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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

While botulism is a terrible illness, its actual incidence is very rare compared to how many scary warnings about its dangers are made to amateur cooks at any chance possible. In fact, I have never made my pickles and hot sauce because I am now irrationally and deathly terrified of botulism.

Here's some real numbers: between 1976-2009 there have been 3618 confirmed cases of botulism in the USA. 100 per year. You have one in 3,400,000 chances to get botulism if you live in US in any given year. And I bet the vast majority are from eating spoiled or contaminated industrial tinned food, rather than people making hot chili sauce.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5460764/

EDIT after rereading the research: of 3618 cases of botulism, 109 were fatal. Of these fatal cases, 61 were due to foodborne botulism. In 33 years. That's a probability of ~1/170,000,000 per year to die of botulism in the US.

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> In fact, I have never made my pickles and hot sauce because I am now irrationally and deathly terrified of botulism.

Don't be. Read up the facts, and make sure to prepare things right.

This is the point of the warning. Botulism is not some cosmic horror which reaches out and grabs you randomly. It is like a knife. If you do things right it is perfectly safe. If you do things wrong it can kill you. The point of the warnings is to learn where the "edge of the knife" is and how to behave to keep yourself safe.

The point of the comment is that the provided "safety precautions" are wrong. It is as if someone said "to avoid knife injuries make sure to always put your fingers under what you are cutting. That way you will know when your knife is getting blunt." The advice provided is that obviously bad.

> here's some real numbers:

We are not talking about national averages. If you make chilli sauce which is not sufficiently acidic then you bottle it up and close oxygen away from it you created a science experiment to grow botulism bacteria. If you do that you suddenly increased your personal probabilities from those nice and low national numbers to alarmingly high.

The warning is there because people are bad at following instructions. And that is usually fine. When someone is making a cupcake and they forgot the chocolate chips out the cupcakes will be less delicious but won't kill them. With chilli sauce this is not the case. It can literally kill you if you adjust the recipe such that it is not acidic enough anymore. So we warn people about that.

> Botulism is not some cosmic horror which reaches out and grabs you randomly. It is like a knife. If you do things right it is perfectly safe. If you do things wrong it can kill you. The point of the warnings is to learn where the "edge of the knife" is and how to behave to keep yourself safe.

In a way botulism reminds me of stories about vampires or other mythical creatures of evil: They're potentially powerful and scary but have simple weaknesses which, if you know them, render them powerless.

That's the rate for a population that almost entirely follows appropriate precautions. I suspect that the rate among people who _don't_ follow those precautions is rather higher.

Our family just found a stray kitten in a storm drain. She is feisty in ways I've never seen in a kitten. The amount of time I've spent thinking some variation of "our whole family is going to get rabies and die horribly" is absurd, especially since the vet just thought she was funny.

We have been canning and fermenting food before we even knew about the existence of bacteria. The "savages" are doing alright.

Indeed. Botulism is one thing that scares the bejeezus out of me (it's up there with rabies in the dark place in my mind where I keep things like that), but it's vanishingly unlikely to occur in this context.

I'd hazard a guess that about zero of those 3618 total cases were related to the consumption of food that was preserved through fermentation.

Have you considered the cases are rare because people are extremely scared of it and take precautions?

Yes but you assume that 100 per year is a fair sample of the population, when in fact it's possible that of the 10,000 Americans making their own hot sauce each year, 100 of them get bubonic chilli plague or whatever it is and die. So your chance of death is 1 in 100. Stick with Tabasco folks!

Doesn't botulism give food a terrible and overpowering smell?

Nope. We didn't evolve the ability to detect botulism in food because it's really, really rare unless you have the right conditions. Most of the stuff you'd find in nature has been exposed to oxygen, which prevents its growth. It's really only when you start putting things in jars (or in oil, or fermenting them in ways that use up all the oxygen) that it can thrive.

Per https://www.cdc.gov/botulism/prevention/index.html: "You cannot see, smell, or taste the toxin that causes botulism. But taking even a small taste of food containing the toxin can be deadly."

Ah, thanks for the useful info. When I have tried to ferment peppers I usually end up throwing them out 50% of the time because something ends up smelling off.

On a side note, I see that botulism toxin (but not the spores) is destroyed by heating at 185F (84C) for a period of a few minutes. I've always boiled my fermented sauces as a final step because it stops the fermentation from progressing and makes the sauce last longer without developing any further "off" tastes.

If I've understood things right, boiling as a last step won't protect you from botulism. My understanding is:

1. The botulism spore can only be killed by heating to something very high, like 250C, which can only be achieved at a higher pressure

2. If the conditions are right, the botulism spore spawns to be a botulism bacteria inside your sealed container; and this bacteria creates the botulism toxin.

3. It's the toxin that kills you, not the bacteria. The botulism toxin can be broken down by heating for a few minutes.

Unfortunately, your "boiling fermenting sauces as a final step" happens between 1 and 2, but not between 2 and 3; so the botulism toxin isn't present yet, only the botulism spore, which won't be fazed at all by 85C. If you want to use boiling to protect yourself from the botulism toxin, my understanding was that you'd need to boil it after you open the can for the first time.

Again, I'm not an expert, so make sure to do your own research.

Ah, I forgot a step. I think this is very common when it comes to making hot sauces but after boiling/pasteurizing, you add a lot of vinegar. This should raise the PH well beyond what botulism can handle and just generally preserves the hot sauce. By volume it has to be at least like 20% vinegar. Some people leave their sauces "live", meaning they don't boil and might not even add much vinegar (common with sriracha) but I don't trust myself to leave out those two steps. Plus, I'm usually going for a tabasco type sauce and vinegar is a key part of the flavor.

Adding acid lowers the pH.

I should have said raises the acidity

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