Salting

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Salting may refer to:

• Salting (food), the preparation of food with edible salt for conservation and/or taste

• Salting, a labor union tactic used to organize a union at a non-union business. Union members or union activists hire on at a non-union business and assess workplace satisfaction and interest in organizing a union. Once the "salted" union employees determine that worker interest in organizing is sufficient, a meeting will be called with the purpose of forming an Organizing Committee. A card drive will then commence, and once a majority of workers sign cards, the National Labor Relations Board is contacted to set a date for an election.

• Salting (mining), the colloquial name for a kind of scam. Historically, it involved minerals or other valuable resources being scattered on a piece of property so they would be "discovered" by a prospective buyer. Modern salting may instead be performed on soil samples (see for example the 1990s Bre-X scandal). These scams were popular and difficult to prosecute because they played on the greed of the victim.

• Salting (sciences), an analogous practice known to have been practiced by a few historians and/or archaeologists who were such devoted proponents of a given theory that they saw nothing wrong with "supplementing" or "fortifying" the historical record, by providing counterfeit evidence or artifacts at excavation sites. For instance, Heinrich Schliemann is believed to have engaged in this practice. With the rise of archaeology as a reputable science, deliberate artifact-salting by genuine researchers has become considerably rarer, and is grounds for professional censure.

• Salting the earth, the military practice of spreading salt on fields to make them unusable for crop-growing

• A salting, an area in the sea or close to the sea where sea-water is naturally evaporated to produce edible salt as a product

• Salting (cryptography), a method to secure passwords

• Salting out, a method of separating proteins using salt

• Salting a horse, in early colonial times in Africa horses were 'salted' by allowing them to catch the nagana disease or animal trypanosomiasis. The horse was well cared for and if it recovered was then resistant and could be used in areas wherer the disease was endemic.

• Rubbing salt into the wounds, an expression now used for malicious verbal assaults of the type 'kicking someone while down'. Originating from the historical practice to rub open wounds -human flesh- with edible salt, which is extremely painful (it gave rise to the expression because after bloody corporal punishment it added a fearsome ordeal to the actual lashing; modern pharmaceutical alternatives such as iodine still have a similar effect) but works as a primitive disinfectant, as better medical care, while fairly urgent, was either unavailable, as often aboard a ship at sea, denied as in some prisons, or too expensive for the commoner's purse.
• A salting: pasture developed on salt marsh. It has the advantage of being free from animal parasites which are killed by the periodic flooding in brine.

[edit] See also

• Salt (disambiguation)