How Two Creative Teams Are Shaking up Salt
These repeat creators are collaborating on a magazine and design object that celebrate the historical significance of a simple but universal ingredient.
If your holiday meal planning doesn’t require some creative accommodations for allergies and dietary restrictions, congratulations. But for many of us, these year-end times of coming together also highlight diverse dining habits.
That’s what Kristen Taylor was thinking about when she came up with the idea for Salty, a magazine and design vessel (live on Kickstarter now) that celebrates an ancient and near-universal ingredient: salt.
“I’ve been thinking about how we do and don’t eat together as friends and as family. It’s harder because people have so many different diets — you become allergic to something, or you don’t eat gluten, or you’re running a marathon and eat differently for a while. There are all these ways that eating together has become fragmented,” Taylor explains. “So I was looking into the foods that we all need, the ways we need to eat together. And salt is universal. Our bodies need it; our brains need it to function every day.”
Taylor is the creator of the independent print magazine Saucy and an alumna of Al Jazeera, PBS, and the podcast Serial. So she knew she wanted to create a magazine telling the story of salt’s significance around the world—from indigenous eating habits to community salt hotels to family salt production plots (plus lots of recipes). But she also thought her project could have a deeper impact if it included a physical object for readers to use at home.
“I got really obsessed with salt, and I wanted to make it more visible — something that you think about all the time.”
So she called her friends Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy.
The husband and wife team behind the design studio CW&T are graduates of NYU’s ITP program, where Taylor used to teach. But the duo really came onto her radar when she backed their Kickstarter project for the Pen Type-A in 2011. “I fell in love with how they think and how they design. I’ve been a superfan ever since.”
Since that first project, CW&T has launched six additional Kickstarter campaigns that solidified the studio’s reputation for making beautiful, long-lasting everyday objects. So Taylor came to them with a salty proposition: she’d research and produce a magazine, and they’d prototype and fabricate the accompanying salt vessel.
“We had never really thought about working in food before,” says Levy. “We make things like pens and timepieces, precision machined and engineered to last multiple generations, to suggest you pay attention to what is otherwise ordinary. Salt is one of those everyday things, but if you look at it closely, it’s really quite extraordinary.”
The salt holder they designed references the nef, a small silver or golden container that was set in front of honored guests at medieval banquets. Salt was so prized at the time that nefs were typically fashioned to look like tiny, ornate replicas of sailing ships, and often featured a secret drawer for the coveted commodity.
“When Kristen first showed us ancient salt nefs, we were blown away — mostly because we could never imagine something so ornate living on our table. So we iterated a ton,” explains Levy. “The one thing that stayed, in a sense, was the idea of a hidden compartment. To access the salt, you swipe a disc to reveal a hole in a smooth, pill-shaped surface. What you don’t see is that below the surface, the entire body of the vessel is filled with salt.”
The design celebrates salt’s history, but also how it travels around the world—and around the table. “Part of the beauty of the sliding lid is that it has movement in it,” says Taylor. “You pass the vessel at the table. You move it from the kitchen to the table. It’s always moving. And that’s the same thing that we were trying to bring out in the magazine. I went to six different countries and explored how salt moves in our daily lives, but also around the world.”
