Sugar and Salt

Now that hangovers from the Lady Magnolia birthday celebration have subsided, it's time to return our focus to the human condition. Here's a good place to start: sugar and salt production. These are commodities we likely take for granted, but getting them to the dinner table, in many parts of the world, involves a lot of toil and misery. This is well-illustrated in a series of photos at "The Big Picture" (from the Boston Globe), found here. Interested in learning more about heirloom salt production? See Araya, a starkly beautiful French documentary, directed by Margot Benacerraf in 1959, about salt mining in northeastern Venezuela.