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

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101–110 of 295 posts

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

#101
post #88
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This stuff is barely pollution. Everything there is a natural part of the environment and biological processes. Literally the only issue here is the concentration of it. Dumping it in the ocean is an ideal course of action. Failing that it should be dumped out in the wilderness, not in bags, but just on the ground. It may have a short-term change in the local environment, but long term it's fertilizer. The risk of du…

They could mix it with woodchips and compost it and it would be an excellent soil amendment full of trace marine minerals.

Mix it with auto shredder fluff and burn it. I bet it won't smell any worse than that stuff usually does.

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

#103
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The environment can handle dead fish. We just don't want it doing that near the humans because it's smelly. Dumping fermented fish wouldn't be like dumping crude oil.

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

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take it outside the environment.

The environment can handle dead fish. We just don't want it doing that near the humans because it's smelly. Dumping fermented fish wouldn't be like dumping crude oil.

The "environment" can handle basically anything given the right conditions and timescale. It's very much 'the dose makes the poison' here, too (eg. how stormwater ponds help protect watersheds from road salt runoff, but often themselves become far too saline to sustain the same ecosystem as the watershed). So while you're not wrong, none of what you commented really means anything. It's a broad assertion without any foundation of context.

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

#106
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having grown up in Toronto, unqualified "beef patty" means the Jamaican snack. It is extremely common junk food I would buy at a convenience store on my way home from school.

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.

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

#107
post #65

I recall reading there were zoning laws in the classical era about where you could manufacture garum (the Roman fermented fish condiment). Here's one attributable example I could find, from the tail end of the Eastern empire. This is 2.4.22 in the Hexabiblos (1344–1345) ["–" sic ] of the Byzantine jurist, Constantine Harmenopoulos of Thessalonica; it legislates a ~450–600-meter exclusion zone (three stadia ). The arc…

Petition to restore “aforestated” to common parlance.

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

#108
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…

I’m in no way implying or arguing celery seeds contain a great amount of vitamin C. There are of course many foods that contain more vitamin C than celery seeds. I’m stating that the naturally occurring vitamin C in celery seeds is the key difference between natural and synthetic nitrites. I guess for me it just comes down to going back to basics. Why use multiple synthetic ingredients if a natural alternative exists…

>I’m stating that the naturally occurring vitamin C in celery seeds is the key difference between natural and synthetic nitrites

The original comment was about products being misleadingly labeled "nitrate free". The fact that celery seeds might have some mitigating vitamin C doesn't change this, any more than it would still be misleading to label with synthetic nitrates added as "nitrate free" if they also added vitamin C to it. Therefore I still think the tidbit about celery seeds containing vitamin C is post hoc justification. The rest of your comment also seems to confirm this, you think that celery seeds is intrinsically better than nitrates, because it's "natural".

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

#109
post #86
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…

Maybe because people still want to eat food. The culture of trying to re-engineer life is not it.

>The culture of trying to re-engineer life is not it.

What does this even mean? Cured meats (via nitrates or celery seeds) is already an engineered product.

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

#110

Just out of curiosity, would dumping a ton of bleach into the mixture get rid of the smell by breaking apart all of the components? Or maybe high concentration acid?

Yes, bleach could destroy the complex odoriferous compounds in fish sauce. Ordinary chlorine bleach in liquid form is so dilute that you wouldn't be able to run the process in-place in the original fish sauce storage tanks, though. There are more concentrated forms like granular calcium hypochlorite that would take up less volume, but the heat generated by oxidizing organic matter on this scale makes it a sort of chemical engineering problem.
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