1881 Factory Raised Salt

I'm all for epicurean variety. I'd be the first to say that the diet I grew up on in the fifties and sixties was a little bland. We only had one kind of apple; Washington, delicious, mushy. And one kind of orange; no navel, filled with seeds.
For vegetables my mother rotated us through non-fresh, industrially-canned green beans, peas and corn. The corn was further broken down into the subcategories of regular and creamed.
Industrially-canned cream corn. Yum...
So I've been happy, for the most part, with the selection of food we encounter today, with specialized niches for this and that. Cool that we have blends of coffee from different carefully roasted beans from Nicaragua to Ethiopia.
And cool too, that we've been exposed to a multitude of grape varietals and vintages, learning words like terroir to describe the underlying flavor tones imparted by soil and climate.
But I saw something the other day I'm really not ready for. Someone sent me fancy candies. They were salted caramels. I love salted caramels. Right up there with kettle korn and bacon-encrusted maple bars for that salty/sweet tongue rush.
But these weren't just salted. They were---well let me just repeat the descriptions on the label. The dark chocolate-dipped caramel was "sprinkled with gray salt harvested off the coast of Brittany." The milk chocolate caramel was "sprinkled with smoked salt harvested of the coast of Wales."
Oh criminy. It's salt, dang it! "Smoked salt harvested off the coast of Wales." Give me a break. First off, you don't harvest it unless it grows. If it's a mineral you gather it.
And if it's salt, and it tastes smoky, there's something else in it. Brought downwind from smokestack-belching Birmingham perhaps.
I should sprinkle it on my industrially-canned creamed corn.
America, ya gotta love it.