Sea salt - Shorts

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  August-Sept, 2002  by Jule Klotter

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In a salt marsh in Portugal's national park Ria Formosa, sea salt is collected manually from small clay-bottomed pans. Using a centuries-old practice, marenotos (salt gatherers) use gravity and gates to control the flow of seawater into channels that flow to progressively smaller and shallower salt pans. There, the sea water evaporates, dried by sun and wind. Each day, marenotos skim sweet, creamy salt crystals, called fleur de sel, from the water surface before the crystals sink to the bottom (fleur de sel comes from France's Brittany coast). These delicate crystals are sold to gourmet shops throughout the world. Every five to seven weeks, marenotos harvest salt from the pans and sift out any pebbles and twigs to ready it for packaging. Unlike manually-collected salt, sea salt harvested by machine must be washed to remove any contaminants left by the machinery. The washing removes some of the minerals and nutrients as wall, nutrients that remain in manually-harvested sea salt.

Amazingly, the pure, manually-harvested sea salt, which is sold by the Portuguese company Necton, is not considered suitable for human consumption according to salt standards set by the Portuguese government in 1973. The highest class of salt, according to these standards, is pure sodium chloride used in industry and as table salt. Iodine, fluoride, and anti-caking agents such as potassium cyanide and aluminum silicate may be legally added to sodium chloride for table salt. The second class of salt is 96% sodium chloride, and the third, "legally speaking, fit only for dumping on roads...to prevent freezing" (Corby Kummer, The Atlantic Monthly), contains less than 96% sodium chloride. Hand-harvested, sun-dried sea salt, rich in minerals, falls into the third class. Traditional salt producers have asked the Portuguese government to exempt sea salt and fleur de sel from the third class category.

In the meantime, Necton is selling most of its salt to the French sea salt cooperative Gierande, which repackages the Portuguese salt and sells it as its own. Necton sells its fleur de sel overseas under its own name; Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, Michigan, (www.zingermans.com), carries it, according to Corby Kummer's article. The traditional salt harvesters of Portugal's Algarve have obtained certification from Nature et Progres, a French group that has deemed the Portuguese unrefined sea salt free of many possible contaminants.

Kummer, Corby. The Cream of the Salt Pan. The Atlantic Monthly 2002 March; pp 100-102

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