Earlier this year, I was in Dunedin, Florida for baseball spring training (as a spectator), when it was still okay to shop. I bought several types of sea salt from the Appalachian Mountains, including Parfume de Sel, sea salt flavoured with green peppercorns, cardamom, star anise, lavender, and rose petals.

When I reorganized my spice cupboard and put all the salt together in one place, there was quite a variety: sea salt from the Appalachians, the Mediterranean, and Brazil. Himalayan pink salt. Kosher salt from Sicily. Plain table salt.

The Appalachian sea salt comes from the ancient Iapetus Ocean, that was forced under the Appalachians during their geologic formation. (Incidentally, the route to Florida went through the Appalachians.) The region once had a flourishing salt industry, though “salt kings” made their fortunes on the forced labour of enslaved people. Nowadays, salt is a niche industry with a few artisanal producers. Briny water is evaporated in hothouses for several weeks, and then the salt is hand-raked and packaged.

I bought Himalayan pink salt at Costco. The label says it’s “from the heart of the Himalayan Mountains,” though the mine is actually in the Salt Range in Punjab, Pakistan, in the foothills of the Himalayas. The name may evoke images of windswept peaks and Sherpa guides, but those are in Nepal. Pakistan is in the process of trademarking pink salt with a plan to export less in rock form, refine and process more of it locally, and realize more of the profits at home.

Kosher salt is the preferred choice of many cooks and chefs, home and professional. It has large, coarse crystals that are slow-dissolving, ideal for drawing blood out of meat in the koshering process, hence the name. Kosher salt doesn’t have added iodine, which many claim imparts a metallic flavour.

Table salt does have added iodine, a practice that began nearly a century ago as a public health measure to prevent goiter, enlargement of the thyroid from iodine deficiency, and conversely, from iodine toxicity. Generally, people who live near a coast get enough daily iodine (150 micrograms). For everyone else, just under half a teaspoon per day of iodized salt, dried kelp, or dried dulse will do it.

I was curious to try dulse (a sea vegetable, aka seaweed), and bought some harvested in Grand Manan, New Brunswick. Dulse can be added while cooking or eaten straight out of the package, which is how I tried it. It’s like chewy tissue paper and tastes like the sea, salty with peaty overtones. It’s the closest I’ll get to the coast for some time, it seems.

Here’s to better days ahead in 2021!