Salt is About Living Connections

No one knows salt like Mark Bitterman. He has traveled the globe for 25 years seeking salts worthy of your food. Mark is a world-renowned speaker and James Beard Award winning author of Salted: A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, and the world’s first ‘selmelier’. A selmelier is to salt what the sommelier is to wine, providing information and expertise that helps diners and chefs get the best possible results from their food. Mark has been recognized as a Local Food Hero by Cooking Light and a Tastemaker in Food & Wine. He has been featured in The New York Times, The Splendid Table, Bizarre Foods, ABC News, CNN, the History Channel, among others. A leading expert on finishing salt, Mark has clientele from top chefs to food manufacturers to home cooks. Mark leads salt-inspired dinners at many celebrated restaurants and lectures at culinary schools such as the French Culinary Institute, the Institute of Culinary Education, and Le Cordon Bleu. When I first came to be part of Grenadine Sea Salt, it was Mark’s writings that taught me much of what I needed to know about craft salt; I often quote him on this blog and our social media feeds.

Inspired by our story here in the Grenadines and a big fan of our salt, Mark approached us last summer regarding a project-specific partnership with his shop The Meadow; his first! We bonded around a shared set of values with our businesses: maintaining the highest quality, creating beauty, spreading joy, connecting with our communities, and taking action. This is what he had to say about The Grenadine Sea Salt experience:

“Stepping off the plane, smells of nutmeg, cinnamon, mango, coconut and coffee will fill your nose--all things farmed locally around the islands. Buried within the lush jungle you will find a small salt farm, run out of a restored 17th century mill previously used for producing sugar, indigo, arrowroot, and cassava. Grenadine Sea Salt was founded by Jerry Simpson.  Like so many modern comers to the ancient trades, Jerry is a renaissance man--chef, film director, inventor, and artist. After falling in love with the island and culture of Bequia he moved there full time to fully commit himself to the creation of unique and sustainable salt blends”.

This was the deal—we send him several pounds of our Original ‘Truly Wild’ Sea Salt, we specify a social cause that we’d like to support, he packages our salt under the Bitterman brand extolling its virtues, we both promote the heck out of it, and 50% of the proceeds go to our chosen not-for-profit organization. We were thrilled and honored to be chosen for this venture. Mark describes his inspiration for the project here, exquisitely expressing our shared passions about the magical nature of salt:

“Salt brings out flavors, harmonizes them, and shows food in its true light. In this way, it reveals to us the true nature of the world around us. And through every meal thus animated, salt connects more energetically to one another. At an atomic level, at an animal level, at a human level, salt is about living connections. In this saline spirit we’re celebrating our connection with Grenadine Sea Salt with a special invitation to discover their gregarious and happiness-filled salt.”  --Mark Bitterman

We chose Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York as the non-profit organization to receive the proceeds of this collaborative effort. Soul Fire Farm is a community farm committed to ending racism and injustice in the food system. In Grafton, New York, they raise and distribute food as a means to end food entrenched inequities in the food system and reclaim the fundamental human right to belong to the earth and to have agency in the food system. The BIPOC centered organization (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) brings diverse communities together to share skills on sustainable agriculture, natural building, spiritual activism, health, and environmental justice. They are also training the next generation of activist-farmers and strengthening the movements for food sovereignty and community self-determination.

Leah Penniman, co-founder of Soul Fire Farm wrote a mindblowing article in the June 2020 issue of Food and Wine Magazine entitled How to Grow Change Through Black-Led Agriculture , where it’s revealed that just 2% of land-owning American farmers are Black, down from 14% in 1920. The article sheds light on some of the reasons why this is the case. More recently they’re featured in a wonderful interactive piece in the New York Times  entitled Magic in the Dirt by cookbook author Julia Turshen. It’s been a wonderful opportunity to become aware of these injustices through the many articles on their website here.

Please share in the joy of Mark’s and our shared sense of purpose by contributing to our cause and order some love on The Meadow’s shop product page,

Thank you. We’ll sign off with this summary of the experience by Mr. Bitterman:

“And so, wow! How like little ions in the great oceans are we all! Flitting through each of our everyday lives, yet intimately interconnected with the world around us. Waiting for a moment of spontaneous and irresistible excitement to bond us all together more closely. The Grenadine Islands in the cobalt Caribbean sea. Green-waving fields of upstate New York. A little shop in Portland, Oregon. And all of us touched by one another. “  --Mark Bitterman