Fit Fare

So remember your high school chemistry class, where you learned that salt is a crystal, an item on the periodic table of elements and square? Yeah, forget all that. Two scientists from India have done what sounds impossible. By adding glycine to a brine solution, they’ve created round salt molecules. Several more learned folks can explain the science to you, because that isn’t my strong suit.

This raises a lot of questions for me, most of which I’m unable to answer. First, why bother? Well, turns out that industries that use a lot of salt, such as the textile industry, have problems with salt caking. Because salt crystals have 6 sides, they tend to stack up and that stacking causes clumps. So in industry that clumping is an expensive, and that answers the why. Next, does this change the basic chemical structure of salt? And amino acids are proteins. So does that make the new salt a no-no for vegetarians? I don’t know.

Not to worry, however, the new salt won’t be on the market for at least ten years. I have a handful of other links to check out for more info; Food Production Daily and Newsweek too.