Off-brand salt.

From now on, I am never buying off-brand salt again, only Morton’s.

The generic grocery-store brand salt that I got this summer at the local supermarket chain started off good enough, but its metal-tab top really didn’t seal tight like it was supposed to, so the salt inside absorbed a lot of water and got all clumpy and wouldn’t pour out when you needed it to, and on top of that you could see that it had so much water that it was actually leaking into the cylindrical cardboard container and warping and discoloring it, with even a little bleeding out into the wrapped-paper wrapper.

Finally one day when I was cooking and needed salt, I ended up just pulling out scissors and cut open the top of that old salt container, so I could spoon out what I needed, and after that I just sat it out on the counter so I could grab salt from it when needed, like to salt my tomatoes and cucumbers that I get at the farmers market when I cut them up for a salad with oil and vinegar and whatnot.

Over the course of a few days, however, that exposure did something, and it’s like the salt began materializing on the exterior of the cardboard carton, and now it’s all dry and crusty like some old arid salt-flat out in Utah.