Suffering under the spell of salt

Suffering under the spell of salt

Here’s another thought experiment: You are cooking dinner for yourself, and the recipe calls for a small amount of salt. You reach into your cabinet, but you have a tough decision to make. Should you use the iodized table salt or the more expensive sea salt?

Rest easy, friends. It does not matter which one you choose. In chemistry, names are unique to the compounds they describe. That means that no name denotes more than one specific chemical. In fact, the reverse often happens. Some compounds have more than one possible arrangement of their constituent atoms, with a different name for each possible arrangement. This carries over into food, too. The product we know as “salt” has a strict definition: the chemical named sodium chloride.

One common misconception is that since sea salt is manufactured differently than table salt, they must be different products. However, sea salt is still salt and still sodium chloride. The process of production and the origin of the salt have absolutely no effect on the end product: salt is salt, whether it was ground out of rock or dried out of seawater. The biggest difference between the available varieties of salt is the shape of the crystals, which can affect how easily salt is dissolved into your food. However, the food will still taste the same, because the chemical used is still the same.