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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

#121

Post by samus »

hluska wrote: post #77
Maxion wrote: post #51

Why on earth are they not composting it, but instead putting in a landfill and locking it up? What a dumb idea.

Environment Canada’s testing found it ‘acutely lethal’. I’d consider composting an acutely lethal substance that is extremely high in salt to be the dumb idea. Canada actually has scientists. From reading through these comments, I know that’s a shock but we do, they test things and they follow the evidence before making recommendations. In fact, those test results from back in 2016 are even public. Just because this…

It could simply be diluted with lots of river water and disposed into the sea, like the waste product of saltwater desalination plants.

Another solution would be to test it in a lab and then bottle it up and sell it, like it was originally intended to be done. But that's a non-starter for the same reason the producer went out of business back then.

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

#122

Post by bsimpson »

m463 wrote: post #93

When I was growing up, there was a town nearby with a paper mill. If we would drive near that town... Wow! that place stunk.

My mom wanted to stop in Savannah, GA on a roadtrip when we were kids.

We got out of the car for a few seconds, got back in, and unanimously decided we were continuing on. It smelt like every bad smell you can imagine all at once, riding on a backbone of soggy cardboard.

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

#123

Post by wbl »

rootusrootus wrote: post #87
wbl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds" - prior failure of intuitively appealing disposal option.

Even in 1970 that could not have made sense to anybody with a brain. They certainly knew enough about explosives to know that the kind of blast required to reliably vaporize an entire whale carcass would be considerably larger than anything they were going to do on a public beach. That whole event was just a couple dudes who thought it would be hilarious and insufficient supervision by adults. Diluting salty rotting…

Transporting forty-five tons of this stinking liquid far enough offshore won't be cheap.

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

#124

Post by gruez »

8note wrote: post #120
gruez wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>celery seeds contain vitamin C which acts as an antioxidant that converts the nitrites into harmless nitric oxide whereas the synthetic sodium nitrite is converted into harmful nitrosamines. This just sounds like post hoc justification. There's hardly any vitamin C in celery seeds[1][2]. Broccoli has 5x the vitamin C per 100g, despite much of it being water. Moreover, if the point is that vitamin C protects against…

why have the bacon at all when you could just eat straight protein powder or soylent though? if you get both the nitrates and vitamin c from the cellery seeds, why bother going through the industrial processes for making the nitrates and vitamic c separate, possibly also from celery seeds, only to put them back together at the end?

It's almost certainly cheaper to synthesize nitrates and vitamin C separately than to farm celery seeds.

>possibly also from celery seeds

It's not. Like MSG (the white crystal kind), vitamin C is produced by microbes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Productio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstein_process

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

#125

Post by bsimpson »

The talk of glutamic acid made me wonder if fish sauce is related to MSG. Gemini confirms MSG is just salt and glutamic acid, which is to say fish sauce is naturally derived MSG.

Fun story:

I was riding a motorcycle across Vietnam a few years ago. Made some friends on an excursion, and we all went to dinner together. The restaurant was a little outdoor kitchen and some picnic benches in front of an apartment building.

When we arrived, the mom was taking orders. She spoke enough English to serve travelers. One of my new friends ordered a sandwich, and fell in love with the sauce it came with. I offered to find out what was in it, but the mom had gone upstairs. Dad didn't speak a word of English.

We managed to ask him about the sauce, and he beckoned us to follow him behind the counter. He pointed at a mason jar of white powder: sugar. He pointed at another: salt. He pointed at a third: salt … wait, we already did salt…

It was MSG. This chef in a rural mountain town had just a handful of ingredients in his kitchen, and one was MSG.

As a 90s kid who grew up hearing of MSG is the same breath as processed foods, sulfites, and other health boogymen, it was wild to encounter it as just another ingredient in someone's pantry.

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

#126

Post by gruez »

gomoboo wrote: post #106
dataflow wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being from Toronto, never in a million years would I even think of that as a visitor.

I grew up in another country where Jamaican patties were popular and ordering a 'beef patty' would never get you a burger patty unless you were in a burger joint. Same as in Toronto; asking for patty (or beef patty) will 99% of the time get you a Jamaican patty.

>>Not being from Toronto, never in a million years would I even think of that as a visitor.

>I grew up in another country where Jamaican patties were popular [...]

Have you considered the possibility that Jamaican patties aren't universally popular and the fact that the two of you came from cities with a significant Jamaican diaspora doesn't invalidate the experience of the person who probably came from a city that didn't?

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

#127

Post by gruez »

overfeed wrote: post #114
dataflow wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being from Toronto, never in a million years would I even think of that as a visitor.

How many visitors do you think would go to a restaurant intending to order a (hamburger) beef patty? The potential for confusion is overstated.

That's not too remote of a possibility given that street foods like currywurst exist, and sausages are theoretically supposed to be sold encased in bread (ie. hot dog) similar to beef patties.

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

#128

Post by bsimpson »

inigyou wrote: post #102

malicious compliance? The government shut down a fish sauce factory while it was in the process of making fish sauce. So the factory owner said fine, I'll stop operations right now.

> Ugo feels that he ran a good business, and the government unfairly barred him from operating. In his view, if the government wouldn’t allow him to sell the product, they could handle the disposal. Ngo paid off his debts before leaving, and feels the matter is settled. Although prior coverage of the factory closure portrayed Ngo as a ghost who absconded his duties, he doesn’t feel that way. To this day he spends half of the year in Canada, though not often in St. Mary’s. “The community is still very good to me,” he says. “When I go there I see my failure; that’s the reason I don’t want to go there.”

From the linked article https://www.eater.com/2019/5/23/18634704/st-marys-irish-loop...

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

#129

Post by colechristensen »

bsimpson wrote: post #125

The talk of glutamic acid made me wonder if fish sauce is related to MSG. Gemini confirms MSG is just salt and glutamic acid, which is to say fish sauce is naturally derived MSG. Fun story: I was riding a motorcycle across Vietnam a few years ago. Made some friends on an excursion, and we all went to dinner together. The restaurant was a little outdoor kitchen and some picnic benches in front of an apartment building…

You can find msg in your local grocery store, usually under the Accent brand.

I've seen two pound jars of it in Costco.

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