Himalayan salt doesn't actually come
from the Himalayas.
It's mined 186 miles away in Pakistan.
Thanks to its pink hue and supposed health benefits,
the salt has exploded in popularity since the late 2000s.
Today, it's turned into lamps, statues,
and of course, table salt.
But extracting the coveted salt means descending
into dark caves, then blasting and carrying heavy rock.
We went inside the mine turning this mountain
into 400,000 tons of pink salt each year.
The Khewra Salt Mine, here in the Punjab region of Pakistan,
is the second largest salt mine in the world.
The pink salt comes from remnants of ancient seabeds
that crystallized 600 million years ago.
Legend has it, it was actually Alexander the Great's horse
that first discovered the salt rocks
when it stopped to take a lick.
Then, under British rule,
salt mining ramped up in the 1870s.
Today, it's a popular tourist destination
and a working mine,
producing the majority of the world's pink salt.
All the mining starts here, at the train station.
This train takes miners deep into the mountain.
Here, tunnels stretch for 25 miles,
and it's always 64 degrees.
300 miners work these dark chambers.
They've used many of the same mining tools
for over a century: pickaxes, hand drills, and gunpowder.
Miners will spend eight hours underground at a time.
Only half of the mountain's salt is actually mined.
The rest is used for structural support
so the chambers don't collapse.
Tractors haul the mined salt blocks out of the mountain.
Each day, miners excavate over 1,000 tons of salt,
or about the weight of 157 elephants.
Outside, they search for the blocks
with the best shape and coloring to send to manufacturers.
Once picked, the blocks are loaded up on trucks
either by hand or crane and sent across Pakistan.
Historically, Pakistan couldn't process this raw pink salt,
so much of it was exported to India cheaply.
India would treat the salt, label it as made in India,
and sell it at a premium.
Pakistan saw little of the profits.
NPR reported that a ton of salt sold to India
for $40 could fetch $300 in Europe.
In 2019, a social media campaign calling
for the end of salt exports to India went viral.
That same year,
the Pakistani government banned all salt exports to India.
The goal? Returning the profits to Pakistan.
But some Pakistani salt exporters suffered.
They didn't speak English
and couldn't meet Europe's tough import standards.
Only about a dozen exporters saw an opportunity
to sell products under Pakistani labels directly to Europe.
Muhammad was one of them.
Every month, he purchases 300 tons of salt from the mine
for his company, Himalayan Decor International.
His artists turn these blocks
into more than 200 different products.
Most of the work is done by hand,
but drills and saws have sped up the process
in recent years.
Over in Karachi,
RM Salt Pakistan grinds up blocks into table salt.
Blocks are fed into the grinder
and broken down into smaller grains.
Workers bag and weigh 1,000 of these pouches
of pink salt every hour.
Like Muhammad's factory,
RM Salt also makes lamps and other specialty products.
After the raw material we get,
we convert it into a different shape as per our order.
As you can see in the cutting machine,
he is cutting different sizes.
On this saw,
water prevents dust from flying up.
But on the grinders, it's not possible,
which is why Muhammad's staff wore masks
even before the pandemic.
Over at RM Salt ...
The lamps are then coated with a gel
to prevent humidity from interacting with the salt,
and then they're shrink wrapped.
RM Salt ships 30 containers of products every month.
Muhammad exports about 80% of his products,
primarily to Western countries like the US, UK, and Spain,
where demand has spiked in the last decade
because of the alleged health benefits.
White, red, or pink.
However, it's such a very small percentage of the salt
that makes up these minerals,
you are highly unlikely to get any real benefit
or any trace of them in your regular serving of salt itself.
But nutritionally, it's pretty much similar to regular salt.
It's also pretty similar-tasting to sea salt.
But others claim Himalayan salt has healing powers,
whether inhaled, used in spa treatments, or in lamp form.
There's a lot of homeopathic remedies
that can seem very, very appealing,
but actually they're not grounded in evidence.
And it's these false health claims
that have driven the price up.
Himalayan salt can cost up to 20 times the price
of normal table salt.
But that money doesn't always make it back to the miners.
They take home less than 1,500 rupees a day, or about $20.
Not much more than the cost of this bag
of Himalayan sea salt at Walmart.
And those salaries have stayed the same
even though Pakistan has severed
its salty relationship with India
and the pink salt is seeing growing demand abroad.
Luckily, the mountain won't run out of salt any time soon.
It's estimated only about 220 million tons
of salt have been excavated here --
nothing compared to the nearly 6.7 billion tons left.