in general. And this is the best time of the entire year to begin providing that support or increase that support

if you'd like to, because you get a bunch of stuff. So please consider that. We'll talk about it more in the middle of the show. And we are joined by a wonderful returning guest and buddy. His novel, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is tremendous and on sale right now. Please welcome Jason Pargin. Hey Jason. Hello. Thank you so much for having me on. This is the show that does the most for my mental health for a whole bunch of reasons. So I'm always, always happy to be here. That's an honor. Wow.

Thank you. That's fantastic. I'm usually because on the episodes I'm on, we're reminded that if you grabbed someone from 300 years ago, like from the year 1725 and brought them to today and just showed them a Walmart, they would have a 1725 and brought them to today and just showed them a Walmart, they would have a heart attack and die on the spot. If you just showed them the grocery section of your crappy Walmart in your city, they would have a stroke.

I especially like that they'll have a stroke before the electronic section with all the TVs. Oh yeah, no, you do not have to show them your smartphone. You just show them the cheese aisle. You show them the frozen fish. Paper towels. Paper towels, yeah, these are made of paper. Do you understand that?

We use it to wipe up things and then we throw it in the trash. We have so much of it, we don't know where to put all of the waste. We never, we have a bottle of cow milk and we never touch the cow. We spill it immediately and then we sop it up with this towel made out of paper and then we throw that right out and then we press a button and another bottle of cow milk comes to us again without us ever touching a cow.

None of us, like most of us have never even seen a cow. And then I drive home. Also don't look at the parking lot. You also can't handle the parking lot. There's a lot of machines. The store is called a Trader Joe's. I'm gonna take you outside. Please stay calm when I show you

what people are doing out here. It's not, this is not a riot. This is not violence you're seeing. This is just people trying to get into the store. Honestly, to add to your point, because I've Italian-acized, all the shops are a lot smaller. Like grocery stores are a lot smaller.

You can't, like when you get out of the center of the city, you can go to a big supermarket, but a lot like all the grocery stores that are in walking distance, they're really small. And when I went back to the US, I like went to like, I don't know, a Kroger's or something. And I almost had a panic attack because it was so bright and there were so many choices. I'm so overstimulated right now. I don't think I can handle this. It's just like there was too much stuff,

too much choice, and I had to just kind of like stand outside and look at a tree for a little bit to regain my composure. Wow. Trees oddly leads into this topic very effectively. Hey, let's do it. One of the many reasons I'm excited Jason is back on the show is we got together last time for an episode about salt mines. Because listeners just suggested salt, which is a great suggestion and kind of bigger than two episodes.

We did salt mines and this week is about table salt, like salt in a salt shaker or something. And starting with you, Jason, what's your relationship to or opinion of table salt? I'm going to start with a question for anyone listening out there. Do they still put salt and pepper shakers on the tables of restaurants? Yeah. Because when I was growing up, there was a habit that both of my parents had that when the food came either at a restaurant or at home, the first thing they would do is salt everything. They would not taste it first.

They just assumed everything needed a layer of salt on it, and that was a 1980s thing. And I think that went out of fashion once we started to talk about sodium and the dangers of it. But they used to salt everything. And as I was sitting here thinking about it, I cannot tell you if McDonald's, if they all still have salt. I know the nice restaurants I go to no longer have those, but I don't know if that's still a thing. I assume you can request it, but mentally I can't picture what the salt and pepper shakers would look like in most of the places I go.

Our town has a diner called the Yankee Clipper, which is named after a plane from the 1940s. So I think like kind of as a throwback, they have the metal caddy of salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, but otherwise you don't see it. Yeah. I think there has been somewhat of a paradigm shift though in restaurants where it's like, no, we need to properly season the food before it gets to your table, instead of making the food before it gets to your table instead of making the customers season it. Which I think that, yeah, I think there's, maybe that was like the Gordon Ramsay effect

of like everyone watching him on TV screaming at people for not seasoning food and smacking them in the face with an unseasoned hamburger patty. And then everyone's like, oh, damn, better not piss off Gordon Ramsay. My relationship to table salt, I like salt, but it is also fascinating how your body adjusts to different levels of salt. So when I was in high school, my mom went on a low salt diet for her health. And even though she would put out table salt for us to use, but obviously for the base meal, she wouldn't add a lot of salt because you can add salt to something

but you can't really get a salt magnet and remove it. So she'd serve the dinner and then say, add as much salt as you want. I understand it's not that salty, but then that had this effect of you taste it first, right, to see how much it needs rather than blindly adding it. And then I think I learned how to adjust my taste level to not needing as much salt as I was accustomed to before

where there was just like a default level of salts. And then I started noticing that when I'd go out to a restaurant, I'd be like, the food is really salty. And other people that I'd be dining with would say like, oh, it tastes pretty normal to me. And I realized my tolerance for salt just went down. By being forced to kind of like add my own salt and trying to do it not too mindlessly, it did like lower my salt tolerance and then also

increase my tolerance for foods that are not as salty. And I think that was something that became something of a myth because when they were trying to warn people about the dangers of high sodium and the issues with heart disease and all that, I think a lot of people automatically said, okay, the problem is I've been sprinkling salt on my meal. When, if you went to a grocery store and looked at frozen food at the sodium levels or a can of soup, at least back then, they would have 800% of the daily recommended amount of sodium.

I think a lot of the sodium that was making its way into people's diets, it wasn't because of what you were sprinkling on. It's because you were getting processed meats. A lot of things were in the process of making it. There's an unthinkable amount of salt in it. More than what you could ever add, in the same way that when people don't comprehend how much sugar is in soda, because you're not seeing the quarter cup of sugar. If you tried to add that to an unsweetened drink, it would look ridiculous. You'd be filling the cup halfway with sugar,

but because it's baked into the process, it sneaks into your system that way. There's a surprising difference between something that has no salt and a little salt. A little bit of salt brings out the flavors. Something that has no salt tastes very strange to our modern palate, because we're used to that flavor enhancement. Yeah. Yeah. It's weird how much of this is just in all of our foods.

And we oddly won't talk that much about health just because the overall trajectory of salt being on a table is amazing on its own. Because health is boring. Who cares? We'll also talk about Morton Salt a lot, which I just have a surprising lifelong connection to because I grew up next to the former estate of the founder of Morton Salt. It was a guy named Joey Morton and he donated his estate to become an Arboretum in Lyle, Illinois. And my mom was a docent there.

My brother got married there. It's lovely. And also when I was there, I was like, I guess salt paid for all this. I never thought about it until now. But things grow there. They didn't like, it's not like, ah, there's too much salt here. Right. You think of the Romans salting the fields of Carthage or whatever is the history reference. So then his place, like his family's motto was plant trees His father especially was also a tree fiend and so yeah Ah, so that's where the tree connection is because like in the beginning

I was like I like I need to stare at trees sometimes to get over my grocery store Over stimulation you're like that's a great segue and then you proceeded not to make it a segue at all. I just want to point that out. That's right. I kept it private until right now. Yeah. And folks, we have a ton of numbers and takeaways to get into those numbers and statistics this week.

That's in a segment called Where we all count some stats but we disregard the numbers though we share so many totals there are some we never tell Baron why were you so surprised that you never saw the numbers did you ever let your lover count the numbers in yourself Would you ever let your lover count the numbers in yourself? That's fantastic. I think if you were around when I was taking my statistics class in college, you could have bumped that C plus up to a B. B for Billy Joel. Yeah.

And that name was submitted by Michelle Z. Thank you, Michelle. There's a new name every week. Please make a Missillian Wacky and Bad as possible as possible submit through discord or to sipod at gmail.com Is it rude for me to ask which Billy Joel song that was sung to the tune of not rude? It's a song called the stranger Off that album. Okay Jason it's really okay. I don't know most of the songs Alex is singing not because he doesn't sing them well but I realized

that I listen mostly to just like elevator music and Gregorian chants, and so I don't have a very good sort of popular music repertoire. Katie, that's why when you went to Trader Joe's and they were playing like early 70s soft rock. You were like, whoa. You just couldn't process it. I was like, this is too much. Where are my Gregorian chants? I want to stare at, I want to look at corn ships with the soothing sound of throat singing, not whatever this modern crap is.

This song has hall and oats in it? That's too much. And the number section relatively short this week, the first number is either first or second. Either first or second. This is really noncommittal, Alex. Yeah, it's the US's approximate ranking in salt production. We are either ahead of or behind China in the top two. That's according to Smithsonian Magazine, but the other source is a key source for the whole show.

It's a book called Salt, a World History, which is by nonfiction writer Mark Kurlansky. The book was a James Beard Award finalist for food writing and a LA Times honoree for science writing. It's amazing. But Smithsonian says we're second behind China. Kerlansky says we're number one in producing salt and consuming salt. So it kind of varies what people say about this. All right.

How is it so close that we have different judgments on who comes out on top? Both countries are giant. Both countries kind of record stats differently. And then also the US uses a lot of salt for de-icing roads. The amazing number is 51%. Mark Kurlianski says we use 51%, a majority of all the salt we produce in the US, for de-icing roads in winter. That's pretty wild.

I remember during our pickles episode, we talked about trying to solve salt waste by using old pickle brine on our roads. Yeah, we don't do that very comprehensively. We're still using salt most places. That explains why I don't smell delicious pickle juice driving down the I-5. That would be nice though. Apparently just 8%, the number 8 of the salt that we produce goes toward food. So almost all the salt we mine and distill and produce is going toward industry and toward

de-icing. That's so wild. Because like Jason, like what you're saying earlier on, like back when we had sort of the Colombian exchange and we had the Silk Road, the concept of dumping huge amounts of salt, which was like almost as valuable as say gold or something on the roads. Just like, all right, we're going to, this is road salt now because it's too icy and it makes our strange horses with rounded feet skid off the road. It would horrify so many people. Also, I think when they saw our automobiles, they would say, wow, that looks incredibly dangerous.

You're going 80 miles an hour down this road. How did you make that safe? We would have to admit, oh, we didn't. No, no, it's not safe at all. 50,000 people a year die in car accidents. It's worth it because we can get to work so fast. Does your large metal horse called a SUV not crush the children? And we're like, and how? Boy does it. How did you solve that problem? We did not.

I've been not driving much because in Italy we just get around by sort of Spider-Manning across the city with spaghetti we shoot from our wrists. But no, I don't have a car here and I use the public transportation or a walk. And when I get in a car, I get really nervous now. I was never a huge fan of driving and I was always a little nervous and now I'm white knuckling it when we're going down a freeway in the US. It's like, why are we going 85 miles per hour? I'm so scared. The answer is we're only going 85 because this slow guy is in front of me.

He's so slow. He's driving me crazy. And yeah, and almost all our salt mining, if people have heard that previous episode, it goes toward industry because there's 51% of it going toward de-icing roads. And then another huge amount of it goes toward what's called feedstock for chlorine manufacturing and caustic soda manufacturing. Because what we do is we take the sodium chloride, which is ions of sodium and chlorine, split it, and then turn the chlorine or the sodium into industrial products. So very little of the salt we dig up or flush out of the ground ends up on a table.

I'm assuming feedstock does not mean you actually feed it to your stocks. No, yeah. It sounded agricultural to me, the term, but it's the machine version of putting grain into a cow. It's putting chlorine into a machine. Cows just chewing on rock salt. Yeah, but this is one of those little, again, the fact that nobody knows how the modern world works, that if you're at a party and you say you're an author, a best-selling author, some

people will be impressed and think that's fascinating. But if you say, well, I actually invented a chlorine production process, people are like, oh, really? That sounds like, no, no, no. The entire world depends on the production of chlorine. Everything you have. It's making paper, every industrial process, but it's also highly technical. None of us know how anything we're using is made, or at least I don't.

You guys might because you do the show. Now, I'd still make fun of that person at a party, don't worry. Yeah, until trying to think about basically Morton salt, I had no idea that chlorine is used for water treatment chemicals. It's what PVC plastics and pipe are made out of. PVC is polyvinyl chloride, had no idea. It bleaches paper a white color. There's all sorts of useful things we get out of salt that is not salt, if that makes sense. We basically split it into chlorine, which is kind of dangerous on its own, and then NaOH, like caustic soda is mostly made of sodium, which are also kind of dangerous on their own. Awesome. It's sort of a simple miracle of chemistry that sodium and chlorine put together is tasty

and not murderous. Yeah. And yeah, the other thing about the US making salt for a table, we are considered kind of a low tier country for that. We make a whole bunch of what I think of as regular salt, like the Morton salt blue cylinder of salt shaker salt. On the Salt Mines show, we talked about basically fancier salts. There's French Fleur de Sel, Pakistani pink salt that gets marketed as Himalayan. Other countries are known for what we consider fancier salts today, and the US is kind of the maker of this topic, which is like just the industrial salt

for your salt shaker. Are seasonal salts, are they just like fun colors or do they taste different? They're pretty much chemically the same. There might be little other things in it and the rest of this episode we'll talk about how that is and why. All right, okay.

The next number here is zero. All right. Zero. Cause that's how much involvement is required from Jewish clergy or Jewish cooking rules in order to label salt kosher. Okay, so yes, all right. Now- It's not really connected to it anymore. I have long been suspicious of this because, okay,

I'm half Jewish and I'm very bad at being half Jewish because I'll occasionally go to a Seder, someone hands me some salted parsley and I'll eat it. And then they start talking about the significance. I'm like, uh-huh, uh-huh. But I'm just waiting for the Monsvot soup, so I am not focusing. But I've never understood kosher salt because my very, very limited, shamefully limited understanding is that I think salt is fine.

I don't remember there being any rules against salt. Yeah, if I had been pressed before researching this, I would have guessed that there's a rabbi going around the facility and blessing the salt. No joke. That would have been my guess. Thumbs up. Just like, yeah, that's salt. That's salt right over here. I, being just a Y guy from small town in the Midwest, I assumed that was the only salt they were allowed to eat, that there was some religious prohibition against you. So yeah. Kosher thing of like, you're not supposed to mix

certain meats and milk or certain types of shellfish are not kosher, but salt is, I don't know. I always just thought salt was salt. And that's part of it. It turns out this is a labeling error. Okay. Related to that meat butchering process. All right. So I've been, I've been gaslit my whole life. Great.

Me too. Even though I'm not Jewish, I just misunderstood. Because we can all share it. That's the beauty of being gaslit. All denominations can all be, we can all be gaslit together. Yeah. In order to make meat kosher in some Jewish traditions that can involve draining blood from the meat or salting and soaking it a specific way. Any salt is kosher to consume, but kosher butchers, especially as salt kind of industrialized, they started requesting a larger grain salt that's good for soaking up that blood from the meat.

It's also easy to clear off of it afterward. So they requested koshering salts for koshering meat. Okay. That makes way more sense. Yeah. And then companies just started mislabeling it as kosher salts and shortening that instead of koshering. And so then from there, everybody got confused.

And especially Gentiles like me were like, ah, it's probably, they probably need salt to be away. That's probably it. Right. Right. It's that you have to, you have to like try to get the salt to go to medical school until you make it kosher. I am half allowed to make that joke. Yeah. And so in actuality, any salts could be used for koshering. You could use Morton table salt if you just figured out a way to make it drain the blood and do the process you need.

Yeah. Like the heavier salt, like if you have a large salt crystal, it's both more absorbent. I mean, that's why we use the rock salt on like driveways in the winter on roads, right? It's just like it has more sucky power per kernel and then also it's easier to clear away. Yeah. And so it's also, kosher salt is beloved by chefs for specific cooking reasons. The one other difference might be it usually is not iodized. We'll talk about iodine and salt later in the show.

But one other thing to say about kosher salt is because this is a labeling error and not driven by faith or science or anything, there's multiple kinds of kosher salt and no real standards for it. And in particular, chefs and home cooks who are foodies know about this because the two most common kosher salt brands are considered super different. Morton makes a kosher salt and then there's the diamond crystal brand. Ooh, diamond crystal. I'll take that one. Goodness. It sounds really fancy. And they're the same chemical, but the grains are very different shapes. And most people measure their salt by volume, not weight. And so, like, especially foodie people will freak out if you're going to use one of the

kosher salts instead of the other, because it will be a different result, but it's just because Diamond Crystal brand apparently comes out of open evaporation pans where there are hollow and pyramid shaped grains. And then Morton puts their grains through big rollers that make flatter coarser grains. And so Cooks Illustrated Magazine says 1.5 tablespoons of Morton kosher salt needs to be subbed for 2 tablespoons of diamond crystal kosher salt. I once tried to ask my dad, because I had a recipe that was cups of butter, but I wanted to do it by weight.

I was like, how much does two two cups of butter weigh? And my dad was like, well, it depends on the density of butter. What's the brand of butter? And I was like, dad, just I need, I'm, it doesn't know. And he's like, no, no, you don't understand. Like I need to understand the chemical properties of the butter before I answer your question. So I just winged it in that case. Yeah. The home cooks would be like, no, because this is one of those things. And again, they are the same substance, but because of the volume, that also changes the

amount of sodium. Food and Wine Magazine says a quarter teaspoon of Morton contains 480 milligrams of sodium. The same volume of diamond crystal kosher salt is just 280 rather than 480, which is like meaningful, but it's all just driven by shapes and volume. If you go by weight, it'll be very similar. That's why I like to use intuition when I'm baking. Like I kind of just feel the salt between my fingers. I try to, you know, sort of like I massage the cocoa powder, sort of just try to get a feel for the vibes that the ingredients are putting out to me, which works roughly 30% of the time.

Last numbers about sodium, apparently kosher salt and the other salts also only have a minor difference in the sodium level. McGill University in Canada is the source here. They say if you do a quarter teaspoon of various salts, you'll have 590 milligrams sodium in table salt, 580 milligrams in coarse sea salts, around 480 in kosher salts. And again, that's mostly volume driven because it's the same volume, not weight. And they also say that if the average adult is aiming to stay below 2,300 milligrams of sodium per day, the sodium difference between salts is meaningful, but not game changing.

The biggest thing is to just decrease your amount of salt, not try to switch to a different type. I see. I mean, yeah, that makes sense. I don't think the like 10 milligrams is going to make a huge difference. Yeah, it turns out. Even though you would think these salts have such different reputations and vibes, you would think like, oh, it means the world.

But it's mostly a volume thing and you just need to know. I also feel like the different textures of salt have a different mouth feel. That's true. Like I remember finding this salt that they looked like little trapezoids with layers, almost like tiny Aztec temples. I don't really know how they made it

cause they grew these crystals in a way. And it was quite, it was some sort of fancy thing. So I didn't buy it regularly because I'm not made out of salt money. But it was, it was a nice exciting sort of mouth taste because it was like, Ooh, that's got a pleasant little, little crispy crunch to it. Whereas normally with salts, like if it's also if it's too hard, right. And you, it's too coarse and you put it on a dish, you just like crunch, bite into a hard piece of salt. That's not fun.

And that, that kind of gets us into our first huge takeaway because mega takeaway number one, businessmen in the 1880s and 1890s used steam power to invent uniform same size white grains of salt. We love uniformity, don't we? Each slice of bread being exactly the same with no visible air holes, every apple looking like it's made out of plastic. There was this whole thing where having very homogenous looking food was like the thing. Like we didn't want to see a bell pepper that looked a little squat compared to another bell pepper.

They had to look the same, which you would think that I would like sort of sympathize with someone with OCD, but I don't. Yeah, we, around the year 1887, we started inventing making salt that way, especially table salt, salt shaker salt. We'll also talk about salt shakers later, but around the 1880s, industrialists said, hey, steam power can make salt all look the same instead of what we now think of as like, quote unquote, raw or something. Like anything you think of as a luxury salt is

sort of a counterrevolution against this and going back to how salt was for many, many centuries. Yeah. The sign of our privilege is that we can turn up our noses at something that we got so good at making that we're bored of it. Even though, again, if you showed them the amount of salt these people were producing to someone a hundred years before this, it would have seemed obscene. Right. It's like, yeah, it's just this pure white grains of white, and each grain is exactly the same.

It had to have seemed miraculous. Whereas now it's like, no, I will spend more to buy salt that some impoverished person has had to personally scrape off of a rock somewhere. Yeah, it's true. And key sources for this are, again, that book, Salt to World History by Mark Kurliansky. Also resources from the University of North Texas Library, historical resources from WBEZ Public Radio Chicago.

On the salt mining show, we talk about the three basic ways of making salts, saltwater evaporation, shaft mining, and solution mining. They all involve either boiling salty water or digging up big rocks of salt or both. And they're all very old. We've mined and produced salt for ourselves for thousands of years. But all of those resulted in jagged, differently shaped salts, and sometimes with other substances in them. And the thing that is sort of a leap forward here is that we figured out how to make salts in a set of vacuum evaporators. A relatively modern machine that leads to a bunch of exactly matching pure white salt grains in a way that consumers said, yes, this is incredible. I love this so much.

So this technology, you put it in a vacuum chamber, I would assume that you're putting in some kind of salt water, right? And then using some evaporative process, but then because it's in a vacuum chamber, it creates this regularity? Yeah. Yeah, the vacuum chamber, you have basically total control of the temperature and the amounts. And the gist of it is you put brine, salty water, into a metal tank, you heat it until it evaporates into sort of a salty steam. And Mark Kurlianski says, quote, this forces the steam into a tank where salt crystals form. Once the crystals

reached a certain size and weight, they dropped through the bottom. If they were too big, they would be washed back up by the incoming brine. If too small, they would not drop down, end quote. And we'll link pictures of it. I know that was sort of a hard to follow description, but the gist is that a vacuum sealed tank and then sort of a trap door at the bottom let salt makers generate endless totally matching salt crystals. If it's too small, it's light enough that it's still caught up in the water vapor. If it's heavy enough, it falls down, but If it's heavy enough, it falls down. But if it's too big, it doesn't go through the grate because it's too big.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense to me. They entirely did this to make salts the same as each other. We could already make salts. They just wanted to do this specific process that it turns out consumers love. Honestly, it kind of makes sense. Like, cause I do also have like a salt grinder.

And I don't, I'm not, I'm no fancy French waiter. So I don't know how to work that thing without getting weird chunks flying out everywhere. And it's got a certain appeal, but sometimes I get a big bite of grainy salt. So that's not always ideal. Frankel I think this is exactly what we were talking about before. We're jokingly treating this as this one weirdo's OCD obsession that all of his salt grains

have to be identical. But in terms of industrial processes or anything, you have to know exactly how much salt you have in this measure. Well, the shape of the grains is everything, because that can give you wildly different measures. We take it so for granted today that every bottle of Coke you drink doesn't taste slightly different. Whoever was working that day, they carbonated it too much. No, every bottle you've had your entire life, unless they changed the formula from sugar to corn syrup or something, there's trillions of them and they are all exactly the same. That is a modern miracle that only goes back to this Industrial Revolution era here. It changed

everything. Now it's boring. Now we intentionally want salt that's weird looking. Historically, as we jokingly said it was worth as much as gold, it was. There was so much labor involved in harvesting it. We're surrounded by salt. The earth is mostly salt water, but it doesn't matter. Trying to get it wherever you live was an enormous pain in the butt. People fought wars over it. It really did make people feel richer too, this process. Because the other big upshot, besides matching salts, is it was just a lot cheaper and easier to produce salts. Really, until this process, salt was still pretty expensive because it's easy to find but laborious to produce. And 1887, two brothers named Joseph and John Duncan set up this for the first time in Western New York State. The central part of New York

State, especially Onondaga County and the city of Syracuse, there's just huge salt deposits. So a lot of early US salt came from there. But they got this going and they also figured out how to chain several tanks together. So just one burst of steam could make salt in seven or eight tanks in a row by just doing slightly lower temperatures in each one. You would think these guys would be famous for doing this because it's a huge deal, but there are two reasons they are not famous. One is that they basically stole this idea from sugar makers. It turns out the idea first happened in sugar production to make matching grains of

sugar. Yeah. And then they just realized salt, which happens to look like sugar, you could do it too. And boy does it. It looks too much like sugar. And it is deliberately, I think that is, there's a cabal of people who are trying to ruin my cookies and make me look like an idiot. I'm tired of it. And both things didn't look so much like each other until the 1800s, because British sugar makers in Liverpool back in the 1820s figured out this vacuum evaporation process for sugary brines. And then about 60 years later, the Duncans are working for somebody else's salt

company in Syracuse. The salt company says, hey, as part of your job working for us, go observe sugar refineries, see if we can learn anything. They observe this process in sugar refineries, write it down for themselves, quit their job and start their own company doing it. They purely stole time from their boss and then made money on their own thing and also stole it from sugar makers. Nice.

Pooping and innovating on corporate dimes. I do love, just a moment ago, so revealing, Alex was like, well, why aren't, you would think Joseph and John Duncan would be famous? Like the kids today, instead of worshipping Logan Paul, they should be talking about the vacuum pan salt evaporation process that Joseph and John Duncan perfected in 1887. Why aren't they your celebrities? That's very me. I know what you meant, but it's like, yeah, why don't we hear about these guys anymore? They invented the condensate steam brine separation chamber process that they didn't invent it, but they perfected

it. Where are my brain chamber heads at? Yeah. Every child is me, but small, right? That's their deal. How difficult it would be to separate the condensate from the... Yeah. There's dozens of people who care Jason.

And then the other reason they're not famous is they got outcompeted by the city of Liverpool in Britain and by Morton in the US. Because in the UK, the salt producers in Liverpool said, oh, if the sugar producers next door are doing a thing we can do, we'll just do that. So as soon as the Duncans did this, they did it too. And food writer Elizabeth David says that a lot of British cookbooks of the turn of the century, like late 1800s, early 1900s, the ingredient list will include something specifically called Liverpool salt, because Liverpool was famous for making uniform salt for the whole UK. Why did that not stick?

Just like everyone started making salt, so then they just called it salt? Yeah, it just became so dominant. Then the other producers in other places copied it because it was so popular. Yeah, in the US, the Morton brand just did it. Morton was founded by a guy named Joy Sterling Morton. He is the only male American named Joy I've ever heard of. And also just almost a side thing, every picture of him, he looks incredibly stern. Willinkum, even when he's doing his pride and joy of planting

trees, he just looks mad. I don't know what you're talking about, Alex. I'm happy. I'm so joyful. I'm glad we could bring him in as a guest real quick. He does look like a human droopy dog. He was from a family mainly focused on trees. His father, Julius, was an important newspaper man and politician in the Nebraska territory, became US Secretary of Agriculture, and helped create the Arbor Day holiday. It started out as an attempt to make 1870s Nebraska less barren looking, even though

prairies are an ecosystem. But they were like, no, trees, because I'm from the East. And so- I'm planting trees for the future generations to enjoy. That's what he looks like in this photo. He's very sort of solemnly holding a shovel next to a sapling. He's so sad. Right, when I see it I'm like, do you like doing this?

But he loved it. He really did. He just is one of those Dower industrialist guys. Yeah, he's droopy dog. And so he's from a very powerful family. He says, how can I be rich too? He starts out working for railroad companies in the late 1800s and then finds out one of the big businesses in railroads is moving salt from Syracuse, New York, west to Chicago

and then the rest of the US. So then he quits that, joins a salt distribution business doing that. Once he learns the basics, he buys the company with basically family money and names it after himself in 1889. It becomes Joy Morton and Company. And from there, he just keeps innovating as hard as he can. He thinks that the only way to win the salt business is to be ahead technologically because otherwise everybody just sells salt. And so he becomes one of the first businesses to copy

what the Duncans copied with vacuum evaporation and matching salt grains. And he just advertised it and scaled it up much harder than the Duncans and became the dominant US salt business. Disrupting the salt industry. and became the dominant US salt business. It's disrupting the salt industry. To the point that I cannot name another salt brand. I know you mentioned Feynman and Crystal earlier, but if you asked me to draw a container of salt from memory, I'm going to draw you a little blue cylinder with a little girl on it with an umbrella.

I say Morton's. There's not many products where there's only one brand I can think of, even with like motor oil. Maybe Kleenex for me, like other than say like Kroger brand tissues, you know, it's like Kleenex. Right. It's the generic or it's Kleenex. Yeah.

That's a good example. Yeah. Yeah. They really just took it over and their first big sales pitch was this kind of thing. They brag that their salt was, quote, of such uniform high quality and grain that inspection under a microscope cannot reveal a difference between Morton salt made in New York and Morton salt made in California, end quote. Wow.

That's commitment. Yeah. That really is. And the pitch was also pretty much true. Nobody was using a microscope to check. But to the naked eye and unlike other previous salt, it matched. And people said, this is astounding. I live in the future. It's cool. This is something I would have done if I had a microscope. I feel like I'm a professional and I could look under a microscope and be like, I don't know, this grain, this one's sort of more of a trapezoid and that one's sort of more

of a rhombus. And so that is why salt looks the way it does. In the 1820s, sugar production did a thing and the 1880s, salt production copied it. And now the jagged kind is fancy. That's pretty much it. Right. We go through pendulum swings. At one point, tanning was like, oh, if you tan, you're a farmer, so that's not trendy. And it's like, oh, everyone who's less wealthy is stuck in the office all day long. So now if you tan, you have time and you're wealthy.

Things that are more obtainable, like things that become obtainable and normal, it's like, oh, well that's for the poor. I want salt that's shaped like a tiny Oscar. One of my favorite videos that goes viral every few months, it's of a clothing garment factory in somewhere, clearly a sweatshop type situation. The woman's job is to take the fresh, perfect blue jeans off the assembly line, put them

on a little table, and then she uses an angle grinder to cut holes and faded spots in the jeans. Because when we pay $150 for pair jeans, we want them pre-holed and pre-worn. And she's taking this perfect garment that came off brand new and is destroying it so that it can be sold to wealthy people who don't want to have to wear the wear into their own jeans. And so you have this person whose job is to sit there all day long with a respirator because the lint coming off of the jeans as you grind them. Oh yeah, and that textile is not good for the lungs. Yeah, and just has this hellish job of wearing our jeans for us to make them look worse because

the aesthetic of, I have done a lot of hard work in these jeans is what we like, but we certainly are not going to put the jeans on and go do stuff. That's ridiculous to suggest. Vintage salt. Is that like a thing, Alex? Alex, is that like a thing, Alex? Have we started sort of like, this is like your, this is a vintage chunk of salt from Jesus times. Yeah, Morton industrialized this so hard that any different looking salt is special to us. Like, apparently at the end of the 1800s, Joy Morton Company had such a massive facility going in Chicago full of these vacuum evaporators that their facility received 500 train loads of salt every 24 hours. Jesus.

Wow. And then turned that into matching Morton's salt and distributed it nationally from there. And that just became how salt works all of a sudden. Before that, it was what we think is special, fancy French salt or something. That's wild. Yeah. special fancy French salt or something. That's wild. Yeah, and that kind of puts us in the modern day part way. But we have two more amazing changes to salt to talk about after a quick break. So we'll take a quick break.

Do a little salt shake. Folks, it's me, Alex, of course Katie, and happy Max Fun Drive to you. Yar, driving me nuts! Nah, I joke, I actually really enjoy Max Fun Drive. Is it? That was like kind of a pirate and kind of a trucker, and I really like it. Well, Yar, driving me nuts! Well, cause it's like, it's like why, it's the old joke where it's like a, it's a pirate with the steering wheel on his crotch and then you go,

why is that steering wheel on your crotch? He goes, yarr, it's driving me nuts. You're right. I think I only brought truckers in because I was thinking of the horrible item of truck nuts. I apologize to everyone. Anyways, welcome to the ultimate week. Is it a maximum fun drive Fun Drive? It is. Yeah. If you're listening to this, when it comes out March 24th, the drive runs through this

Friday, March 28th. There's going to be a finale couple of streams on that day. Me and Katie are going to eat some pizza on one of them. We'll have stuff on social media about it. Eat some pizza. Eat some Zahs. Yeah. We truly love being on Maximum Fun. And that organization, which is Artist Owned Shows, which is kind of a miracle in entertainment, and then their organization is an employee-owned co-op, which is a second miracle in entertainment.

It's amazing. This is the special time of the year when we ask people to join in on the listener-supported operation that we're doing. And so thank you so much to a bunch of people who've made new memberships, upgraded their membership, one-time boosted it, given a gift membership, any other ways you can do it. That's maximumfund.org slash join to do it. And then this is the final week of that special window when there'll be extra things we do if we hit certain amounts of people and also just extra special shows that

we're doing on the internet. So it's wonderful. It's really fun. I enjoy it because there's all this cross-pollination that happens within the network right now. And it's really fun to hang out and speak with other podcasters that are our buddies and our pals. Yeah. And also to, you know, kind of have a fun little interaction with you guys where we're like, we're trying to get up our goals, but also doing fun content for you and doing extra little goodies. I love it. I do too. Yeah.

It's fun with this show every week. Like when we did a cool ass episode, one of you baked cool ass cookies and put it on Discord what incredible amazing and like you're always just making each week of doing this fun And so that escalating for a drive is extra fun. It's great escalating Sorry Yeah, we'll keep posting on social media and especially on the Discord about just what's going on.

Again, the 28th we'll have some special streams and there's other stuff in between too. If you like any other Max Fun shows, they've got things going on as well. Thanks for making the end of March really fun. It's like gray and 35 degrees where I am and you are making it sunny. You know what I mean? Maybe that's corny to say but yeah You're the sunshine and Alex's coffee. I don't I really know what to say But you really do. Thank you for yes, Andy. I didn't do a good thing and you approved it

I didn't say sunshine in your coffee, which isn't really I was trying to Best part of Folgers wait now. God damn trying to, best part of Folgers, wait, no, goddamn it, the best part of waking up is Max Fun Drive in your cup. I think we were primed to think of Folgers because we just taped on Inspectors Inspectors. We did, and again, Inspectors Inspectors is like one very long, that one Folgers commercial that you're currently thinking of right now. Yes very long, that one Folgers commercial that you're currently

thinking of right now. Yes, folks, that one. Yeah, with the siblings who hook up. But this is- That weird- But Inspectors Inspectors- They don't hook up in the show. They don't hook up in the ad.

You make it sound like it. That's very strange. That was unfair of me. But yeah, the bow coat we did for this drive, episode four of our TV recap podcast that we do secretly and specially, it's called The Inspectors and Inspectors. It's about a show produced and funded by the US Postal Service to teach people about postal crimes, but what it actually does is mislead people about how postal crimes work and then have a mother and son almost hook up every episode.

Almost hook up every week. It's an unintentional but very present overtone in the show. She throws a sandwich at him once and then he like flirts with her about that. You forgot about that? Yeah. It's a good time. We analyzed this show that is probably only been watched by I would say about 20 people, or 22 people including us.

So, and you'll learn absolutely nothing about the United States Postal Inspector Service, but you will learn a lot about this particular television show. What I would not give to be able to get into the analytics of BYUtv.org because that show today used to be on CBS, the very real US television channel, CBS. And then it is now streaming for free on BYUtv.org, a service run by Brigham Young University and the Church of Latter-day Saints. And so what I wouldn't give to know if they are seeing a spike on their little Mormon computer of watches of this show and saying, what's going on?

Someone on the eastern seaboard of the United States and also in Italy. Our show's really doing well in Italy. Yeah. I think our show's really doing well in Italy. I'm probably flagged as like some kind of Italian postal spy or something. Italy is trying to find out our weaknesses in our ironclad postal inspection service. Yeah. And I hope that reflects the kind of magic evokes make happen by directly supporting our show. None of it could exist.

Regular stuff could not exist without direct support. Advertising could not support it in general, but especially any advertising in a positive way could not. And so thank you for making it possible the only way through your support. Yeah, I'm just truly grateful to all of you. Right. And imagine if we had to rely on, say, like some brand of pasta sauce to get our show off the ground. We'd always be interrupting this. Ideally. We'd be interrupting.

Like compared to the other brands. Oh my God. Like this is thanks to aatino's pasta sauce. Every five minutes bringing it back to pasta sauce. Yeah, like trying to feel wonder about the world and being like, and also, you know, would really dress up six degrees of Kevin Bacon as if he slathered him with Sabatino's Pasta Sauce. Code Sabatino's for Sabatino. It can also be used as an industrial lubricant other than WD-40.

Sabatino's Pasta Sauce goes great on everything from pasta to risotto to your door hinges. And then the founder of Sabatino calls us and says, also, I believe a lot of pseudoscience now and we're like, well, the show does too. All right. Great. All right. Sorry. No more.

Stop bathing people. That's what Sabatino says. Yeah, no, it's great that we don't have to pretend to like products that we don't or agree with political opinions that we don't agree with because we just we do the show for you folks. So this is we're wild and unleashed here. We can say whatever we want like darn. Darn and heck, Edds. Oh.

I'm excited to see you on the Discord right now, excited to see you on streams on the 28th. And let's have a great rest of the Max Fun Drive. We'll also let you enjoy the rest of this episode, because all the episodes are available because of your support too. People can just listen if they truly lack the economic resources to help you're supporting them too. Thank you. So thank you. Thank you. Happy MFD. Max Fund Drive. Happy Drive Times. Max from Fund Dirog slash join. Driving me

balls. You get it Alex? You get it? I forgot about the pirate. Now we're back. Great. Yeah great great great. I forgot about the pirate. Now we're back. Great. Yeah. Great. Great. Great. We're back and we have two more takeaways about why salt is the way it is now. Cause takeaway number two, salt iodization is one of modern society's greatest public health triumphs. All right. Like this is one of the best things that's ever happened in the modern world in the last hundred plus years is that we added iodine to salts and made everybody's lives better.

It's goiter, goiter time. Yeah. Goiter time, baby. This is, I'm really curious about this because I think this was explained to me as a child and I just didn't quite understand it. So I was like really worried that if I didn't have enough salt that I would get a neck goiter. You can.

But essentially it's true. Yeah. Yeah. The two big stories of it'll be the 1920s US Midwest and then the like post-Soviet republics at the turn of the millennium after the USSR ended. Because the gist here is that salts, the sodium in it is an essential nutrient for humans. You do need some salt even if you're trying to be healthy. Separately iodine is an essential nutrient. And the two big problems if you don't have enough are big goiters, especially on your neck, and also that there might be mental deficiencies in your children. Those are both very bad, especially the second one.

So what is a goiter, right? Because as far as I understand, there is a sort of inflammation of part of the thyroid that causes a goiter. Yeah, that's right. Your thyroid gets way too big, and it's uncomfortable and considered aesthetically bad. All right. And it turns out that the world varies in just how much it looks into iodine in the diet. Apparently, Japan is a good example of a place with plenty of natural iodine. The soils have lots of it and then foods commonly eaten there like fish and seaweed have a lot of it. So, places like Japan lucked

into not worrying about it. The counter example is a place like Michigan. Apparently because the Great Lakes are freshwater, there's almost no iodine in the soil. The foods traditionally eaten there by white colonizers are not high in iodine. And so especially around the turn of the century, people called Michigan the goiter belt. The United States had a goiter belt of common goiters. That's so mean. It's very mean and sad, but it was apparently true. A lot of goiters.

Yeah. All right. And this is something that didn't get solved as a common, common public health issue until the last hundred years, right? Yeah. public health issue until the last 100 years, right? Yeah, in the US, yeah. Because Europe starts to figure out a way in the 1830s, there were especially French scientists realized if you just add iodine to salt, that will tend to on a public health level salt this because most people eat salt every day.

And there's also specific humans who can't eat a lot of salt or have iodine issues. It's not a universal statement. But they start solving this in Europe. The other solution is an iodine supplement, like a little pill, like a vitamin. In a public health way, you can just have a lot of people do it without thinking about it if you iodize salt. And around 100 years ago, people in the US Midwest start catching up to this European idea. Especially a guy named David M. Cowie was the first ever professor of pediatrics at the University

of Michigan. He was trained in Germany. He learned about Swiss and German iodization of salt and said, let's please do that. And in studies in Ohio and Michigan and elsewhere, it just immediately helped every time they gave iodine to people. It was the obvious solution. Because it's like a, it's a really important molecule for the creation. I think of like the thyroid hormone. And so that's why your thyroid gets so big is because it's like desperately trying to create the thyroid hormone, but it doesn't have the component to make it.

So your thyroid is just like, it's like working out. Like you've got like one arm that you always like arm wrestle with and it's working out, it's getting huge, but it's actually not, it's still not able to produce that, that thyroid hormone because it's lacking the iodine. Yeah. And this was devastating for people. Especially the mental deficiency in children that basically slang for it was cretinism.

If you've heard the insult of calling someone a cretin, that's because they were like mentally slowed down and lost IQ points and it was bad. And the amazing date here is May 1st, 1924. So when we're taping this barely a hundred years ago and a few months, May 1st, 1924 was the first iodized salt on US shelves and the start of making this better for Americans, especially in Michigan. It's wild because it's just like just by the chance of where you end up, right?

In a location, the biome is going to be completely different. You're not going to have access to say like ocean fish or seaweed or salted, well, not salted earth, but you know, salt in the earth and iodine in the earth that gives you green vegetables that have more of that in it. And then you just miss out on it. And this is not to get political, but this is one of my issues with, well, they're putting chemicals in our food. It's like, okay, again, if you went back to eating what just happens to be local to your region to act like, well, God's earth will provide us with all of the nutrients and chemicals and stuff we need. It's like, okay, during World War I,

the biggest issue with recruiting soldiers is that something like 30% had goiters or some other related deficiency. It was common in some parts of the country. Half the kids had this. And this was in the era when my grandmother was born. She would have been born just a few years after they introduced the solution, not after they eliminated it. This is not ancient history. I can go talk to this person about this era. Right. And it's also just so easy to do. And in 2006, the New York Times just tried to get some numbers on the costs of iodizing salt. Talked to public health experts who said one ton of salt only needs two ounces of potassium iodate.

So they're not putting very much chemical in our food, but that tiny amount of iodate. So, also, they're not putting very much chemical in our food, but that tiny amount of iodate in an entire ton of salt costs about a dollar fifteen. Too much. Oh, that's going to make my taxes go up so much. You just need to bother to do it. It's so easy. Yeah, and then also there are some weird conspiracy theories about this that were created by companies producing iodine supplements, like vitamin type pills of iodine. And the pills are fine, the iodization is fine, it's all fine, but apparently those companies were concerned they couldn't sell the pills anymore, so they tried to undermine salt iodization in the public. And then those rumors have stuck around.

That's wild. I wish they just pivoted to a different pill, but oh well. Iodine is so dangerous. Anyways, here's our supplements. What was the play there? Yeah, the play was specifically iodizing salt is dangerous, and you should get it from a pill instead. And then it's like, you work for a pill company, right? Don't ask me that. Was their attempts. Yeah.

It's so frustrating. So, so frustrating because it's so difficult to change course once you undermine people's trust in public health. It's just so hard to get people back on board. Yeah. And then the other big example of this still being necessary happened after the Soviet Union ended. Because this salt iodization is also something just kind of none of us think about.

There might be a little label on your package that says it's iodized or not. But in the process of ending the Soviet Union, a big set of the new post-Soviet republics like Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, I've heard Americans call it the Stan countries, even though they're different and interesting, each of them. It does also sound like you're stanning these countries. So that's a little confusing. And I am. I love it.

No, I don't. But along the way, the people running food systems and health systems in those countries often lost track of the salt iodization step. That was done back in the Russia part. And so apparently a lot of those countries plummeted to only around 28% of households using iodized salts. And then there was a spike in goiters and what's called cretinism. Just because nobody cares about salt iodization as like a topic. They just forgot. They weren't against

it. They were just like, oh, we forgot that step in the checklist of being a country. Oh, well. It's the curse of success, right? Like we're seeing that with measles vaccines now where it's like when something's really successful and it eliminates the problem, then everyone's like, what? There's no problem. Why do we need it? Yeah. Yeah, that's part of it. And these countries like got around to doing it again in the early 2000s. So for about a decade, they just kind of forgot. And the United Nations had to step in. They also interviewed a public health advocate in Kazakhstan named Valentina Sivyakova. And in 2006, she overheard a Kazakh schoolboy calling their peers stupid. And the schoolboy's insult was, what are you,

iodine deficient or something? Look at Mr. No Iodine over here. Yeah. And it's a weird public health story too, in terms of democracy. Because from 1920s America to 1990s Kazakhstan, relatively democratic countries, you need to talk people into iodization. And then, counter example, Turkmenistan's first ruler was a total despot named Saparmurat Niyazov, who required all clocks to have his likeness on them. He renamed the days of the week after his family. Clocks specifically? Yeah, he was just weird.

I just, I'm sorry, I know we want to get back on salt, but like, was his clock like the face? Like, would the thing, the hands go around his... I couldn't find a picture. I really wanted to see if it was his arms like Mickey Mouse, you know? Yeah, I wanted to know. Right, right. It was like a Mickey Mouse clock, but with a despot. All right, sorry. Back to salt.

He was a weirdly positive example of re-iodizing salt because he had total despotic control. In 1996, he declared plain salt illegal and ordered shops to give out many pounds of iodized salt per family at state expense. He just brutally solved a good thing. That was the other way to re-iodize the salt. Despotism works 100% of the time except when it doesn't. Pretty much. Yeah. It is so efficient because you can have a guy to say, oh, climate change is real. Okay, as of right now, no more cars. Yeah.

Yes. And that's it. There's no quart, there's nothing. It's like, nope, okay, no cars. But then you can also have a guy saying, I don't like toilet paper. It's back to sticks. Yeah, that is the downside. You're basically praying that this person is not crazy and you're just rolling the dice. And most despots, it's the pinnacle of sanity.

Yeah, you want to be on a clock. I mean, it makes sense to me. Yeah, who doesn't? Who doesn't? And then the one other update to salt is our last takeaway number three. Salt shakers exist because chemists added safe, scary sounding chemicals to table salt. Ooh, scary. This is anti-caking agents and it's also the Morton Salt logo origin. What are they called?

Canceridium? What do you mean dangerous sounding? Yeah, they are safe, but the scariest sounding name is sodium ferrocyanide. Which sounds like it's sodium iron iron, and cyanide. Yeah. But it's fine because of how chemistry works. I mean, apple's got cyanide in it a little bit, I think. They do. The seeds.

Yeah, the seeds. The seeds. Yeah. And as we know, Alex just eats those seeds right up. He eats an apple like a horse does. I do. Whole apple. I still do.

It's great. Whole apple. For real? He got really on the whole apple track and he hasn't stopped. Yeah, I don't think I told you, Jason. I learned you can eat the apple core from our apples episode and now I just eat the whole apple. Yeah. That's for real. Brenda begging Alex like, please Alex, please stop. She respects it and doesn't like it. Yeah. And then other chemicals here are sodium, aluminosilicate,

calcium silicate, magnesium carbonate, microcrystalline cellulose. They all sound not good, but it's tiny amounts and they're all fine. Right. This is my pet peeve because I could go on TikTok right now and have a wellness influencer going to the grocery store and they'll grab something off the shelf. It's like, why does your bread need to contain something called sodium aluminosilicate? What are these corporations putting into our children? It's like, OK. For one thing, you grabbed a Twinkie. Do you understand the problem with the Twinkie is not the chemicals that they put in it to keep it from molding? The issue is not the

big scary words. The big scary words are to keep it from having mold on it. Because everyone has this experience of either going to a farmer's market or a fancy bougie grocery store that boasts no preservatives, no chemicals in this bread. And the next day, the bread is green. Like, what's this ripoff? These people sold me moldy breads. No, no, no. All that scary stuff on the label, they're not adding that to try to contaminate your brain to make you a subservient consumer. It's because, once upon a time, when they talk about the greatest thing since sliced bread, and that phrase sounds like nonsense to you. What difference? No! Being able to sell pre-sliced bread that

did not immediately turn into a rock was miraculous, but it was due to adding a bunch of scary sounding chemicals to it. Yeah, I mean, the thing is like preservatives and bread like that, it's like that is for a car-based economy. Like the key with like fresh bread that doesn't have preservatives in it is that you eat it that night. You just eat the whole thing. It's like, well, what do I do about bread the next day? Well, you walk to the bread place that's like a few blocks away. That's what you do. And so that's why our bread is shelf stable.

Yeah. It did come as a surprise to us that we were like, oh, this bread will last a week. And it's like the next day, new door stopper. All right. So we got these anti-caking agents. So now you can shake it out of a shaker without it turning into a solid block. Yeah. Before 1911, most people had something called a salt seller, which is a little jar that you pinch your salt out of with your hand because it sticks together a bunch. And then in 1911, the Always Tech Forward Morton Salt Company added magnesium carbonate to their salts.

And when they did that in 1911, a tiny amount of magnesium carbonate made the salts come out of a container without clumping, without adverse health effects. And this blew the world's mind to the point that in 1914, they debuted a Morton salt girl to advertise the feature. Because once upon a time, if there was too much moisture or humidity, your salt would turn into a solid brick. So inventing a type of salt that you could sprinkle out even on a rainy day. When it rains, it pours.

The salt pours! The salt pours. The little girl carrying the salt container in the rain under her umbrella and it's spilling out behind her. That is a boast. Right. It's so resistant to caking and humidity that she's accidentally draining the salt onto the street carrying it home. Because our salt will keep pouring even when it rains. That's why I'm-

Maybe the greatest slogan in corporate history that's still on there to this day, a logo that no one knows what it means. The average person is like, why would you have a girl standing in the rain to sell your salt? She's flexing. She's not being stupid. She's flexing about how amazing this pourable, moist salt is. Just everyone copied them and everyone does their own anti-caking agents. So no one knows that was a technological and branding win when it was put on the container, the little lady. Right, and you can't have a cute rhyme with humid.

And the humidity, it's still poridities. And let's face it, if you left an open container out in the rain, it would be totally ruined. The slogan is a lie to a degree. For sure. Yeah. But no, this is... And she's wasteful. She's a Pratt-Fall-Mr. Bean type character, basically. No crops will ever grow on that part of land she's walking through because she assaulted

the earth forever in that spot, leaving a trail of death behind her. But still. Yeah, there's a Roman legion that just came through and then she's finishing the job. Yeah, it's horrible. Yeah, and then that allowed salt shakers to exist starting in the 1910s. And then two other US trans made them popular. Apparently Apparently motorists, when they started doing the first road trips, salt shakers were an easy souvenir. And then also in the Great Depression, ceramics and glass companies pivoted to salt shakers because it was one of the only items people could still afford at all in the Great Depression.

Like salt or the shakers themselves? The shakers, yeah. They just made that instead of bigger and more expensive glass or ceramics. I see. I seeics because everybody was poor But it was like you can buy this tiny thing and people did when you're poor it pours What Yeah, and so that's why salt shakers exist at all and it's why the little girls on Morton salt and Morton salt they had three huge technology wins in a row matching salt grains and then anti caking and then salt iodization.

They were one of the first for that too. So that's why salt is the way it is today. That is very mind blowing. I had no idea. I thought it was just like, look at, I thought it was similar to the copper tone girl, you know, like she's a little girl on the beach and her bikini bottoms are getting ripped off by a dog. And I always thought that was weird,

but it's like, look at this, like I just thought clumsy girls, like were the thing to put on your brand. Like, look at this stupid girl getting her, like struggling with her sunscreen with the dog pulling off her bathing suit. Like, look at this stupid girl pouring salt on the street. I just was like, I guess they just, idiot children were like the thing to put on your product. And today in our kitchen, we have a salt and pepper grinder charged with a USB cord. Oh, it's electric.

And it will grind my salt for me. Yeah, it's electric. And it's got a little light that comes on. We turned over it, since you've turned it over and the light comes on, a little motor grinds the salt. And I wish I could go find Joy Morton and bring him into the future and say, see, we buy these big coarse rocks of salt that we fill in our salt grinder and it grinds it for us right here.

And he would have a stroke and die of rage. But do you know what I sacrificed so that you wouldn't have to do this? And you're like, wow, Joy, your emotions match your face for once. Wow. I planted so many trees for you. Hey folks, that's the main episode for this week and want to say an additional thank you to Jason Pargin for coming on this show and being amazing like always. By the way, his latest novel is I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. It is on sale now.

It is funny, exciting, standalone. Also in terms of the internet making us scared of stuff, we talked about the internet being scared of iodide and salt or anti-caking agents and salt. I feel like that's a thematic fit with what goes on in the book. Again, it's I'm starting to worry about this black box of doom. It's on sale now and Jason's a full-time novelist. The only way he can keep doing that is book sales. So that's why he comes on podcasts like this and provides us with joy in that way. So please give it a look. And hey, you're in the outro of this podcast episode.

It's got fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Mega takeaway number one. Mega Takeaway Number 1. Businessmen in the 1880s and the 1890s used steam power to invent uniform white grains of salt. I also almost made it a whole nother takeaway that these salt makers stole the idea and the process from sugar makers. I just like that. That they realized they could make salt and sugar look kind of identical starting at the end of the 1800s. Takeaway number two, salt iodization is one of modern society's greatest public health triumphs.

Takeaway number three, salt shakers exist because chemists added safe chemicals that are admittedly scary sounding chemicals to table salt as anti caking agents. And then a lot of numbers kind of throughout the show. The ones at the top of the show were about the amazing amount of salt production in the US that goes into industry and not into food. Also the entire story and differences of kosher salt and just what's going on with sodium in your food as it relates to salt. Those are the takeaways. Also I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating

stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is how the Morton Salt Guy helped invent the internet. He was also a tech entrepreneur, almost by accident. Visit sifpod.fund for that bonus show, for a library of approaching 20 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all 20,000 other secretly incredibly-fasting bonus shows and

a catalog of all sorts of Max Fund bonus shows, it's special audio just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things? Check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFund.org. Key sources this week include a wonderful nonfiction book. It's called Salt, a World History. It's by award-winning author Mark Kurlansky. Our podcast has also cited his book about paper and he just is amazing at this kind of writing. Also lots of very useful

culinary and scientific information from McGill University in Montreal, the magazine Bon Appetit, the magazine Cooks Illustrated, the food writers at the New York Times, then a lot of historical information from the University of North Texas, from WBEZ Public Radio in Chicago, and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatigok people, and others.

Also Katie taped this in the country of Italy. Jason taped this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, and Sa'atza Yaha peoples. And I want to acknowledge that in my location, Jason's location, and many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIFT Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life.

There is a link in this episode's description to join that Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Cause each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 4. That's about the topic of grocery stores. Fun fact there, there's a modern, sorta little-known regional southern brand of convenience store

called Piggly Wiggly, that brand changed the entire grocery shopping experience for the entire world back in the day. I recommend that episode. I also recommend Jason's podcast, Big Feets, co-hosted with Robert Brockway and Sean Baby. It's produced by the wonderful website 1900hotdog.com. They recap the television show Mountain Monsters, which is a bunch of foolish guys hunting bigfoots and so much more.

I also recommend my co-host KD Golden's weekly podcast. It's called Creature Feature. That is about animals, science, and more. Absolutely wonderful. Our theme music is Unbroken, Un-Shaven by the Boodos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to The Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating.

So how about that? Talk to you then. ["The New York Times"] Maximum Fun. A worker-owned of artist owned shows supported directly by you.