Scalding is a Scala library built on top of Cascading that simplifies the process of defining MapReduce programs. It uses a functional programming approach where data flows are represented as chained transformations on TypedPipes, similar to operations on Scala iterators. This avoids some limitations of the traditional Hadoop MapReduce model by allowing for more flexible multi-step jobs and features like joins. The Scalding TypeSafe API also provides compile-time type safety compared to Cascading's runtime type checking.