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Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

defector.com

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Re: Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

#11
post #7
post #2

Since this is just salted, fermented fish, which the scientist in the article claims he would like to taste, why does it need to be buried in plastic? Why not slowly pour it into a sewer, over the course of several months?

Sewers go places, and it is nearly a million liters of extremely concentrated stinky. If you do this, you take a single location source of stinky and smear it over a much larger set of locations that will then ALL be extremely stinky, in a way that isn’t easily cleaned with water as the fats and oils (also extremely stinky!) are of course not soluble.

Instead the stinky will be spread through time.

The solution to pollution is dilution, and the ocean would metabolize it away fairly quickly.

Re: Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

#12

Isn't the ocean filled with salt and already knows how to biologically degrade fish? I sort of think that you could deposit this at sea somehow, just need to spread it out sufficiently. I am sure I am overlooking something that would lead to an unintended ecological disaster.

"just need to spread it out sufficiently"

Use a crop duster type aircraft - what could go wrong?

Edit: Growing up in a fishing village I'm fully aware of the potential for WMD level stench that the fishing industry is capable of generating.

Re: Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

#15
Sounds like the Canadian Food Inspection agency screwed the town out of spite. Like they had a target on Ngo's back. Anyone have more details? From the linked Eater article:

>He suggests that a prior conflict with the CFIA over product labeling motivated them to close the factory before the inspection began. Ngo claims that he had been vocal about their interactions, and speculates “if they shut [us] down, nobody makes any complaints anymore.”

>After the government-run lab found Ngo’s product to be safe, he went on to win a court case and an appeal against the government. Even after those victories, the CFIA moved to restrict the sales of his product to the province of Newfoundland. “If I sell there, who will use my product?” Ngo says, pointing out the small population of Newfoundland and its non-existent Vietnamese community. “I could sell maybe one or two cases a month[...] we can’t survive.” The CFIA declined to comment, citing the amount of time that has passed since filing its initial complaint.

They could have stopped production in the moldy factory but allowed sale of the remaining product.

Re: Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

#16

There's a farmers market here in Zurich where some Italians drive up and sell Italian products like cheeses, sausages, etc. but one thing I buy from them I've never seen anywhere else - they are rotten salted anchovies packed with peppercorns. Stink super bad and are falling apart but when you're making a sauce you drop one in and the anchovy dissolves and delivers tons of umami - glutamates - and you no longer smell…

I mean, instead of investing so much effort to get glutamate into your food, why not use MSG directly? Sounds like much less hassle? Reminds me of the time when Big Food over here in Germany replaced MSG with "yeast extract" so they could claim that their foods contained no artificial flavor enhancers (although the yeast extract also contains a lot of glutamate).

Re: Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

#18
post #2

Since this is just salted, fermented fish, which the scientist in the article claims he would like to taste, why does it need to be buried in plastic? Why not slowly pour it into a sewer, over the course of several months?

From the linked Eater article: >Perhaps the most promising and most discouraging event for the factory happened in 2016. That year, the provincial government approved a cleanup plan, and a private company began the process. But the cleanup was halted soon after it started when it became clear that the contractors were dumping several dozen vats of rotten fish sauce directly into the ocean. According to Ryan, the prov…

Put it on a boat, navigate to an area with a current away from any land and then slowly release it

Re: Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

#19
post #16

There's a farmers market here in Zurich where some Italians drive up and sell Italian products like cheeses, sausages, etc. but one thing I buy from them I've never seen anywhere else - they are rotten salted anchovies packed with peppercorns. Stink super bad and are falling apart but when you're making a sauce you drop one in and the anchovy dissolves and delivers tons of umami - glutamates - and you no longer smell…

I mean, instead of investing so much effort to get glutamate into your food, why not use MSG directly? Sounds like much less hassle? Reminds me of the time when Big Food over here in Germany replaced MSG with "yeast extract" so they could claim that their foods contained no artificial flavor enhancers (although the yeast extract also contains a lot of glutamate).

Like labelling bacon nitrate free while also including celery seed something-or-another that is... Just nitrates.

Re: Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed

#20
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the linked Eater article: >Perhaps the most promising and most discouraging event for the factory happened in 2016. That year, the provincial government approved a cleanup plan, and a private company began the process. But the cleanup was halted soon after it started when it became clear that the contractors were dumping several dozen vats of rotten fish sauce directly into the ocean. According to Ryan, the prov…

Put it on a boat, navigate to an area with a current away from any land and then slowly release it

Take it outside the environment.
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