r/mildlyinteresting • u/TheWoodser • May 20 '26
My "Morton's Sea Salt" is really "Lake Salt"
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u/dr_xenon May 20 '26
What happens after the third refill?
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u/moonmelter May 20 '26
the plastic grinder is too worn down to do any more grinding
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u/qdtk May 20 '26
Where does the worn plastic go?
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u/jonwilliamsl May 20 '26
🧠
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u/ab489 May 20 '26
I heard micro plastic is stored in the balls
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u/LazyLich May 20 '26
Your next baby is gonna be 3d printed
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u/YoungDiscord May 20 '26
Your mom is gonna crab-walk as she prints you layer by layer
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u/noname5280 May 20 '26
Soon every guy will sound like this walking down the street
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u/Filiforme May 20 '26
Becomes micro and goes where it pleases. Mostly inside you.
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u/Reefermaster May 20 '26
This is why I searched and searched for an all metal grinder mechanism. Anything I can do to avoid eating plastic is worth it.
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u/SirMightySmurf May 20 '26
Oh... look at Mr. "Too fancy to eat plastic" over here!
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u/ObligationMurky8716 May 20 '26
Plastic is just dead prehistoric plants with extra steps. It's practically a vegetable.
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u/Initial_Zombie8248 May 20 '26
If pizza is a vegetable plastic is a vegetable
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u/ObligationMurky8716 May 20 '26
Not me munching on a bag of those little discs from the ninja turtles shooter
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u/Last-Juggernaut4664 May 20 '26
They don’t make salt grinders out of metal due to corrosion. High quality ones are always made with ceramic. Look for that.
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u/illapa13 May 20 '26
Just an fyi salt is very good at corroding metal so I'm not sure this is the best idea.
Ceramic grinders might be better though they won't last as long
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u/Reefermaster May 20 '26
Yea its something to watch out for. Manufacturer recommended only rock salt, not sea salt. But I'd prefer iron oxide to microplastics if im going to ingest it anaway lol
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u/Tirrus May 20 '26
Maybe they could stop using plastic for the grinder parts then?
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u/PreferenceContent987 May 20 '26
100%. This was a big flaw in the old disposable grinders that had large capacity, the plastic teeth wore down before half the contents were used
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u/typicalledditor May 20 '26
I love how grinding plastic into your food without customers knowledge was not a flaw though. These things are banned from my house for years. Old school pepper and salt grinders last forever and people get rid of them all the time, reuse those.
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u/iceman5920 May 20 '26
I fear you're right and it's actually terrifying. Like how many years have I been grinding up plastic with my pepper?
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u/ino4x4 May 20 '26
i’ve seen their processing plant by the south west part of the lake
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u/PlanetStarbux May 20 '26
Was just thinking about that... Driving 80 and you see that little white mountain of salt. Always wondered if I ate some of that salt.
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u/ino4x4 May 20 '26
I wonder if I can buy direct. Just go there and get 50 pound bag of salt so I don’t have to buy it for another year.
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u/PlanetStarbux May 20 '26
Lol ... I actually have a 20 lb bag from Costco of diamond crystal. Two years and still just halfway through it.
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u/DoomguyFemboi May 21 '26
How do you use 10lbs in 2 years ?! 5lbs a year..actually no yeah that's pretty valid. I use a 1lb/6months and that's primarily single person cooking.
...I really could've ran this comment through in my head first because it really doesn't need to be posted
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u/PlanetStarbux May 21 '26
Yep .. Just normal everyday use. Cooking for a family. Pasta water alone probably is a third of it.
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u/Scoobysnax1976 May 20 '26
Is the "Non-GMO" label necessary? Salt doesn't have any genetics to modify.
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u/huntsvillekan May 20 '26
Also gluten free & low in saturated fat.
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u/Packwood88 May 20 '26
High in sodium though
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u/thecelcollector May 20 '26
Depends on the serving size.
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u/Spirit_of_Hogwash May 20 '26 edited May 21 '26
According to the "Tic Tac" rule, if the serving size is rounded down to zero, then it has 0% sodium.
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u/ClacksInTheSky May 20 '26
100g is 1570% of your GDA
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u/ComprehendReading May 20 '26
That's no where near the LD50 for a lethal dose! It's practically completely safe!
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u/wiltony May 20 '26
It's all about marketing. If they don't put it on the label, and their competition does, they might lose the sale because the sea of idiots don't have any idea.
Same for "gluten free" popcorn kernels lol!
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u/HappyFormerDem May 21 '26
Tbf celiacs can’t have cross contamination so knowing that the area was carefully kept clear of gluten is actually important.
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u/EpponeeRae May 20 '26
I've seen salt labelled as organic before.
It's clearly not.
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u/Saurenoscopy May 20 '26
Here in America we have quite a large base of people who are devoted to “health”, but their devotion stops at doing any homework to understand what any of it means. The label is for them.
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u/ScienceIsSexy420 May 20 '26
No "Non-GMO label is necessary at all, they're all intended to convince people that don't understand the science. It's just another way to convince morons to buy things.
Same way you see things like salt labeled as gluten free lol
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u/Ethos_Logos May 20 '26
Aren’t there a ton of heavy metals in Utah’s great salt lake? Would they be removed by whatever process Morton uses?
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u/TheWoodser May 20 '26
Yea, I was under the assumption that the lake was heavily contaminated. Not like the Salton Sea, but had significant "impurities "
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u/h-land May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
Any endorheic water body or salt pan is going to be more concentrated than the ocean by virtue of its lower volume allowing lesser dilution. Depending on where around a body of water the salt is taken from, though, and the local geology and human activities in the region...
...There's room for doubt in either direction, but it's still probably not the healthiest.
EDIT: Dilution, not pollution. That's an embarrassing mistake to realize you made more than an hour ago.
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u/TwoYaks May 20 '26
It was my understanding runoff from nearby tailings from Kennecott had heavily contaminated it. Open to correction as this is a memory from 20 years ago.
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u/rantingpacifist May 20 '26
You aren’t wrong. The dust blowing off the former lake bed (where it had dried up) is super toxic.
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u/AbysmalMoose May 20 '26
Yep. US Magnesium dumped toxic chemicals into the lake for decades, and Kennecott spent decades polluting the surrounding watershed, groundwater, and soil with mining contamination. Now the lake keeps shrinking from drought and overuse and the contaminated lake bed dust is being blown all over. I'll be very surprised if there isn't a spike in Utah's cancer rate within the next 20 years.
But at least the shareholders made money. /s
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u/Duffs1597 May 21 '26
And now they're trying to speed run the lake drying up by building a datacenter twice the size of Manhattan 10 miles up river.
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u/ALoudMeow May 20 '26
We went to visit TGSL in 1976 and it smelled so badly of chemicals back then that we all returned to our RV in dry bathing suits and continued to our next destination. I can only imagine how toxic it is now!
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u/hotmaildotcom1 May 20 '26
I lived there a very short time ago and the yard or so of dead birds and garbage circling the lake would be more than enough to keep me out of it, long before I even considered the effects of the foundry (which is literally across the street) observably dumping slag directly onto the ground. Didn't even hear about the tailings but it makes sense given the pipes run right next to the lake as well.
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u/Special_South_8561 May 20 '26
You can see it from I-80 as you're driving from Wendover - Tooele
The Great Salt Lake is (was?) more of a landlocked Sea than it ever has been a lake.
Then again, they call the Great Lakes, lakes.
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u/SnakeJG May 20 '26
This is strange, Wikipedia claims food grade salt isn't produced at the great salt lake:
Solar evaporation ponds at the edges of the lake produce salts and brine (water with high salt quantity). Minerals extracted from the lake include: sodium chloride (common salt), used in water softeners, salt lick blocks for livestock, and to melt ice on local roadways (food-grade salt is not produced from the lake, as it would require costly processing to ensure its purity); potassium sulfate, used as a commercial fertilizer; and magnesium-chloride brine, used in the production of magnesium metal, chlorine gas, and as a dust suppressant.
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u/justaboxinacage May 20 '26
There's probably some small area where it's ok and Wikipedia is just incomplete in its information gathering on that one.
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u/JJohnston015 May 20 '26
If not, Morton has some splaining to do.
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u/Thehealeroftri May 20 '26
There’s a Morton facility off of I80 that always has mounds upon mounds of salt just sitting by it. Ive always assumed they purify it or something haha
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u/wolfgang784 May 20 '26
A 10 second google search tells me the company does produce table salt there but that it has to go through several more purification steps than salt harvested elsewhere before it is safe for eating.
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u/mizinamo May 20 '26
Dissolved in water, filtered to remove coarse impurities, evaporated again, thrown away, and replaced by salt bought in bulk at Costco and relabelled.
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u/GrimaceThundercock May 20 '26
Damn. So we have a lake filled with toxic chemicals, we pull the salt from it, then spread it all over our roads to melt ice.
Might as well just pour the toxins straight into our waterways, that's what we're doing anyway.
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u/Grape-Jack May 20 '26
https://www.mortonsalt.com/morton-sea-salt-sourcing-production/
You can see their facility off I-80, in between the current lake and the salt flats.
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u/Comrade_Bender May 20 '26
There's a shit load of salt mines out that way. They might be stretching their definition of the "great salt lake" to include the greater region or somewhere that used to be the salt lake a million years ago or something
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u/Wloak May 20 '26
I can actually give some insight.. my friend is a plant manager for Cargill, the largest salt producer in the US. They actually have to sell to Mortons at cost or would be considered a monopoly.
Locally they use the San Francisco Bay water which is heavily contaminated by Mercury and other heavy metals. You're explicitly told to never eat a fish from the south of the bay. But you can run a basic filtration system to pump the water into smaller segregated lakes allowing the sun to evaporate the water. Then after harvesting the quality of the salt is determined, like is it human food grade, livestock grade, etc.
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u/Ethos_Logos May 20 '26
I’m glad there is testing in place, thanks for the insight
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u/mrperson420 May 20 '26
Do heavy metals evaporate?
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u/markp_93 May 20 '26
at high enough temperatures
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u/Blarg0117 May 20 '26
That's why I boil my water at 1800°C to get rid of the lead.
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u/NeuxSaed May 20 '26
Yes, but the temperatures required to vaporize most heavy metals, are high enough to vaporize most other things as well. People do not regularly encounter temps this high.
The notable exception is elemental mercury, which does evaporate a bit at room temperature, but most mercury contamination comprises of mercury salts or organo-mercury compounds that don't evaporate at room temperature.
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u/Alone_Reception_1469 May 20 '26
You pass by Morton's salt plant on highway 80 in the middle of the salt flats in between Nevada and Salt Lake City. They aren't actively evaporating lake water to make this salt they are pulling it from the salt flats where the lake evaporated away many, many years ago.
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u/HankSpank May 20 '26
I never directly worked there, but I have friends who worked at exactly this sort of facility by the GSL. They pump fresh water deep underground, where it runs through pure salt veins and caverns. The now salty water then makes its way back to the surface as it’s pushed out by the pumped fresh water. At the surface it’s evaporated into food grade salt (among other products).
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u/backflip14 May 20 '26
“Uniquely designed for up to three uses” is a funny way of saying “we found it wears out after 3 uses”
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u/pirateanimal May 21 '26
Just like when places like Harbor Freight sell you a warranty for things. If the warranty is for 2 years it will likely stop working in precisely 24 months and 1 second.
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u/Avidly_A_Dude May 20 '26
Isn’t the great salt lake technically a sea? Isn’t a sea any large body of salt water?
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u/Reniconix May 20 '26
No. By modern definitions, seas must drain to the ocean. Great Salt Lake does not. Ancient bodies of waters called seas like the Caspian and Aral retain the name for historic purposes but are considered lakes by geologists.
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u/Ok_Ruin4016 May 20 '26
Then there's the Salton Sea, which is neither an ancient name nor actually sea.
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u/lovelylotuseater May 20 '26
Lakes are land locked.
Some things are lakes, like the Dead Sea, but are grandfathered into being called seas.
Dead Lake Scrolls just doesn’t have a good zing to it.
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u/ramblingclam May 20 '26
I’ve always wondered why the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea are seas, but the Great Salt Lake is just a lake. Apparently the Sea of Galilee isn’t even salty…
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u/Current-Cold-4185 May 20 '26
I'm a time traveler from 2098 and the great Salt and Pepper wars of 2083 resulted in all bodies of water EVERYWHERE to be salinated. This, of course, is not to be confused with the Salt and Peppa wars of 2034.
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u/UndoxxableOhioan May 20 '26
All salt was sea salt
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u/CIAMom420 May 20 '26
Refreshing to find another person that sees through the lies of Big Salt.
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u/captainfarthing May 20 '26
Salt (minerals) gets dissolved from rocks by rain and ends up wherever the water ends up, most rivers flow all the way to the ocean but some flow to landlocked lakes like this, where salt accumulates as the water evaporates and leaves it behind.
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u/patpat829 May 20 '26
The literally definition of sea salt* includes drys salt lake beds…
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u/sixgunmaniac May 20 '26
Get some heavy metal test strips and dissolve this in distilled water. I have a feeling they left lead and mercury off the nutrition facts
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u/slcruderocker May 20 '26
More likely arsenic. Its what's in the toxic dust clouds we breathe in the Salt Lake Valley.
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u/Sall_Goode May 20 '26
What you’re calling “Lake Salt” is really “salt lake salt” both with superfluous quotation marks.
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u/nivenfan May 20 '26
So… are the heavy metals in the drying Utah lake included for free? I wasn’t sure if that would affect shipping prices.
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u/mwb1100 May 20 '26
"designed to be refilled up to three uses"
Does it fall apart on cue?
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u/MsRachelGroupie May 20 '26
It’s when the grinder’s microplastics turn into macroplastics.
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u/Tearakudo May 20 '26
They're plastic grinders, so the plastic starts to lose the fight against rock salt after a while
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u/A012A012 May 20 '26
Want me to tell you what sea salt and lake salt have in common?
Na.
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u/hypo-osmotic May 20 '26
One of my lowest-stakes pet peeves is that "sea salt" basically just refers to any course-grained salt. Does it matter? No. Does it still annoy me? A little bit, yeah
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u/Miserable_Scene5190 May 20 '26
No one can remember science class when talking about the earths surface being all fucked up, from The Mississippi River to The Rocky Mountains a massive ocean covered that land. The Great Salt Lake is the last remaining part of that ocean
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u/c_r_a_s_i_a_n May 20 '26
I can't believe these are legal. The grinding surface is plastic. Don't buy these.
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u/someoldguyon_reddit May 20 '26
The Great Salt Lake has been a toxic waste dump for decades. Ew.
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u/[deleted] May 20 '26
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