Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Salt Works

Episode Date: November 16, 2019

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 classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the Backyard Guest House over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. 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 I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everybody. Charles W. Chuck Bryant here on a lovely Saturday morning in Atlanta, Georgia. We're going back in time to February 18, 2014 to talk about salt. Our episode How Salt Works is one of my all time favorites. I love salt because I'm from the South. Probably like it a little too much. You ask my doctor, but that salty, salty goodness on food just makes it all pop for me. But it has a really cool interesting backstory, how you get salt, a harvest salt, and how salt works on food. Learn all about it right now.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. Oh yeah, Jerry's over there. She's all happy 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. This is the one I didn't look up. Yeah, because you're in a salty mood. Yeah. I've said that plenty. I don't know if that comes from like a salty dog. 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. 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 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, sal d'are means to give salt. Salad too, the word salad comes from the word salt. Really? Yeah. So salt is a, it's an important thing, historically speaking. There's been economies largely based on salt. There've been

cultures rated 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. 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,

you can't do that, mate. You can't mine your own salt? Right. But he did because he was Gandhi. It was called the Salt March to Dondee. By Gandhi. By 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. 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. Yeah. Unfortunately. I got some stuff on that later, but it was used as a currency in Ethiopia up until the 20th century and 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. 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. 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. 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 going to 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. Massachusetts Bay Colony had the first patent to produce salt here in the colonies, 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. 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 what not.

And now yuppies walk along those trails. Jog. Yuppies. Are they still yuppies? Oh, yeah. Dinks. Yeah. Or 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. 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 won 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. Yeah. 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... Well, 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. I'm going to eat a couple eggs. I'm going to have cravings like that though. You don't. No. 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, 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. Yes, 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. Sodium chloride is about a 60-40 mix sodium to chloride, by the way. Is that right? Yeah. Nice. It makes little cubes, right? Yeah. 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. Like 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 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. 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 tastes salty. You don't want to water your cropland with it though. No, no, no. 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 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 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 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. Yeah. If you want to kill yourself in China, here's how you do it. Yeah. Here's how much salt you need. I don't know, but that was rough. Is you like that? Yeah. I'm off today. No, you're not. I'm a little off. You are on. My microphone just swerved to the left. That's never happened. There's a ghost in here. Yeah. Yeah. 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 because it 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 like, 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 heart beat 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. Hey, everybody. When you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So, I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia, who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse in the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So, yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb, too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. 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 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? 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. 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 no cutting your sodium intake doesn't decrease your risk of heart attack or stroke. And as a matter of fact, there is... What is 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.

Okay, so try to keep it between 3,000 and 4,000 milligrams. 3,000 and 7,000. 7,000 milligrams. 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, it's 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 1440 milligrams. A Big Mac, I think, was around 1100. Wow. Quarter pounders more? With the bacon, I think. Oh. They have like 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. At any rate, just give it a look, like soups or

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. 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. I'm 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 salty A. I just made that word up. Oh. Later in the show. Okay. 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 Campari. Yeah. Like I found out that I'm a bitter super taster. Yeah. So, like things that seem like normal to other people are like really bitter to me. Like grapefruit. Do you have one example? Grapefruit, Campari. Oh, that's bitter. Yeah. But it's like 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 um grapefruit and Campari just by exposure. Like I've come to appreciate them more. Well, it's Campari. It's a bar uh it's like a bitter uh digesty for aperitif. Okay. You do like a Campari in soda. It's an agroni. Right. Oh, I think I've seen people like if their stomach's upset or is that bitters in soda? Well, Campari is a type of bitters. Okay. It's not that super compact bitters like Angostura. Yeah. But it is a type of bitter. I think it's a digestive. Okay. 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. There's you should be seasoning your food to some extent. Sure. Like bland food is like it's a 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 in 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 and a good place to put it is 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. Huh. Yeah. 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 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, it pours. Right. And little 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, pours. It never rains, but it pours. And then they finally settled on when it rains, it pours. Yeah, that's the best one. Because it never rains, but it pours doesn't make any sense. They probably fired that person. And she's been updated one, two, three, four, five times. Oh, really? Yeah, the last time in 1968 and 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. She's totally made up. Yeah, because you was like, it's Morton's granddaughter is what, you know, you want to think. Selma. Selma Morton. So that is the story of the 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, okay. Had a friend that played soccer there. Erskine. ERSKINE. 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 the stuff by hand, which is pretty cool. You might see it called fleur de sel, which is French for flower 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. 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 at salt. Interesting. So 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 in Alalea. 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 Alaya salt has iron oxide in it from the volcanoes. Oh, that makes sense. And Hawaii also produces

black salt too. From the lava? Yeah, in 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 cell gris, which is from France. And then smoked salt is also gray, where they just take some salt and smoke it. Yeah. 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, you know, I guess somebody who knows what they're doing with the smoked, it's good. I like a good smoked meat, well, day type of thing, but not necessarily like, you know, when they'll add like artificial smoke in the kitchen to a meal. Right. No, I'm saying. Yeah. Although smoked cheese is good.

Oh yeah, man. Good smoked. 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 it yet. Is it good? I mean, as soon as I walked in the door, I got a knife out. Yeah. It's like, I got to try this stuff. Yeah, it's delicious. Yeah. Anyway, thanks Hilary. Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah,

you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. 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 friends vapor 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. So chefs and 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 know plenty of chefs that cook with sea salt. Yeah. So I disagree with that. Well, with a topper, they mean like it's a finishing salt. It brings out like 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 the 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 in coarse grain 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. Right. By the way. And then we have the redheaded 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 your man. Yeah. 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 at 44 million. Then you've got Germany, India, and Australia as the other leading top five salt producers these days. Yeah. And India gets the profit from its salt production thanks to Gandhi. I guess so, huh? Yeah. Oh, that's pretty neat. And think about that. They're number four on the list. Yeah. And they weren't even allowed to produce it not so long ago. No, they were allowed to produce it, but all the money went to, yeah. Okay. Chirics. 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. 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. Like blasting out a room. Right. You blast a room, but you leave a couple of adjacent rooms for support. Right. And then eventually, you've mined out all the salt, and then you fill it with industrial waste. 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 surface and further process it from there, depending on what kind of salt 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. They have several like chapels, but then a full cathedral. And it's all made out of salt. It's 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. Shut up. Like the whole cathedral is just salt. It's amazing looking. Man. Yeah. Check it out. No goats allowed. No, they would wreak havoc. Or no chucks allowed. I 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, you know, how they made salt back in the old days too. They would, you know, 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 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, you know, they wash it, they clean it, they drain it, but they leave the, a lot of impurities in there and this stuff is almost 100% pure sodium chloride. Gotcha. It's good stuff. And like I said, I use the Mediterranean version 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, that's true. It's just an ancient, important thing to mankind. Yeah, they would like 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 Buddhist 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 if they flicker off on the highway. Just a protector. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah. See, I would have eaten it. That's why I don't let you ride 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. Wow. Who is that? Cassio keyboardist? Yeah. Well, you got Jerry again. Yeah, she's giggly today. 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, 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. Well, 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. Nice. You know? 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. Nice. And if you email info at beautiful briny sea salt dot 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 at 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, this cop wrote in and 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. Listen 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 Doerner, which was a fair assessment, but here's 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. I could see how someone not from the area might think they were LAPD, so it's not that big of a deal. Okay. 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. Okay. 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. Okay. 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. And 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 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? 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. So we have a lot of respect for law enforcement for sure, for all they do. So I hope that doesn't come across as any differently. Nice Chuck. Very insightful, too. 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 SYSK podcast. You can join us on facebook.com. You should know. You can send us an email

to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, hang out with us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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 iHeartRadio 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, yeah, 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 podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.