Salt: Ruining Our Lives?

We don’t often think about salt. It sits on our tables and on our roads, just a simple inert molecule that makes food taste better and gets ice off the road. But recent news reports reveal the sinister side of this seemingly innocent mineral, a side of vice, gluttony, and financial ruin. How salt is the center of a legal battle in New Jersey, and bankrupting a man in China, here on Uproxx News.

First up…stupid lawsuits! Four housewives in New Jersey, thankfully not the scary plastic trolls from the Bravo TV series, are suing the Campbell’s soup company. Why? Because their “less-sodium” branded tomato soup, which costs more, have almost as much sodium as regular Campbell’s soup.

The housewives do, in fact, have a technical case: “less sodium” is a label defined by the FDA as having at least 25% less sodium than an “appropriate reference food”. The problem seems to be that Campbell’s just turned the salt sprayer or whatever dumps the stuff into their soup vats to “25% less” and didn’t bother to test the soups themselves, so the tomato soup is basically almost as salty as the real stuff, and costs a bit more.

Still, considering nobody was actually hurt, we do have to wonder why these four housewives were bringing a lawsuit in the first place instead of just writing an angry letter to get some coupons or something. Or, for that matter, why they’re trying to make it a class-action suit. Is there some sort of soup crusade we don’t know about? Has soup become the new battle between housewives with nothing to do and large corporations? Clearly salt has brainwashed them to get revenge upon the Campbell’s corporation.

Look, it makes sense if you have this cream of mushroom soup. We made it ourselves from some dried mushrooms our stoner roommate left behind!

Next in salt and financial ruin, a man in China is stuck with 6.5 tons of salt after a salt panic drove prices through the roof. Internet trolls posted rumors that Japanese radiation was going to contaminate the ocean near China, making the sea salt dangerous to consume and you should totally stock up now. Which people did, in large quantities, triggering a panic and a huge blame game currently being won by the Chinese government, who arrested the rumormongers despite the fact that they could have stopped all this by actually delivering the news in a timely fashion since they, you know, own the news agencies.

A Mr. Guo decided to speculate and shelled out nearly $4000 for 240 bags of salt, which was delivered to his home, and promptly blundered into a Communism joke. He failed to get a receipt, so he couldn’t return the salt to the buyer. He can’t move the salt out of his house because he doesn’t have a salt transport license. And he couldn’t resell the salt privately because that’s illegal. Then the Internet began attacking him for helping drive the salt panic.

He did manage to unload the salt on friends and neighbors who felt bad for him, but unfortunately, that’s attracted the attention of the municipal salt affairs department.

My God, salt has even taken over China. All hail our new mineral overlords!

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  • Some actual real housewives, like, not the rich annoying kid, are suing Campbell’s because, uh, just because, we guess. (NJ.com)
  • Japan irradiated? Thousands dead? Nuclear reactors dangerously close to meltdown? And you react by stockpiling salt? Yeesh. Stay classy, China. (Wall Street Journal)
  • Meanwhile, didja hear the one about the Chinese salt speculator who is about to be sucked into a bureaucratic hell from which there is no escape? (Financial Times)

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  • In the art world, Rule 34 comes to life in Switzerland as a dirty old man sells off his erotic antiques. No, seriously. It’s an anonymous creepy old guy, whose family was for some reason not interested in inheriting his ivory “auto-erotic stimulation” devices, so he’s selling them at auction. First up, his collection of pornographic watches, highly valued because only the best watchmakers could paint the tiny scenes of boning and create tiny automata of a dude doing a hooker doggy-style. Boy, getting your rocks off before the Internet really sucked if you were whacking it to a watch. (Reuters)
  • Meanwhile, people in London are paying to look at chamberpots, vials of urine, and gross old pickaxes. We wish we were joking. (Yahoo!)

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  • Soup accounts for 20% of Campbell’s total sales. What’s the rest? Crackers, cookies, and other foods. No, really. (Huffington Post)
  • China has 2 million tons of salt in reserve. For what? (Christian Science Monitor)

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