Stuff You Should Know - How Salt Works

Episode Date: February 18, 2014

A Roman senator once said, "Mankind can live without gold, but not without salt." Right he was. The human body needs salt so much we have developed a taste for it specifically. But too much salt can be toxic. Learn about salt's role in human history and how we get it from the Earth in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and this is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast.

Oh yeah, Jerry's over there. She's all laughy today for some reason. Old Salty Dog. Cheers. Why did Salty, calling someone Salty, I wonder where that came from? I meant to look that up. It's the one I didn't look up.

Yeah, cause you know, you're in a Salty mode. Yeah. I've said that plenty. And what if that comes from like a Salty Dog? Here, this is my idea. Okay. So Salty describes somebody who is a little coarse, a little rough around the edges, a little upset.

Hear me out. So because their face is usually puckered into like a sour puss face, and what makes your face pucker, eating salt. So they're a Salty person. Okay. I would call them lemony. Well, so take something with a grain of salt.

It's actually ancient. That's from the Romans. Okay. They would take poison with a grain of salt. There's something that was hard to swallow with a grain of salt to make it go down more easily. Okay. Let's go ahead and cover these then.

Somebody not being worth their salt? Yeah. In this article, it says that slaves were traded with salt. And if you got your hands on like a slave that wasn't worth much, like that he wasn't worth his salt. Is that not the origin? I found the first reference in print came from an 1805 description or book about an expedition to Guinea-Bissau.

And it mentions a guy who wasn't worth his salt. He's a good man, Peter Hale. H-A-Y-L-E, but he wasn't worth his salt, the guy said. And I looked it up and I couldn't find that whether Hale was hired or was a slave. But I got the impression that what the guy was talking about wasn't that he had traded salt for Hale. But not worth the salt like in his body?

No, he was not worth the salt, meaning a salary, which supposedly salary is rooted in the idea of paying someone in salt. Same with soldiers, salt-dare means to give salt. Salad too, the word salad comes from the word salt. Really? Yeah, apparently. So salt is a, it's an important thing,

historically speaking. There's been economies largely based on salt. There've been cultures raided by other cultures because of salt. If you were an ancient salt producing area, probably the rulers controlled with the tight grip that salt production and salt distribution. Yeah.

And that actually carried on into the modern age. When Great Britain was occupying India, they had a tight control on salt production there. And actually Gandhi started a revolution or helped along the revolution to overthrow British imperial power through a salt protest. He walked 240 miles to the coast where the salt production facilities were

and grabbed a bit of salty clay and boiled it, boiled the salt out of it, which was an illegal act. Yeah. And that protest spurred other similar protests and the British were like, oh, hey, you can't do that, mate. You can't mine your own salt? Right, but he did, because he was Gandhi.

That was called the salt march to Dandi. By Gandhi. Gandhi. Yeah, salt dates back to 60, 50 BC. And they actually have found evidence of salt trading in prehistoric times. So obviously it's used to spice food is great, but it's used to preserve food was super valuable.

Yeah. Back in the day and still today. Because salt is one of these things, you remember nature loves homeostasis, it loves balance. Oh yeah. And if you introduce salt to the mix, it kind of throws off that balance. So to gain homeostasis, salt is introduced into, say, meat.

It likes to go into the meat, but it also draws out the moisture, whether it's blood, water, whatever. So it dries out the meat. It introduces the salt and it draws out the moisture. That's right. That's called curing, which preserves things. Because anytime bacteria comes in contact

with that salty meat from that point on, the bacteria, boom, gets dried out and dies. Yeah, that's why packaged foods are still loaded with sodium, unfortunately. I got some stuff on that later, but it was used as a currency in Ethiopia up until the 20th century. And it was used as a form of suicide in China for nobility.

They would OD on salt and kill themselves. Oh yeah. Because it was expensive and very valuable. So nobility, that's like, it was like a noble way to go out. We'll talk in a minute like what happens when you have too much salt. It's not very pleasant. It's not very pleasant.

But you know, in medieval Europe, remember we did the 10 medieval torture devices episode? Well, we skipped one called the goat's tongue and it was apparently a real thing, a tickle torture. They would dip your feet in salt water, bring in a goat and the goat would lick the bottom of your feet and then they would dip it again. And from the description, no, I'm saying like,

it wasn't in there, we missed it. From the description, apparently being tortured, tickle tortured was not pleasant. I would love to have my feet licked by a goat. They would do it until you did not love it. That was the point of the goat's tongue torture. It sounds like fun to me. Yeah.

In the Middle Ages, salt was transported along the notorious old salt route in northern Germany. I know what I'm gonna get you for Christmas now. A goat in some salt water. I've had both at the same time. I don't know why I didn't think about it. It played a big role in early America as well. Yeah.

Massachusetts Bay Colony had the first patent to produce salt here in the colonies. Yeah, salt water is happy. Here in the colonies. And they did so for 200 years. The Erie Canal opened primarily to transport salt. Yeah, they called it the ditch that salt built. Really?

Uh-huh. It sounds like something you just made up. No, I swear. I've been on the Erie Canal. Oh, yeah? Yeah, they have this nice system of locks. Sure. And they're still like donkey trails

where the donkeys used to pull these little flat bottom boats that would carry salt and whatnot. And now yuppies walk along those trails. Dog. Yuppies. Are there still yuppies? Oh, yeah. Dinks.

Yeah. I heard one the other day. Dual income, large dog owner. All right. In the early 1800s, salt was apparently four times expensive as beef, because salt was valuable, obviously. And we were lousy with beef. And in the Civil War, salt played a big part

in the Union strategy. There were quite a few battles, salt over capturing, salt works and salt mines. Yeah, in Saltville, Virginia. Yeah. Salt. I wonder what they do there. And it actually had a big effect on the salt shortage

on the Confederate troops. Yeah, not just the troops, but the people behind the lines back in the Confederate states were like, we want our salt and it had a huge impact on morale, apparently. I would say so. And the reason why salt is so important, if you haven't gotten the impression that it is important

by now, you should rewind the podcast and just listen to the last several minutes over again. Salt is extraordinarily important because the human body requires it. It's something that we need to survive and to live. So much so, that we actually have a taste sense for it. Yeah, it's the only, you don't need bitter to live. No.

Or sour. No. Or umami. As a matter of fact, things like bitter and sour are there, I think, to detect things that we shouldn't be eating. Sure. Salt is to detect something we need.

That's right. And we can actually, this is so mind blowing to me. I love the human body. I think it's amazingly wonderful in ways that we don't even fully understand yet. But consider this, when you need salt, your body produces a craving in you for salt. Yeah.

That is awesome. Like I'm one of those believers, I don't follow it necessarily myself, but in a diet, well no, think about it, in a diet where you just eat what you crave. Right. I think it can go off the rails because I think that we would have been-

We crave the wrong things now. Yes, now. But if you could go back 150 years, maybe. Sure. I would bet you could survive pretty easily and thrive on a diet where you were just kind of led by your cravings, like oh, I need some eggs. Right.

And eat a couple eggs. I'm not cravings like that though. You know, you should pay attention to yourself. Listen to what your body is telling you, and I'll bet you find that you do have specific cravings for specific foods or foods that are very simple. Yeah. Like meat, like chuck, go eat a steak.

Chuck, go eat some eggs. Like things that are basic staples, I'll bet you'll notice you have cravings. Salt, let's break it down chemically. Okay. It's sodium and chlorine are the two basic elements in salt. I think we all know this. Which are electrolytes.

That's right, and we'll get into that in a minute. Sodium is silvery white metal, and neither one of these are super friendly, independently of one another. No. Especially chlorine. Yeah, sodium reacts violently if you mix it with water and oxidizes in air.

Chlorine exists in gas at a room temperature. They're both really volatile. But when you put them together, and you have sodium chloride. They make beautiful music. Makes beautiful halite, and beautiful music. And sodium chloride is about a 60-40 mix sodium to chloride, by the way.

Is that right? Nice. And it makes little cubes, right? Yeah. Like the molecules are cubicle. Right, the sodium packs in pretty tight, and then the chlorine fills in the rest, and they make tiny little cubes.

It's actually reversed. That's what I said. Yeah. The chloride is packed, and then the sodium fills in. But you know. I would have thought the sodium was bigger. Oh, well. But what you have is NACL.

That's right, and you mentioned electrolytes. Those are minerals that conduct electricity in our body, in our fluids and tissues. Which is very important for our function. Super important. Muscle movement. We run on electricity. Heart contraction.

Yeah. Involuntary muscle moves through electrical impulses. I guess all muscles do. Yeah, you want your eyes to blink, buddy? Yeah. Eat some salt. Right. And so there's two conditions that you can have conceivably.

Well, three. Three would be just all the systems are normal. But the other two is too little salt and too much salt. Too little salt is called hyponatremia. Yeah, that's what that lady died of. The hold your wee for a wee contest? Oh, is that right? Yeah.

Yeah. You can OD on water. And I guess that's what you would ultimately die from is hyponatremia. Yeah. There's water toxicity. If you have too much water, you probably have too little salt.

Because water flushes salt from your system. It's the method that your kidneys use to maintain the balance of salt and other electrolytes in your body. And that's why you might drink Gatorade if you're working out, because it has electrolytes in it. Right, exactly. It's what tastes salty.

You don't want to water your cropland with it, though, as we found from the movie Idiocracy. Yeah, and I actually found, too, that in the 1980s, there was a lot of controversy over salting roads, killing roadside vegetation. Well, yeah, for sure. I mean, if you were into conquests and that kind of thing and you wanted to make sure that the land you just occupied

couldn't be used to grow crops to feed the opposing army, you would plow the land with salt. Salt the earth. Salt the earth, yeah. Which is not the salt of the earth, because that means you're a good fella. Right, yeah. But not a good fella, because those guys are salty.

Wow, look at you. That was a team effort. That was a clever wordplay, my friend. If you take diuretics, or you have, like, massive diarrhea for a period of days, or vomiting, or some sort of stomach bug, you might be at risk for hyponatremia. Yeah, because you're flushing out

all of this, all of your electrolytes. Yeah, this is salt that your body needs. So if it's out of balance, you're going to suffer things like, well, an inability for your heart to beat, which is often fatal. Yeah, kidney problems. Yeah. On the other hand, you can have hypernatremia,

which is too much salt. And like you said, if you're a Chinese aristocrat, you may die from hypernatremia. Yeah, they even had a, man, sometimes a blank out on the word, how to manual? Well, it's sort of like how many grams of salt you needed per pound in your body. They had like a chart, I guess.

If you want to kill yourself in China, here's how you do it. Here's how much salt you need. I don't think that was rough. Is he like that? I'm off today. No, you're not. I'm a little off. You are on.

My microphone just swerved to the left. That never happened. There's a ghost in here. So too much sodium, I think you said already, is hypernatremia instead of hypo? Yeah, hyperhypo. Exactly. It's like glasemia, but with nutremia.

Exactly. And with hypernatremia, basically, remember how salt, if you introduce it to, say, a jerky of some sort, it will dry it out. Or a slug? Yes, which is a shameful thing to do. Don't do that. If you introduce it to a meat or something like that,

it's going to dry it out through osmosis in search of homeostasis. It does the same thing to your blood and your extracellular fluids. That salt will draw out the fluids in your cells, but will maintain it in your blood. Yeah, it's water retention, basically. Yeah, your kidneys, when it has too much salt to deal with,

kicks it around the blood supply. Just remember in the Hangover episode, why drugs are so fatal when you drink a lot of alcohol, because your kidneys are trying to process the alcohol, so it keeps the drugs just going around and around in your blood supply. Same thing with too much salt. If your kidneys have too much to deal with,

they just keep the excess going around in your blood. And since that salt is drawing out all the excess moisture, it increases the volume of your blood, which makes your blood pressure rise, which makes your heartbeat harder. Yes, which supposedly, logically, would put you at risk for a stroke or heart attack. And that's how you would die from hypernatremia.

Yeah, I have high blood pressure. Well, supposedly, cutting your sodium down isn't going to help. Yeah, there's a lot of conflicting data on that, for sure. We'll get to nutrition soon. We'll cover that. Well, how about before we move on? Do you want to do a message break? I'd love to.

On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

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blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life.

In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second-hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends, and we dove in.

And let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, like you said, there's a lot of controversy over how much salt or how little salt you should have on a daily basis in your diet. Yeah, the National Heart, Blood, and Lung Institute

say no more than 2.4 grams of sodium. It's about a teaspoon per day. Americans, they found, consume an average of about 3.4 per day. So that's one gram too much on average. And you actually don't need more than about a half a gram a day if you want to maintain that stasis. So yeah, just for your electrolyte intake. The thing is, though, there was, for many years,

because it makes sense that if too much salt increases your blood pressure, then too much salt should put you at risk for strokes and heart attacks. Well, the CDC panel surveyed material and all sorts of studies that found cutting your sodium intake doesn't decrease your risk of heart attack or stroke. And as a matter of fact, there is- Was it just more hereditary?

They don't know what it is. They just know that basically below 3,000 milligrams of salt and above 7,000 milligrams of salt a day were two groups that were at higher risk of heart attack. So if you have too little salt, you're at higher risk of heart attack too. OK, so try to keep it between 3,000 and 4,000 milligrams. 3,000 and 7,000.

7,000. The thing is, they weren't comfortable making any recommendation. They were just saying, this is what we found. Everyone's scared to go on the record. Yeah, because we just don't know. It doesn't make any sense that you would have a heart attack if you ate less than 3 grams of salt

a day that flies in the face of conventional wisdom and nobody's figured out why yet. Interesting. Well, something you should monitor at the very least, because I think a lot of people look at fat grams and calories, and all that stuff is great to look at nutritionally. But when you start poking around on the soup can, and you see, wow, this chicken noodle soup

has 890 milligrams of sodium in this one little can. Which is almost a gram of sodium. Yeah, close to it. A quarter pounder with bacon and cheese. You didn't do Big Macs? No, I should have done Big Macs. You communist. I think Big Macs, actually, I did see.

This is 1,440 milligrams of Big Mac, I think, was around 1,100. Wow. Quarter pounders more? With the bacon, I think, adds. They have a whole bacon-onion ranch or something topping that you can put on quarter pounders now. I've not yet tried this. But I think about it from time to time.

Like right now? Yeah, right now, especially. So at any rate, just give it a look. Like, soups are notoriously high in sodium. Packaged foods are notoriously high in sodium. Don't just think about the table salt that you use. Like, oh, I didn't salt my food that much today. If you eat a lot of packaged foods,

you're eating a lot of sodium. Yeah, and nobody can tell you how much you should be eating or shouldn't be eating. But like you said, it's good to just pay attention to that kind of thing, because you probably are eating a lot more than you realize. Yeah, and you should be eating a lot of packaged food anyway. I'll just go ahead and say that.

So, Chuck. Yes? What kinds of salt are there? Well, first of all, I should say I love salt. I do, too. Salt and pepper are my favorite two spices. From the south, I have a taste for salt. And pork fat?

Yeah. That's pretty southern, too. Yeah, for sure. So I love salt. I like good Mediterranean sea salt. That's what I use at my house. And I'm going to plug this local saltier. I just made that word up.

Later in the show. OK. But I'm a big salt fan. I like salt, too. I like sweet. I like umami. I like sour. I'm training myself to like bitter

through the use of kampari. Yeah. Like I found out that I'm a bitter super taster. So like things that seem like normal to other people are like really bitter to me. Like grapefruit, kampari. Oh, that's bitter. Yeah, but it's like disgustingly bitter to me.

Like I can't understand how the rest of humanity eats grapefruit. I don't like grapefruit. Well, maybe you're a bitter super taster, too. You and me, buddy. But I have to tell you this. I've trained myself to like grapefruit and kampari just by exposure.

Like I've come to appreciate them more. Well, kampari, it's a bar. It's like a bitter de-justy for aperitif. OK. You do like a kampari and soda. It's an agroni. Right. Oh, I think I've seen people like if their stomach's upset,

or is that bitters and soda? Well, kampari is a type of bitters. OK. It's not that super compact bitters. Like angostura. Yeah. But it is a type of bitter. I think it's a digestive.

OK. It's good stuff. Anyway, I like salt. What I'm really saying there is I like well-seasoned food. And if you're a chef or a home chef, you know that salt is important to cooking. Super important. And baking, obviously.

But bland food can't do it. No. What's the point? What is the point? Agreed. Types of salt? Let's start with table salt. And look, man, if your doctor put you

on like a bland food diet, I feel for you. But there's stuff out there you can eat. There's spike. There's Mrs. Dash. You should be seasoning your food to some extent. Sure. Like bland food is like it's bland life. Yeah, they even have the imitation salt in new salt.

I didn't do any research on that. But I've bought it before. Do you like it? I didn't use it that much. But it exists in my home, next to the empty thing of Mediterranean sea salt. I got you. Yeah.

All right, so table salt's the first one we should cover. That's the traditional either iodized or non-iodized fine grained salt that you see in many, many homes and restaurants. And it's iodized. They did a little research into this. Did you look up iodized salt? Yeah, well, I mean, I know that they added it. Because at one point, it was sort of like fluoride.

They thought, well, we need this in a good place to put it in salt. Yeah, because most people use salt. And we'll just put it in the table salt because it's an easy additive. But there was a real problem with hyperthyroidism, things like goiters, mental retardation, just poor fetal development linked to iodine deficiency.

So they put it in salt. And apparently, it's considered to be responsible for this thing called the Flynn effect, which there was like a three IQ point rise in the middle of the 20th century in Western nations. And nobody could figure out what it is. And they think now that it was because they added iodine to salt. Really? And so it had the aggregate effect of raising

our IQ by preventing poor fetal development. Well, it's still a problem in other parts of the world, just not here in North America. Right. Other parts of the world that don't have iodized salt. You know how dumb they are. Oh, man. That was terrible.

I'm just kidding. You need to apologize to the rest of the world for that. I'm sorry, everybody. So like I said, table salt is the most common salt. They remove all the impurities. They have things in there to make it not clump and stick together. And so it pours freely.

So even when it rains, it pours. Well, should we get to that? Yeah, don't you have something on that? Yeah, I just, for some reason, thought of the Morton Salt Girl. And like every great advertising story, they were like, how do we? It was sort of a new thing at the time in 1911

to package salt this way in a container with a spout. How'd they package it before? I don't know. Big blocks, probably. Is that right? Like a deer lick or something? I'm not sure, actually. But I know that this was a fairly revolutionary product

to package it like this and process it like this. So the agency was NWA-er in company. And Don Draper walks in and says, I've got 12 proposals for you. Which one do you like? And Sterling Morton of the Morton Company, of course, it's always someone else like his son or his wife or something. It was his son and secretary pointed toward one of the ads

with a little girl holding the umbrella and said, this is the one. And he said, you know what? I think you guys are right. The whole story is right there in the picture because the whole point was this salt doesn't clump when it rains at pores. Right.

And real girls can't be trusted to be sent to the store by themselves because they ruin all the salt by keeping the nozzle open on the way home. Some of the different slogans they had was flows freely, runs freely, pores. It never rains but it pours. And then they finally settled on when it rains at pores. Yeah, that's the best one.

Because it never rains but it pours doesn't make any sense. They probably fired that person. And now she's been updated one, two, three, four, five times. Oh, really? Yeah, the last time in 1968, she's been the same since then. Yeah. And there was never a real model for that girl. That's a question they often get.

Totally made up. Yeah, because it's Morton's granddaughters, what you want to think. Selma. Selma Morton. So that is the story of the Morton. Erskine. That's an old-timey name if ever there was one.

Erskine? Yeah. That's a college, right? No, it's like a person's name, I think. Well, it's a college, too. Oh, OK. And a friend that played soccer there. Erskine.

E-R-S-K-I-N-E. There's a college named Colgate, too. It's like crazy to me. Sea salt, sir, is next. It's going to cost you some more money because of several reasons, one of which, if they go old school and in some parts of France, they still harvest this stuff by hand, which is pretty cool.

You might see it called fleur de sel, which is French for flour of salt. And it's not processed like table salt is. So you're going to have a lot of those trace minerals. It's going to be coarse and flaky. And it colors it, too. It can, for sure. Like you can have white sea salt, pink, black, gray,

or a combination of them. Pink salts are traditionally associated with Himalayan salt. Yeah. And the pink is often the result of things like copper or iron. Or apparently, there's a type that contains an algae, a salt-tolerant algae, which would make it an extremophile. That gives it, it has the beta-carotene pigment in it.

And that gives it a pinkish hue, that salt. Interesting. A pinkish hue? You're eating algae, pink algae, in your salt, which is pretty neat. That is pretty neat. And that's Hawaiian, right? A lot of times?

Hawaii has a different one, an aloea. Oh, I read that as algae. Yeah, I did, too, a couple of times. And I was like, why would they separate these two out? There's no G. No, it's that Hawaiian aloea salt has iron oxide in it from the volcanoes. Oh, that makes sense.

And Hawaii also produces black salt, too. From the lava? Yeah, and a little bit of charcoal. I'll have to try some of those, actually. And yeah, and then there's gray salts, too. Which is, there's selgree, which is from France. And then smoked salt is also gray, where they just take some salt and smoke it.

They put it over a smoky fire, and you have smoked salt. Do you like smoky foods? Sometimes. Yeah, yeah. It can be a little overbearing for me at times. Yeah, in the hands of, I guess, somebody who knows what they're doing with the smoked, it's good. I like a good smoked meat, little day type of thing,

but not necessarily when they'll add like artificial smoke in the kitchen to a meal. Right. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Although smoked cheese is good? Oh, yeah, man. Man, good smoked cheese.

Hey, and thanks to fan Hilary Lozar for sending us some great cheese. Yeah, that was very good of you. I had some of that smoked good yesterday, actually, when I got home. I haven't had yet. Is it good? Yeah, and as soon as I walked in the door, I got a knife out.

It's like, I got to try this stuff. Yeah, it's delicious. Anyway, thanks, Hilary. So chefs in gourmands will say sea salt is what you want to be using, because you're going to get a unique flavor from those minerals that are not in table salt. Sure.

I agree with them. It's tough to bake with, though. Yeah, it's tough to measure. You get a lot more precise measuring, for sure, from table salt. Right. And they don't recommend you bake with sea salt. No, because baking is a specific chemical reaction.

Cooking is different. Yeah, they say that most chefs don't cook with sea salt, but they will just add it as a topper. But I've cooked with sea salt, and I have no plenty of chefs that cook with sea salt. Yeah. So I disagree with that. Well, with a topper, they mean it's a finishing salt.

It brings out all the flavors if you sprinkle it on the top. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely used for that. But I've also seen it used in the food. Right, so well, that leads us to kosher salt. Apparently, some people like to cook with kosher salt. Yeah, for sure. And if you are using following a recipe and you're switching out whatever amount of salt

is called for, you want to double it, because kosher salt is larger coarse-grain salt. Yeah. And here, to me, is a fact of the podcast one of several. Kosher salt is not necessarily kosher itself. It's used to make things kosher. Oh, you didn't know that?

I didn't. I thought kosher salt was like salt that had been blessed by a rabbi or something. Really? Yeah. I never understood it, but now I do. It's salt they use to make things kosher. If you use table salt to make something kosher,

it's not going to work. Right. Kosher salt, because it's large and coarse-grained, makes meat kosher by drawing the blood out, because eating blood ain't kosher. Yeah. So if you salt it with kosher salt, it's going to draw the blood out of the meat.

And bam, you have a kosher cut of steak, baby. Boom. And it's not iodized either, by the way. And then we have the red-headed stepchild of the salt family, rock salt, which is used. It's got a lot of impurities. It's unrefined. It's very large-grained.

And it's used to melt ice on roads and sidewalks and to make homemade ice cream. Yeah. And probably some other stuff. But do you know of any other uses? I think rock salt's used in some chemical productions. That makes sense. Yeah.

If you want to make a good industrial brine, rock salt you're man. Yeah. All right, salt mining. That's how you get salt, because it is a natural thing that exists in the earth. The largest producer of salt these days, no surprise, is China.

In 2012, they produced about 65 million tons. The US is not too far behind it, 44 million. Then you've got Germany, India, and Australia as the other leading top five salt producers these days. Yeah. And India gets to profit from its salt production thanks to Gandhi. I guess so, huh?

Yeah. Oh, that's pretty neat. And think about that. The number four on the list, and they weren't even allowed to produce it, not so long ago. No, they were allowed to produce it, but all of the money went to, yeah. OK.

Jerks. So there's three types of mining, three main types. There's deep shaft mining, solar evaporation, and solution mining. And deep shaft mining is basically like any other type of mining, where you just drill a shaft down into a mine. Yeah, which an underground seabed

is where the salt is. Right, that's where you get your salt. Yeah, I think that's one of the facts of the podcast. Yeah. They're ancient underground seabed. Ancient seabeds that dried up, and the salt remained, and they form these basically salt deposits that can be dozens or hundreds of feet thick and massively wide.

And you drill down into these things, you create a couple of shafts, and then they usually use what's called a room and pillar system, which really helps. It's very difficult to explain, but if you see a picture of it, it makes perfect sense. Agreed. But you're basically creating a checkerboard pattern,

going down and mining the salt deposits. So you leave a deposit. Right. You blast a room, but you leave a couple of adjacent rooms for support. And then eventually, you've mined out all the salt, and then you fill it with industrial waste. Yeah.

That is one thing they do. So that's deep shaft mining. Yeah, and they'll remove the salt there and crush it and haul it to the service and further process it from there, depending on what kind of salts you want in the end. Right. And there's this awesome mine called the Wieliszka salt mine in Krakow, Poland.

And it has a full-on cathedral made out of salt. What? Amazing. And they have several chapels, but then a full cathedral. And it's all made out of salt in this old salt mine that's now a UNESCO site. And they went to the trouble of boiling salt. It was a table salt mine.

They would boil this raw salt and purify it, and then use that purified salt to make crystal chandeliers out of salt. Like the whole cathedral is just salt. It's amazing-looking. Man. Yeah, check it out. No goats allowed.

They would recap it. Or no chucks allowed. They just walk around like licking stuff. Right. They would ask you not to do that. A deep shaft mining, by the way, I think is usually rock salt is what they're producing there. Right.

And then there's solution mining. Yeah, that's basically they take a well over a salt bed and then inject water in there and make a brine and then pump it up from the underground as a wet solution and into a vacuum pan, which is going to seal it up and they're going to boil it and then evaporate it, which is how they made salt back in the old days, too. They would boil it and evaporate it and then scrape the pan.

Right. So it's kind of a modern version of that. Right. Then they dry it out and refine it. And then from there, they're going to either add anti-clumping agents or iodine, depending on what you want. And then with solution mining, you've

got like a salt bed or a salt dome that's exposed because it's somehow through tectonic action, an ancient sea bed or salt bed has been exposed to the above ground, like the surface of the earth. Right. And then what's the last one? Well, the old school solar method, solar evaporation. This is when you have a salt lake or seawater

and wind and the sun cooperate with the shallow pools and they leave salt behind. And you can only harvest it about once a year, once it reaches a certain level of harvestability, of thickness. And like we said, sometimes it's still done by hand even, although it is industrialized in other places for sure. But they wash it, they clean it, they drain it.

But they leave a lot of impurities in there. And this stuff is almost 100% pure sodium chloride. Got you. It's good stuff. And like I said, I use the Mediterranean generally, but Australia is big on it too, on this method. And we should probably mention also that salt has a lot of religious significance.

Oh yeah. It's just an ancient, important thing to mankind. Yeah, they would use it to seal important things. Yeah, in the Old Testament, which is pretty old. Sure. Lot's wife, I believe her name was Sarah. Was it Sarah or Ruth who was married to Lot, turned into a pillar of salt when she looked behind her,

even though God said, don't turn around. I'll turn you into a pillar of salt. Yeah, and she did. And apparently, there's a salt pillar at Mount Ararat that's called Lot's wife. People are like, that's her right there. And who is it? Buddhists that board off evil with salt?

Yes. Yumi has a little shaker of salt that her mom put in her glove compartment of her car. Oh, really? Yeah. Just to shake people with a flicker off on the highway. Just a protector? Yeah, that's nice.

See, I would have eaten it. Well, that's why I don't let you ride in Yumi's car. That's right. One of several reasons. Stay out of the glove box. You got anything else? I do. I have this good thing.

And there's a Roman senator named Cassiodorus. And he said, quote, mankind can live without gold, but not without salt. Who's that? Cassio keyboardist? Yeah. Well, you got Jerry again. Yeah, she's giggly today.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikulur, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life.

In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars. If you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends, and we dove in.

And let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And I have a plug, because here in Atlanta, there's a lady who makes salts. But if you go to Facebook and type in beautiful, briny

sea salt, and I go to her Facebook page and click on the about thing, you will see her lovely homemade handcrafted salts. And my favorite is the magic unicorn. See if this sounds good. Sea salt is, of course, the main ingredient. Smoked paprika, lemon, garlic, rosemary, and celery seed. But it does sound good.

It's delicious. You get some broccoli and some cauliflower, some like beets and big chunks of garlic. Throw it out the window and buy a steak and put this magical unicorn on it. Some olive oil, sprinkle it with this stuff, bake it in the oven. Delicious to go with that steak.

Magical unicorn. Yeah, magic unicorn is my favorite. And the black truffle salt is delicious. And then she has one called Campfire, which is smoked salt with cumin and ancho chili powder. And if you email info at beautifulbrinyseasalt.com, you can order some of this stuff. That is very nice of you.

And I told Emily, she's a friend of hers. I said, tell her I'm going to plug her, so she better get her little fingers working. You know? Nice. Start making some salt. Yeah. Because the stuff you should know, Army, is a salty crowd.

So if you want to learn more about salt, I don't know how you possibly could. But if you want to look into it, you can type the word S-A-L-T into the search bar, howstuffworks.com. And it will bring up this article, how salt works. And since I said search bar, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this, We Should Apologize to Cops.

What do we do now? Well, there's a cop road in it. Well, I'll just read it. Is it the police chases one? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they didn't like that one. Hey, guys.

My name is Glenn. I'm a police officer in Southern California. I've been enjoying the podcast for years. I suspect our political leanings may differ at times, but I always enjoy learning and listening to different points of view. I listened to the December 17th manhunt podcast. That's not the police chase one.

You're right. But I think it involves something like that. I felt it was very accurate, with the exception of some information you provided about the LAPD. We've bashed the LAPD before for their history of corruption. They have a pretty thick history of corruption. But they're not all bad ladies and men.

Well, no, of course not. You mentioned that officers were super jumpy during the manhunt for Christopher Dorner, which was a fair assessment. But here is where you got something kind of wrong. You stated that the LAPD fired on two uninvolved vehicles. It was the LAPD who shot at one in the Torrance Police Department who shot at the other.

You could see how someone not from the area might think they were LAPD, so it's not that big of a deal. OK. However, the bigger mistake is that you stated that these shootings killed two people. Nobody was killed. So I need to go back. I saw in several places that at least two people were killed.

Really? Yeah, accidentally from those shootings. I'll go back and look again. OK. But Glenn, Josh takes issue. Sir. Well, he's not the only one who's written in. I just haven't gotten around to going back and looking and

double-checking. But I mean, while we were researching, I came across that, and it wasn't like on a forum or message board or something. They were in articles. OK. Well, we'll get to the bottom of it. He was, Glenn says, I'm very surprised you would make

such a statement without doing your homework. I did my homework. You typically appear to go to great links to fact check. Sometimes I get the feeling you guys are not the biggest fans of law enforcement. I'm not naive and recognize my profession's shortcomings for sure. Just like you, though, I want facts influencing the show,

not personal opinions. This email was not intended to justify the actions of those two police departments, just to set the record straight. Understood. And despite the goof and the cop bashing, haha, I still love the show. That's from Glenn. And Glenn, I don't hate cops.

I love cops. We've done a lot of super supportive shows on law enforcement, I think. Sure. Chuck's like the law enforcement dude. But I don't like jerks. And I think a lot of times people's experience with cops are when they're pulled over and not being helped by a cop,

which is unfortunate. Sure. Because they do so much great work. But when you get pulled over and you're hassled by a jerk cop, you think, man, what a jerk cop. It's like eating at a bad restaurant. You know what I'm saying? Like, you go to a good restaurant, you tell one or two

people, you have a bad experience at a restaurant, you tell like 20 people. It's like 50 full with cops. Yeah, so we have a lot of respect for law enforcement, for sure, for all they do. So I hope it doesn't come across as any differently. Nice Chuck, very insightful too. Yeah, thanks Glenn.

Yeah, thank you Glenn. I'll go back and double check. If I'm wrong, I'll admit it. I just haven't had a chance to look again. We'll give them 20 licks. Off of a block of salt. From a goat. And I might die of hypernatremia.

Man, that wrapped it all up right there. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck to correct us, take issue with something we said whatever, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash W should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com. And as always, check us out at our cool home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by Lynda.com. Lynda.com offers thousands of engaging, easy to follow video tutorials taught by industry experts to help you learn software, creative, and business skills. Stuff starts at $25 a month and provides unlimited 24-7 access. Try Lynda.com free for seven days by visiting Lynda.com slash S-Y-S-K. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker

necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.