Oh Horrors! There’s Plastic in Our Salt!

Oh, woe is me.

Nothing is sacred.

Of all the rituals in one’s life, can you think of another more significant, more central, that goes further back in your life than that of sprinkling salt on your breakfast eggs…your luncheon salad…your suppertime meat and mashed potatoes?

Ain’t none. (Well, in my case, maybe slathering on butter…but I wouldn’t swear to that.)

Here’s a word you’ve likely come to know…interesting word…microplastics.

It’s one of those put-together words that gives you information…and in its case, the more you hear it, the more you wince.

Micro, of course, means very little=extremely small. Microscopic.

Microplastics—twenty-first-century word—are plastics broken down into itty bitty teeny tiny pieces.

I’m going to spare you the sickening statistics about how much plastic has been dumped worldwide into our glorious oceans, lakes, streams, and springs. You don’t want to know. Nor how used plastic bottles and bags are strewn across the byways of this world.

I remember being on a bus in India riding from here to there, and I finally had to stop looking out the window to spare myself the sight of hillocks of plastic knee-deep.

I find myself wondering whether our children—our children’s children—will find a way to grab this tiger by the tail, halt it from damaging the planet and us. I damn well hope so.

Sure for some time I’ve known about plastic…haven’t stored food in plastic containers…have used paper and cloth bags for produce and such at the market.

But until a few days ago when my inbox had a letter not asking for a campaign donation but curiously a newsletter that included the fact that I had PLASTIC IN MY SALT!–plastic in my revered Maldon salt flakes from England’s Blackwater Estuary River!–I had no idea. It was a blow.

And then today researching the subject I discovered I haven’t been paying attention. In 2018, Greenpeace International reported, “Over 90% of sampled salt brands globally found to contain microplastics.”* That was seven years ago! Where have I been?

So what’s to do?

Searching online for microplastic-free salt, I found a few. One was fine-milled from Turkey—Natural Spring Salt with “Microplastic-free” printed on the label. I sent for it (Amazon) and it’s lovely—although I am used to the flake size of Maldon’s. Sniffle.

Other salts that promise to be microplastic free are Spring Salt, a coarse kosher salt from Peru. And Brazen Peruvian Pink Salt. MAYİ Natural Spring Fine Ground Salt is rather magical—its source is the ancient Tethys Sea in Anatolia (now Turkey). And there’s Vera Salt Sourced from an ancient spring in Spain.

So in the exchange, we’ll be enjoying a condiment with romantic beginnings from far away.

Not so terrible after all.

And I will try to give a bit more to The World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy and see what we can do to support Oceana, The Ocean Cleanup, Plastic Soup Foundation, Beyond Plastics, and Alliance to End Plastic Waste.

You, too?

* https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/18975/over-90-of-sampled-salt-brands-globally-found-to-contain-microplastics, June 6, 2025