8 ms·

One class of items not listed here, which I'd recently started to think might be less-than-optimal: pepper sold in jars with built-in, plastic, grinders. I'd

One class of items not listed here, which I'd recently started to think might be less-than-optimal: pepper sold in jars with built-in, plastic, grinders. I'd long since noted that as the jar emptied the grinders were increasingly ineffective. Thinking on why that might be ... I realised that this was because as you grind the pepper, you're also grinding plastic directly into your food. There's surprisingly little discussion about this that I can find, though this 5 y.o. Stackexchange question addresses the concern: <https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/103003/microplastics-from-plastic-pepper-grinders https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/103003/microplas...> Seems to me that plastic grinders, whether disposable or sold as (apparently) durable products, are a class of products which simply shouldn't exist. Searching, e.g., Walmart for "plastic grinders" turns up five listings presently, though it's not clear whether it's the body or the grinder itself which is plastic. In several cases it seems to be the latter. <https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/plastic-grinders https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/plastic-grinders> (Archive of current state: <https://archive.is/yIIX4 https://archive.is/yIIX4>

williamdclt 1y ago
The grinder itself is almost certainly always plastic in these. Even in refillable grinders, in the low-medium range the burr is often plastic
- dredmorbius 1y ago
  It's (thankfully) still possible to buy all-metal grinders, ensuring one a reliable source of dietary steel. Krell or otherwise.
- jcattle 1y ago
  Is it? I always thought the cheap ones were ceramic. Or is ceramic also somehow a type of plastic?
  - williamdclt 1y ago
    Ceramic are also a thing, but plastic burrs do exist afaik (don’t know which is more common). Plastic < ceramic < metal
agotterer 1y ago
Thanks, I hadn’t considered the plastic on the pepper grinder. Guess I’ll be looking for a new pepper grinder as I continue my pursuit of removing plastic and dangerous chemicals from the kitchen. So far the pans, tupperware, and cooking utensils have all been replaced. While not food, another not so frequently talked about plastic exposure could be clothing dryer vents pushing materials from synthetic clothing into the air. It’s likely less of a problem than the rubber tires on our cars making their way into the air. But it was something that occurred to me while cleaning out the dryer vent this past weekend.
- hedora 1y ago
  I’m definitely buying natural fiber clothing moving forward for this reason. However, I wonder how bad eating bits of the plastic burr grinder actually is. Presumably, they mostly pass through. Stomach acid probably leaches a bunch of stuff, but is it worse than (say) canned tomatoes that were sitting in a plastic liner for a year? I’d wager the grinder bits have a lot of surface area from scarring. That’d increase leaching. Anyway, I strongly recommend small turkish-style grinders: https://bazaaranatolia.com/products/turkish-grinder-pepper-mill https://bazaaranatolia.com/products/turkish-grinder-pepper-m... (No idea if this brand is decent; the form factor is great, especially for $14) It has roughly a single-recipe capacity, so I stick crushed red pepper flakes, cumin seed, celery seed, black pepper kernels, etc in it per the recipe, then grind until it is empty. The burr on the one I linked is metal. I’d probably prefer stainless body + whatever is commonly used for espresso grinders, assuming such a gadget exists.
  - kube-system 1y ago
    > (No idea if this brand is decent; the form factor is great, especially for $14) > These grinders are made of Zamak (brass and zinc) If it's real brand-name ZAMAK, then it should at least be low in lead :)
- johncole 1y ago
  Your biggest exposure is going to be water, hands down. What you store it in, how you filter it, these are going to be major sources of plastics and pfas.
kylebenzle 1y ago
We 100% know and are well aware that food items like cutting boards, plastic-ware, etc. are all sources of plastic we ingest. We are doing it on purpose, eating plastic that is, the only question is why!
- llm_nerd 1y ago
  The why is that plastic is an extremely convenient, cost effective way to make lots of things. And the evidence that it was deleterious to human health was negligible. And to be fair, it's still fairly uncertain. We demonstrated endocrine problems with BPA, but aside from that microplastic consequences on health still seems uncertain. At best we're mostly doing the correlation/causation thing that leads people down a confusing path of cure-alls and snake oil. If there was a smoking gun for the consequences of this in our day to day living, surely it would be regulated out of existence[1], but thus far that evidence doesn't exist. [1] - ha ha, who am I kidding. In reality industry groups would muddy the waters, try to pretend it's "political", finance astroturfing groups, and soon enough a certain segment of society will be proudly clutching onto their microplastics, demanding higher dose services, and ascribing it with magical cure-all powers.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    > surely it would be regulated out of existence[1], but thus far that evidence doesn't exist. surely, it's not so sure, especially with the current administration reversing so many existing policies. for example, reversing the restriction of asbestos is currently in the works. so adding new regulations on plastics use seems like something that the current policy makers will absolutely not be considering. at this point, I would not be shocked if they said they were reversing the bans on lead in gasoline or paints
    - rubslopes 1y ago
      > reversing the restriction of asbestos is currently in the works. I really, really hoped you weren't being serious... But https://web.archive.org/web/20250624143349/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/us/epa-trump-asbestos-ban-delay.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250624143349/https://www.nytim...
tantalor 1y ago
This was just posted today on r/BuyItForLife, > After reading about micro plastics in the disposable salt and pepper grinders from the big box, stores broke down and bought these very nice all metal mechanism grinders. https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/comments/1liyril/after_reading_about_micro_plastics_in_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/comments/1liyril/after...
- Jackson__ 1y ago
  Posting ones "just bought" product to "BuyItForLife" is an irony I had not thought of before. Especially considering one of the metal grinders contains salt...
  - tantalor 1y ago
    I don't know why people buy salt grinders. They serve no point. I buy both coarse and fine grain salt. It's extremely cheap. You don't need to grind salt.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      I think it must just be the association with grinding pepper being fancy, and the fact that they are neighbors on the table.
MetaWhirledPeas 1y ago
Is the plastic you ingest this way significant though? I don't remember the details, but the Veritasium video on this subject suggested that the scraped teflon you ingest from pans is less significant than the plastic that leeches into food in products like microwave popcorn. I assume this has to do with the reaction between the substance being contained (popcorn oil, in this case) and the item containing it (plastic-lined paper). If the plastic particles are large enough, I assume we pass them.
- nosianu 1y ago
  > Is the plastic you ingest this way significant though? The follow-up question you might want to ask though is: How often do you want to ask that question? Yes, every tiny little bit is insignificant. That is true for most things, including actual direct poisons. A better way to look at such discussions is not to assume that this very specific thing you are currently looking at is the one, only complete problem. Remember instead, in these posts we are looking at lots and lots and lots of tiny details, only a tiny part of the whole problem space. Do you repeat that relevancy question for every single part? The answer, when you split the problem enough, is always "relevance is near zero". That is the problem of our tiny brains not being able to comprehend the whole, requiring us to look at tiny parts one at a time. When you create the sum, or the integral, of a huge number of rounded-down zeroes you get zero, and now you have the wrong answer for the whole of the problem. Even big problems consist of a huge number of tiny parts. Asking the summary question on each tiny part is not a good method. Every tiny bit of plastic we find is exactly just that - one tiny piece of the big picture. By itself and alone it would be inconsequential. If it was just that one single source of plastic particles, we would not have this discussion. We are here, performing such research, having such discussions, because we have a very large number of such tiny pieces. The question of relevancy is for the whole. Whether this one particular piece of microplastic you ate today, which came from your plastic pepper mill, is the tipping point is not a useful or answerable question, it's all of them combined over time.
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    Boy, that's a lot of words to say "care about everything". Asking the summary question IS important. If we all switch to reusable straws, will that save more or fewer whales than shutting down one coal plant? If my tap water is injecting 99% of the microplastics in my bloodstream, IDGAF about pepper grinders. And I eat pepper like it's "the black vegetable".
tristor 1y ago
I am a huge fan of Unicorn Pepper Mills: https://www.unicornmills.org/ https://www.unicornmills.org/ as a buy-it-for-life item that truly works better than alternatives. That said, they do have plastic bodies, but the grinder mechanism is entirely made from metals and ceramic.
adriand 1y ago
I use a mortar and pestle (both made of stone) and would highly recommend it!
- fuzztester 1y ago
  good option. i like that too. metal ones are also available in india, made of stainless steel and maybe other metals instead. traditionally, people in india used a thick flat wide stone and a thick cylindrical stone grinder applied back and forth on top of the lower stone, to grind spices, onion, ginger, chilllies, turmeric, etc., into a paste or masala, which was then used in making curries, sambar, and other dishes.
  - fuzztester 1y ago
    here is an image of one such stone pair, not exactly what we had at home, but close: https://www.natureloc.com/products/ammikallu-grinding-stone https://www.natureloc.com/products/ammikallu-grinding-stone also called aattukallu in tamil and iman dasta (iirc) in hindi or urdu, but searching for the latter only gave results for mortars and pestles, which are not the same thing as the one above, the ammikallu.
  - jodrellblank 1y ago
    Traditionally grinding things with stone ended up with people eating stone which ground their teeth down[1]: > "A. When soft stone like sandstone was used for milling grain, as the ancient Egyptians often did, residue from millstones could cause a serious problem over a lifetime, said Dr. Robert K. Ritner, associate professor of Egyptology at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Egyptian teeth have been well studied in mummies, and only the rare mummy had good teeth, said Dr. Ritner, who lectures on Egyptian medicine. ''They usually had heavy abrasion, and were sometimes so worn down at the crown that the pulp or even the root was exposed, which must have been horribly painful,'' he said. The Egyptians were obsessive about cleanliness, using a natural soda compound called natron for cleaning the mouth and sometimes a chewing reed to massage the teeth. They had few cavities, and the damage seen in studies pioneered by the English researcher F. Filce Leek almost certainly resulted from the residue of disintegrating millstones." [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/06/science/q-a-teeth-and-millstones.html https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/06/science/q-a-teeth-and-mil... [2] https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-whole-grains-damage-your-teeth/355042/8 https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-whole-grains-damage-you...
moralestapia 1y ago
PlasticList is amazing and thank your raising these issues, it never crossed my mind and I use this everyday! That linked StackExchange thread perfectly portrays why the site went down the drain. >Maybe you'll ingest more microplastic on fish or proteins in higher food chain than grinders. >If you drink tea you've got a lot more to worry about in terms of ingestion. OK ... ? >Your concern, although logically valid, is nearly impossible to regulate or even measure. And yet, PlasticList is a thing. >We're talking about amount that is, literally, microscopic. Yeah Einstein, that's why they're called microplastics. I am SO glad that place is extinct now.
alwa 1y ago
Peugeot—yes, they of the cars—make an excellent line of steel-based pepper grinders, and a great nutmeg mill as well. Along with hoop skirts and lawnmowers and much more, apparently, over the 200 years since the family started their first steel mill: https://us.peugeot-saveurs.com/en_us/inspiration/history/ https://us.peugeot-saveurs.com/en_us/inspiration/history/ The car business sold to Stellantis, but the lineage’s kaleidoscope of other enterprises apparently continues.
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  Ikea makes one with ceramic burrs which also solves the issue most of them have where the grinder faces down and drops grinds on your table.
  - globular-toast 1y ago
    OXO too. The IKEA one does appear to be glass and cheaper, though. Looks good.
  - sunnybeetroot 1y ago
    Could you tell me which model as they have a few?
    - SchemaLoad 1y ago
      The 365+ is the one I've got https://www.ikea.com/au/en/p/ikea-365-ihaerdig-spice-mill-black-70163692/ https://www.ikea.com/au/en/p/ikea-365-ihaerdig-spice-mill-bl...
- andruby 1y ago
  I love them and have bought half a dozen over the years. My dad gifted me one when I moved out decades ago. A good pepper grinder (and the Peugeot’s are top notch) is such an obviously valuable purchase. Lasts a decade and fresh pepper from a good grinder is much tastier. One of the best $35 to spend imo
- rsync 1y ago
ThrowawayTestr 1y ago
I got a $7 ceramic pepper grinder from Ikea.
jihadjihad 1y ago
Kind of surprised there’s no mention of Fletchers’ Mill [0] here, they’re good quality mills made in Maine. The pepper mills use stainless steel while the salt mills use nylon (corrosion resistance), so you’d have to look elsewhere for salt. Personally I just dump kosher salt into a salt cellar and call it a day but I am sure there are plastic-free salt mills out there somewhere. 0: https://fletchersmill.com https://fletchersmill.com
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Salt mills are sort of useless anyway… salt is just a bunch of little rocks, unlike pepper it doesn’t need to have been recently ground to be “fresh.” Get some large sea-salt flakes if you want to be fancy with salt.

williamdclt 1y ago

The grinder itself is almost certainly always plastic in these. Even in refillable grinders, in the low-medium range the burr is often plastic

dredmorbius 1y ago
It's (thankfully) still possible to buy all-metal grinders, ensuring one a reliable source of dietary steel. Krell or otherwise.
jcattle 1y ago
Is it? I always thought the cheap ones were ceramic. Or is ceramic also somehow a type of plastic?
- williamdclt 1y ago
  Ceramic are also a thing, but plastic burrs do exist afaik (don’t know which is more common). Plastic < ceramic < metal

agotterer 1y ago

Thanks, I hadn’t considered the plastic on the pepper grinder. Guess I’ll be looking for a new pepper grinder as I continue my pursuit of removing plastic and dangerous chemicals from the kitchen. So far the pans, tupperware, and cooking utensils have all been replaced. While not food, another not so frequently talked about plastic exposure could be clothing dryer vents pushing materials from synthetic clothing into the air. It’s likely less of a problem than the rubber tires on our cars making their way into the air. But it was something that occurred to me while cleaning out the dryer vent this past weekend.

hedora 1y ago
I’m definitely buying natural fiber clothing moving forward for this reason. However, I wonder how bad eating bits of the plastic burr grinder actually is. Presumably, they mostly pass through. Stomach acid probably leaches a bunch of stuff, but is it worse than (say) canned tomatoes that were sitting in a plastic liner for a year? I’d wager the grinder bits have a lot of surface area from scarring. That’d increase leaching. Anyway, I strongly recommend small turkish-style grinders: https://bazaaranatolia.com/products/turkish-grinder-pepper-mill https://bazaaranatolia.com/products/turkish-grinder-pepper-m... (No idea if this brand is decent; the form factor is great, especially for $14) It has roughly a single-recipe capacity, so I stick crushed red pepper flakes, cumin seed, celery seed, black pepper kernels, etc in it per the recipe, then grind until it is empty. The burr on the one I linked is metal. I’d probably prefer stainless body + whatever is commonly used for espresso grinders, assuming such a gadget exists.
- kube-system 1y ago
  > (No idea if this brand is decent; the form factor is great, especially for $14) > These grinders are made of Zamak (brass and zinc) If it's real brand-name ZAMAK, then it should at least be low in lead :)
johncole 1y ago
Your biggest exposure is going to be water, hands down. What you store it in, how you filter it, these are going to be major sources of plastics and pfas.

kylebenzle 1y ago

We 100% know and are well aware that food items like cutting boards, plastic-ware, etc. are all sources of plastic we ingest. We are doing it on purpose, eating plastic that is, the only question is why!

llm_nerd 1y ago
The why is that plastic is an extremely convenient, cost effective way to make lots of things. And the evidence that it was deleterious to human health was negligible. And to be fair, it's still fairly uncertain. We demonstrated endocrine problems with BPA, but aside from that microplastic consequences on health still seems uncertain. At best we're mostly doing the correlation/causation thing that leads people down a confusing path of cure-alls and snake oil. If there was a smoking gun for the consequences of this in our day to day living, surely it would be regulated out of existence[1], but thus far that evidence doesn't exist. [1] - ha ha, who am I kidding. In reality industry groups would muddy the waters, try to pretend it's "political", finance astroturfing groups, and soon enough a certain segment of society will be proudly clutching onto their microplastics, demanding higher dose services, and ascribing it with magical cure-all powers.
- dylan604 1y ago
  > surely it would be regulated out of existence[1], but thus far that evidence doesn't exist. surely, it's not so sure, especially with the current administration reversing so many existing policies. for example, reversing the restriction of asbestos is currently in the works. so adding new regulations on plastics use seems like something that the current policy makers will absolutely not be considering. at this point, I would not be shocked if they said they were reversing the bans on lead in gasoline or paints
  - rubslopes 1y ago
    > reversing the restriction of asbestos is currently in the works. I really, really hoped you weren't being serious... But https://web.archive.org/web/20250624143349/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/us/epa-trump-asbestos-ban-delay.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250624143349/https://www.nytim...

tantalor 1y ago

This was just posted today on r/BuyItForLife, > After reading about micro plastics in the disposable salt and pepper grinders from the big box, stores broke down and bought these very nice all metal mechanism grinders. https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/comments/1liyril/after_reading_about_micro_plastics_in_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/comments/1liyril/after...

Jackson__ 1y ago
Posting ones "just bought" product to "BuyItForLife" is an irony I had not thought of before. Especially considering one of the metal grinders contains salt...
- tantalor 1y ago
  I don't know why people buy salt grinders. They serve no point. I buy both coarse and fine grain salt. It's extremely cheap. You don't need to grind salt.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    I think it must just be the association with grinding pepper being fancy, and the fact that they are neighbors on the table.

MetaWhirledPeas 1y ago

Is the plastic you ingest this way significant though? I don't remember the details, but the Veritasium video on this subject suggested that the scraped teflon you ingest from pans is less significant than the plastic that leeches into food in products like microwave popcorn. I assume this has to do with the reaction between the substance being contained (popcorn oil, in this case) and the item containing it (plastic-lined paper). If the plastic particles are large enough, I assume we pass them.

nosianu 1y ago
> Is the plastic you ingest this way significant though? The follow-up question you might want to ask though is: How often do you want to ask that question? Yes, every tiny little bit is insignificant. That is true for most things, including actual direct poisons. A better way to look at such discussions is not to assume that this very specific thing you are currently looking at is the one, only complete problem. Remember instead, in these posts we are looking at lots and lots and lots of tiny details, only a tiny part of the whole problem space. Do you repeat that relevancy question for every single part? The answer, when you split the problem enough, is always "relevance is near zero". That is the problem of our tiny brains not being able to comprehend the whole, requiring us to look at tiny parts one at a time. When you create the sum, or the integral, of a huge number of rounded-down zeroes you get zero, and now you have the wrong answer for the whole of the problem. Even big problems consist of a huge number of tiny parts. Asking the summary question on each tiny part is not a good method. Every tiny bit of plastic we find is exactly just that - one tiny piece of the big picture. By itself and alone it would be inconsequential. If it was just that one single source of plastic particles, we would not have this discussion. We are here, performing such research, having such discussions, because we have a very large number of such tiny pieces. The question of relevancy is for the whole. Whether this one particular piece of microplastic you ate today, which came from your plastic pepper mill, is the tipping point is not a useful or answerable question, it's all of them combined over time.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  Boy, that's a lot of words to say "care about everything". Asking the summary question IS important. If we all switch to reusable straws, will that save more or fewer whales than shutting down one coal plant? If my tap water is injecting 99% of the microplastics in my bloodstream, IDGAF about pepper grinders. And I eat pepper like it's "the black vegetable".

tristor 1y ago

I am a huge fan of Unicorn Pepper Mills: https://www.unicornmills.org/ https://www.unicornmills.org/ as a buy-it-for-life item that truly works better than alternatives. That said, they do have plastic bodies, but the grinder mechanism is entirely made from metals and ceramic.

adriand 1y ago

I use a mortar and pestle (both made of stone) and would highly recommend it!

fuzztester 1y ago
good option. i like that too. metal ones are also available in india, made of stainless steel and maybe other metals instead. traditionally, people in india used a thick flat wide stone and a thick cylindrical stone grinder applied back and forth on top of the lower stone, to grind spices, onion, ginger, chilllies, turmeric, etc., into a paste or masala, which was then used in making curries, sambar, and other dishes.
- fuzztester 1y ago
  here is an image of one such stone pair, not exactly what we had at home, but close: https://www.natureloc.com/products/ammikallu-grinding-stone https://www.natureloc.com/products/ammikallu-grinding-stone also called aattukallu in tamil and iman dasta (iirc) in hindi or urdu, but searching for the latter only gave results for mortars and pestles, which are not the same thing as the one above, the ammikallu.
- jodrellblank 1y ago
  Traditionally grinding things with stone ended up with people eating stone which ground their teeth down[1]: > "A. When soft stone like sandstone was used for milling grain, as the ancient Egyptians often did, residue from millstones could cause a serious problem over a lifetime, said Dr. Robert K. Ritner, associate professor of Egyptology at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Egyptian teeth have been well studied in mummies, and only the rare mummy had good teeth, said Dr. Ritner, who lectures on Egyptian medicine. ''They usually had heavy abrasion, and were sometimes so worn down at the crown that the pulp or even the root was exposed, which must have been horribly painful,'' he said. The Egyptians were obsessive about cleanliness, using a natural soda compound called natron for cleaning the mouth and sometimes a chewing reed to massage the teeth. They had few cavities, and the damage seen in studies pioneered by the English researcher F. Filce Leek almost certainly resulted from the residue of disintegrating millstones." [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/06/science/q-a-teeth-and-millstones.html https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/06/science/q-a-teeth-and-mil... [2] https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-whole-grains-damage-your-teeth/355042/8 https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-whole-grains-damage-you...

moralestapia 1y ago

PlasticList is amazing and thank your raising these issues, it never crossed my mind and I use this everyday! That linked StackExchange thread perfectly portrays why the site went down the drain. >Maybe you'll ingest more microplastic on fish or proteins in higher food chain than grinders. >If you drink tea you've got a lot more to worry about in terms of ingestion. OK ... ? >Your concern, although logically valid, is nearly impossible to regulate or even measure. And yet, PlasticList is a thing. >We're talking about amount that is, literally, microscopic. Yeah Einstein, that's why they're called microplastics. I am SO glad that place is extinct now.

alwa 1y ago

Peugeot—yes, they of the cars—make an excellent line of steel-based pepper grinders, and a great nutmeg mill as well. Along with hoop skirts and lawnmowers and much more, apparently, over the 200 years since the family started their first steel mill: https://us.peugeot-saveurs.com/en_us/inspiration/history/ https://us.peugeot-saveurs.com/en_us/inspiration/history/ The car business sold to Stellantis, but the lineage’s kaleidoscope of other enterprises apparently continues.

SchemaLoad 1y ago
Ikea makes one with ceramic burrs which also solves the issue most of them have where the grinder faces down and drops grinds on your table.
- globular-toast 1y ago
  OXO too. The IKEA one does appear to be glass and cheaper, though. Looks good.
- sunnybeetroot 1y ago
  Could you tell me which model as they have a few?
  - SchemaLoad 1y ago
    The 365+ is the one I've got https://www.ikea.com/au/en/p/ikea-365-ihaerdig-spice-mill-black-70163692/ https://www.ikea.com/au/en/p/ikea-365-ihaerdig-spice-mill-bl...
andruby 1y ago
I love them and have bought half a dozen over the years. My dad gifted me one when I moved out decades ago. A good pepper grinder (and the Peugeot’s are top notch) is such an obviously valuable purchase. Lasts a decade and fresh pepper from a good grinder is much tastier. One of the best $35 to spend imo
rsync 1y ago

ThrowawayTestr 1y ago

I got a $7 ceramic pepper grinder from Ikea.

jihadjihad 1y ago

Kind of surprised there’s no mention of Fletchers’ Mill [0] here, they’re good quality mills made in Maine. The pepper mills use stainless steel while the salt mills use nylon (corrosion resistance), so you’d have to look elsewhere for salt. Personally I just dump kosher salt into a salt cellar and call it a day but I am sure there are plastic-free salt mills out there somewhere. 0: https://fletchersmill.com https://fletchersmill.com

bee_rider 1y ago
Salt mills are sort of useless anyway… salt is just a bunch of little rocks, unlike pepper it doesn’t need to have been recently ground to be “fresh.” Get some large sea-salt flakes if you want to be fancy with salt.