Salt is one of the most essential and yet overlooked commodities in Asian food culture. From belachan to mei chye to nuoc mam, salt and various salt-preserved condiments occupy an irreplaceable place on dinner tables all over the continent.

Salt production was a common industry throughout much of colonial Southeast Asia. Here, men evaporate seawater to produce salt in Celebes (modern-day Sulawesi), Indonesia. Historically, Indonesia was a major producer of salt for the region, with salt pans being a common and conspicuous feature of the North-eastern coast of Java in particular.

The salt produced in Indonesia and other places like the Gulf of Thailand was exported throughout the region to places such as Singapore. Singaporean artist Cheng Soo Pieng’s Drying Salted Fish (1978) depicts just one of the many uses of this product. Preserved fish, having been heavily salted and dried, was ubiquitous in everyday consumption.

Today, salted fish is still commonly found in supermarkets and dried goods stores in Singapore. Along with other preserved food products such as salted eggs and salted vegetables, salted fish has historically been an easy and cheap way to add protein and flavour to bland staple foods like rice or porridge.

In Singapore, beansprouts with salted fish are a common dish in home cooking and economical rice stalls. In a 1989 political forum, a government official referred to working-class families as “salted fish families” when discussing the topic of education subsidies. The families that subsidies should be directed to, argued the official, were the “struggling families who ate salted fish when their money ran out before the end of each month”.

Recent years have complicated the class distinctions involved in the consumption of such salted food items, with a growing appropriation of salted and cured foods in upscale cuisine. At Drury Lane in Tanjong Pagar, one can have a taste of Creamy Salted Egg Yolk Eggs Benedict for $17. The plate of beansprouts with salted fish, pork, and rice cost me just $2.80. The latter has long been considered a good meal for the average Singaporean, while the former meal would have been would have been unthinkable for most as recently as a decade ago.

These distinctions also appear in the production and sale of salt itself. In the supermarkets, there has been ever greater diversification of high-end varieties of salt—with sea salt, artisanal salt, flavoured salt, etc. gracing the shelves, all sold at higher price points.

Despite the diversification in the forms that salt takes on the shelves, most of it continues to come from the same few sources of labour around the world. In Mumbai, for example, workers toil daily in the sun, navigating the manmade salt flat with processing factories waiting in the background. Today, India is the world’s third-largest producer of salt and the seventh-largest exporter.

Despite the similar methods of salt production around the world, the salt that we eat ends up taking on countless different forms, each embedded with particular cultural and social meanings. By the time the salt lands on a plate, it will have taken on a life of its own.