Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed | Hacker News Reader

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

defector.com

267 pointsohjeez287 comments

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.

I don’t think he was targeted but he met the reality of bureaucracy. One agency actually funded him and approved the building and allowed him to operate for 11 years. Another agency said you can’t operate or sell because of the growing mold. Another agency said dump the forbidden fish sauce in the sewer. Another agency said to bury it.

Canadian bureaucracy around food is at times insane (and vaguely racist). Just look up '1985 Jamaican patty wars'.

From cbc:

>In 1985, the Canadian government tried to stop Jamaican bakeries and restaurants from using the term "beef patty."

>At the time, Canada's Meat Inspection Act classified a beef patty as what goes in a hamburger. It could contain only meat and seasoning and it couldn't be encased in dough or a crust. Therefore, a Jamaican patty — widely known as a flaky pastry with a spiced beef filling — didn't meet the criteria.

That actually vaguely seems reasonable? Especially in contexts where there's only text to go by (eg. on a menu), people might actually be confused.

It’s not that it’s unreasonable to think the word “patty” is ambiguous —it’s that it’s unreasonable to spend tax dollars on saving people from that ambiguity

> it’s unreasonable to spend tax dollars on saving people from that ambiguity

I quite appreciate the taxpayer funded regulation of technical terms - I like being able to buy ice cream at the store and know if it's "ice cream" or "frozen dessert". Or "cream cheese" vs "cream cheese product". Or many other similar things.

The Jamaican patty and fish sauce ones are problematic, but also happened 25-40 years ago.

Do you have an encyclopedic knowledge of which terms are regulated and which ones aren't?

Don't you think it would cause more confusion if people expecting to buy a Jamaican beef patty instead have to buy a "Jamaican beef-inside-pastry product" ?

>Do you have an encyclopedic knowledge of which terms are regulated and which ones aren't?

Do you have an encyclopedic knowledge of which professions are regulated and which aren't? If not, should we get rid of professional licensing?

>Don't you think it would cause more confusion if people expecting to buy a Jamaican beef patty instead have to buy a "Jamaican beef-inside-pastry product" ?

This feels like a strawman given that they settled on "Jamaican patty", which is reasonably brief and certainly less confusing than the original term of just "beef patty".

> Do you have an encyclopedic knowledge of which terms are regulated and which ones aren't?

The solution is to ensure all common terms people expect in a daily shopping are covered. Thus why "beef patty" was covered. Sounds like you agree with the government on this one. Not covering it would make it confusing for people who would then need to keep track of which common terms are covered and which are not. Its a bit silly at times but as you noted yourself the alternative is even worse.

In Ontario, "Frozen Treat" and "Ice Cream", "Orange Juice" and "Orange Drink" are on shelves often right beside eachother with nearly identical packaging. I only noticed the latter when I saw one was significantly cheaper, at first thought it was pulp/no pulp.

Yup, exactly - which is what makes the regulated descriptors (eg "juice") so important!

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.

>>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?

I’m from New Haven and if you went into a place and asked for a beef patty you would get a Jamaican beef patty, not a burger. It may not be everywhere, but pretty much every city I’ve lived in that is the case

If you ask for a beef patty here, the server will look confused, and then bring you a hamburger patty on a plate

Anecdote: I asked for the "mushroom burger" on their menu at an airport years ago -- I didn't want meat and it had nothing indicting meat in the listed ingredients that I checked -- and they brought me a hamburger beef patty with mushrooms on top. Imagine both of our surprises when they brought me the plate and I was like uhm I think that's another table's order? Well it turns out, at least to that restaurant (idk about the rest of the locality), that was considered a mushroom burger. Elsewhere in the same country (and even Googling it now), a mushroom burger means a vegetarian burger with a portobello mushroom or such as the "patty". Like how a salmon burger means the patty is made of salmon, or a veggie burger means the patty is made of veggies.

I sat there looking dumb and the waiter thought (like everyone here) that I was some idiot who didn't know what a burger was. Now I'm not suggesting they need to regulate what "mushroom burger" means across the locality too, but I couldn't have been the first one to get caught off-guard by this, and the whole incident never needed to happen either. At least in an airport where people from all over stop by, I seriously wouldn't think that only a racist or anti-meatatarian/anti-vegetarian dictatorship would impose some common-sense rules to prevent confusion or food/time wastage arising from cuisine-"unculturedness".

I once ordered a vegetarian burger in some kind of trivia bar of a big american city. It came with bacon... When I asked they said: "but nobody ever complained about having bacon in it". there are alternate realities out there. Even in the deepest small town I had never seen that.

A mushroom burger is a normal order at a takeaway in New Zealand: the usual beef burger, but with added mushroom.

Note that there is often a rather restricted choice for vegetarian or vegan food (unless you pick your place carefully).

If I ordered a mushroom burger (especially as my preferred “mushroom and Swiss burger”), I’d be surprised if it came without the beef patty (the burger part).

It’s not that I can’t understand that the other exists, but my brain is wired to think of mushroom as a topping/adjective and burger as the noun.

I've seen the meat version plenty of times too, it's not like I couldn't understand that either. That was the entire reason I checked the ingredients, which had never failed me until then. Restaurants normally list something about the meat if it's there... but not always.

Which I point out here because there are people saying "just check the ingredients" and, no, this clearly happened despite that.

And which I also point out because the same people arguing "just check the ingredients" would get mad (possibly even more so) if you actually agree and decide to require reliable ingredient lists.

P.S. The top result I see for "what is a mushroom burger" on Google is meatless: https://www.recipetineats.com/swiss-mushroom-burger/

I can’t think of many places in the US where “mushroom burger” doesn’t mean a beef burger with mushrooms. Maybe in a vegetation or vegan restaurant.

Now if you asked for a mushroom veggie burger, that would be different.

Perhaps you should visit more of the US, or visit different types of restaurants? Neither meaning is as dominant as you make it sound. You see both within five minute walks of each other.

Heck, the top result I get for "what is a mushroom burger" on Google right now is a meatless one: https://www.recipetineats.com/swiss-mushroom-burger/

And the top AI result is similarly about another non-veg restaurant's meatless burger.

Haha I guess we discovered the mysterious country you were referring to when you said, "Elsewhere in the same country." I wonder why you didn't want to reveal it? Could it be because you knew you were wrong, ahead of time?

I'm talking about restaurants, not SEO'd slop recipe sites on google.

> You see both within five minute walks of each other.

Provide an example, then.

Here are some real-world examples:

Red Robin's "Sauteed 'Shroom" burger: https://www.redrobin.com/menu/burgers/sauteed-shroom

Chili's mushroom swiss burger: https://www.chilis.com/menu/big-mouth-burgers/mushroom-swiss... - notice how this one doesn't say anything about a meat patty, except for the picture. That's because without some kind of qualifer, by default "burger" means a sandwich with a beef patty, everywhere in the US.

Buffalo Wild Wings mushroom swiss burger: https://www.buffalowildwings.com/menu/categories/burgers/mus... - also no mention of beef.

Those are chain restaurants which can be found throughout the US, so you can't claim this is something regional. I defy you to find a single counterexample at a restaurant like this. Certainly, this is going to be what you get at any airport restaurant.

Here's an example of how vegeterian mushroom burgers are typically listed, at https://www.barhygge.com/menus : "Mushroom-Barley Veggie Burger". Notice the "veggie". That's what will typically be specified unless you're at a vegan or vegetarian place where it's assumed.

> Haha I guess we discovered the mysterious country you were referring to when you said, "Elsewhere in the same country." I wonder why you didn't want to reveal it?

Reveal what? The country of the airport and my travel was irrelevant. You wanted to talk about the US and I talked about the US.

> Could it be because you knew you were wrong, ahead of time?

Wow, you totally caught me.

> notice how this one doesn't say anything about a meat patty, except for the picture.

Except the picture? Why the heck would I ignore the picture? Do you understand the fundamental issue here, or do you think it was that I was too stupid to look for a picture when I looked at the menu at the airport?

Since it's so difficult to comprehend: the whole problem is over whether information is communicated adequately enough that people can confidently understand what they're buying. The format of said communication, whether typewritten on a menu, imaged digitally, drawn by hand, handwritten on papyrus, engraved into a rock, or verbal from the waiter... is so clearly not the point.

> also no mention of beef.

It's literally in the photo. You seem to be really struggling to find examples where this information is actually missing. I wonder why.

> Provide an example, then.

Have you heard of Shake Shack? https://www.google.com/search?q=give+me+an+example+of+a+mush...

All of that may be true and yet it seems overly prescriptive for a state authority to determine the name of food. After all, a cheesesteak is not a steak but a sandwich. Regional variations on names are quite reasonable. On the other hand, Canadians are a prescriptive culture. In Montreal, for instance, they are very strict about street signs and so on. Perhaps it is just how things are done by that people.

> After all, a cheesesteak is not a steak but a sandwich.

I don't know if you're not seeing the obvious or deliberately ignoring it, but the rather-salient differences between those are that (a) "cheesesteak" being one word rather than two tells you it might be a different thing, and (b) "cheesesteak" (or even "cheese steak" by itself) do not carry a single universal meaning different from the rest. You know, unlike "beef patty", where even Googling it now doesn't show Jamaica in the top result.

If you want something to compare against, this is like banning people businesses from calling soymilk just "milk". Nobody minds if you sell soymilk or Jamaican beef patties. They're just asking you not to actively hijack terms that carry significantly different meaning to millions/billions of other people. It's not that hard and it's not some sort of totalitarian flex to have rules like this. With HN being what it is, they'd probably call banning that anti-veganism.

> If you want something to compare against, this is like banning people businesses from calling soymilk just "milk".

Big Dairy got to you, huh.

There’s nothing wrong with referring to other kinds of milk as milk. If anything, cow’s milk should be clearly labeled as such, if we’re following the approach of identifying ingredients properly.

How would you define milk?

Per the 1828 Webster Dictionary: an emulsion made by bruising seeds; as, the milk of almonds, produced by pounding almonds with sugar and water.

This is not the definition supporting the statement that cow milk and almond milk are both kinds of milk. Implicitely relying on different definitions inside a single statement is an example of equivocation.

When people ask for chicken do you also introduce them to your timid cousin?

Or when they ask for meat, do you also show them the meat of the latest math problem you were working on?

Just because it's in the dictionary that doesn't mean you get to ignore what most people mean by it in context.

If you are going to quote a dictionary, please first ensure you are quoting it properly and without misrepresenting the contents and b) that in cases wherein a definition has multiple potential meanings it lists the different uses from common to uncommon.

As per the actual 1828 Noah Webster's dictionary, which you can find here https://archive.org/details/noah-websters-1828-dictionary-el..., on page 7828, the definition of "Milk" is:

MILK, n. 1. A white fluid or liquor, secreted by certain glands in female animals, and drawn from the breasts for the nourishment of their young.NWAD MILK.2 2. The white juice of certain plants.NWAD MILK.3 3. Emulsion made by bruising seeds.NWAD MILK.4

And, just in case the commonality of milk being milk from a cow, see also the other shorthand definitions noted on pages 987 and 988 of the table of contents.

MILKEN, a. Consisting of milk. [Not used.] MILKER, n. One that milks. MILK-FEVER, n. A fever which accompanies the first flowing of milk in females after childbirth. MILK-HEDGE, n. A shrub growing on the Coromandel coast, containing a milky juice. MILKINESS, n. Qualities like those of milk; softness. MILK-LIVERED, a. Cowardly; timorous. MILKMAID, n. A woman that milks or is employed in the dairy. MILKMAN, n. A man that sells milk or carries milk to market. MILKPAIL, n. A pail which receives the milk drawn from cows. MILKPAN, n. A pan in which milk is set. MILKPORRIDGE, MILKPOTTAGE, n. A species of food composed of milk or milk and water, boiled with meal or flour. MILKSCORE, n. An account of milk sold or purchased in small quantities, scored or marked. MILKSOP, n. A soft, effeminate, feeble-minded man. MILK-THISTLE, n. A plant of the genus Carduus. MILKTOOTH, n. The fore tooth of a foal, which is cast within two or three years. MILK-TREFOIL, n. A plant, the cytisus. MILK-VETCH, n. A plant of the genus Astragalus. MILK-WORT, n. A plant of the genus Euphorbia; spurge. MILK-WEED, n. A plant, the Asclepias Syriaca. MILKWHITE, a. White as milk. MILKWOMAN, n. A woman that sells milk. MILKY, a. Made of milk.

Specifically note the commonality of milk dash thing when it refers to plants. Not that it's particularly relevant, aside from the actual commonly used definition of milk already provides an example of milk being commonly understood as milk. As an additional example, look to the definition of mentioning almond milk on page 2134. Specifically note that it says milk of almonds, and not just milk.

AMYGDALATE, a. [L. amygdalus, an almond.] Made of almonds. AMYGDALATE, n. An emulsion made of almonds; milk of almonds.

As you can see, I care way to much about milk.

White-ish, vaguely nutritious beverage suitable for coffee.

> Big Dairy got to you, huh.

Common sense did, not Big Dairy.

> There’s nothing wrong with referring to other kinds of milk as milk.

There very much is. For most people, if they go to a shop and ask for milk and get handed goat milk, they will get annoyed. Similarly if they ask for eggs and get handed duck eggs or quail eggs. I don't know why common sense is so lacking on this forum but this is not my opinion, this is a fact.

But yeah, if someone disagrees with you they're just Big Dairy shill. There's no other way a rational person could disagree with another.

or, just let people call things what they want, and focus on real problems instead. Even this comment as I’m typing feels like too much time committed to the subject.

> or, just let people call things what they want, and focus on real problems instead. Even this comment as I’m typing feels like too much time committed to the subject.

If a problem isn't yours that doesn't mean it's fake.

You can simply not waste your time on it, that's not other people's problem. Why should they even care that you're wasting your time? When you clearly don't care about them wasting time or money due to this stuff, you should expect zero sympathy for your own time wastage on the subject. You need to show sympathy before you receive it.

I don't think these kind of language struggles are as minor as you paint them, especially around regulation and law-making.

a well understood and unified spoken language is the keystone to a lot of human endeavor; even if the goal is a region without language barriers the bootstrap process towards that goal is accelerated by a common tongue.

If I got a jamaican beef patty instead of a hamburger beef patty, i think that would be close enough.

But I have serious issues with the term "sweetbreads".

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.

I think that type of law is usually supposed to protect against, not a surprised restaurant patron (because that's the kind of thing that would fix itself anyway, the customer would send it back and/or not go back) but subtle adulteration of food.

The law says the "patty" has to be nothing but meat and seasoning so that nobody can sell a "beef patty" that looks like a normal patty but actually is 10% sawdust (or more plausibly, some gross but very cheap filler product).

In a well-functioning government, this kind of thing could be worked out - the regulators would realize their rules were too far-reaching and culturally myopic, and that this is clearly not an attempt to sneak adulterated mystery meat past them. They could alter the regulation, like allowing the term "Jamaican Beef Patty" to be used, and that prefix removes the 'no encasement' regulation and allows whatever other common safe ingredients.

But of course, most governments don't function that well. The bureaucrats get deeply invested in enforcing their rules and no one with the authority to change the regulation can even hear the cries of those impacted, let alone change them.

You might be surprised, I had a similar kind of confusion myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49164552

Many people on keto diets do exactly this, as they won't eat bread. I've dined with multiple people who have gone into a restaurant and ordered a beef patty. And until today, I'd never even heard of the Jamaican thingy, which would not be keto-friendly btw.

Sorry, but you're just uncultured if you don't know what Jamaican patties are.

This is like saying "never in a million years would I think 'butter chicken' is a red, spicy Indian curry instead of chicken roasted in butter".

Sorry, you’re just uncultured if you don’t understand that understandings of different “foreign” cultures differ from place to place.

I don’t even agree that the use of the term “beef patty” should be regulated just so you don’t confuse a dumb tourist lol. Getting something you didn’t expect is part of travelling. But YOUR comment is too condescending and hypocritical to NOT draw attention to, and it’s a type of hypocrisy that’s endemic to North America. You tell someone from the US that you don’t know Spanish or some aspect of Mexican culture or something like that and if they’re snooty enough they’ll call you an uncultured trailer park hick or something. Put another 1,000–2,000 km of distance to the cultural reference you’re making and you’ll get blank stares.

I live in a country that’s far further from the Caribbean, where it makes up an insignificant part of our vast multicultural landscape. Don’t act like I’m “uncultured” due to something that you’re much more likely to know about due to your geographic proximity.

1. Jamaican cuisine is fairly popular globally.

2. Patties are popular within Jamaican cuisine.

It's not something very niche. I think my comment was perfectly fair. It's like not knowing what empanadas, samosas, shumai, or takoyaki are (and yes, one would be uncultured for not knowing any of these too). It betrays something about the cosmopolitan-ness of your life experiences.

It's not even about geography. I'm pretty sure a good proportion of even Torontonians don't know about the Jamaican patty, and I'd call them uncultured too.

There's nothing wrong about being uncultured, it's not the end of the world. You can even work to improve it.

If we're going by anecdotes, let's add mine: I've lived in 4 continents, about 15 countries, I speak 6 languages, I hold a few citizenships, I consider myself fairly cultured and not only I've never eaten a Jamaican meat patty but I've also never seen one for sale.

In fact the only way I know about their existence is through watching news reports of what happened in Canada in 1985.

How familiar are you with food from the Amazon basin region? I wouldn't consider you uncultured for not knowing much about it, but orders of magnitude more people eat food from the Amazon basin than Jamaican food.

That being said I'll gladly accept Jamaican restaurant recommendations in Taiwan or close to Berlin.

>In fact the only way I know about their existence is through watching news reports of what happened in Canada in 1985.

Since you know about it, the label doesn't apply to you, regardless of how.

Alright, buddy :-)

That’s not very fair. Can’t pretend for a second they or the many like them haven’t seen news about 1985 Canada?

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/2501/

"The average North American probably only knows about Ackee and Saltfish, and Curry Goat!"

"And Oxtail Stew, of course."

"Of course!"

Does one need to know a variety of dishes from each of the 193 UN-recognized states' cuisines to not be uncultured? If not, which ones are OK to be ignorant of? Clearly Jamaica's a must-have, but I'd like the full list so I can remediate the issue at once.

>Does one need to know a variety of dishes from each of the 193 UN-recognized states' cuisines to not be uncultured?

No, but you should know the top 5 dishes of the 10-15 most popular cuisines of the world, at least. That's only about 50-75 dishes; many individual restaurants have bigger menus than that.

>Ackee and Saltfish, and Curry Goat! And Oxtail Stew,

Yes... I would expect one to know these. At least that oxtail stew is a popular Jamaican delicacy.

> No, but you should know the top 5 dishes of the 10-15 most popular cuisines of the world, at least. That's only about 50-75 dishes; many individual restaurants have bigger menus than that.

Man, I so don't care about food. I pay attention to it enough that it doesn't hurt me and gives me the nutrients I need.

193? Top five? 10-15? 50-75? I could not care less to have a standard regarding knowledge about cuisines.

I get what food I can from the options I have available to me and use the words on the menu or out of the staff's mouth.

Edit: stick to the point

You’re asserting that Jamaican is in the top 15?

That’s quite the claim.

> You should know the top 5 dishes of the 10-15 most popular cuisines of the world, at least.

Leaving aside how ridiculous these numbers you pulled out of nowhere are, what godsent culturedness list are you using that is somehow so common knowledge and that yet the rest of us uncultured boneheads somehow missed the memo for? Even searching this now, and no disrespect whatsoever to Jamaica, I neither see "Jamaica" nor even "patty" listed in the top search result for the 100 top cuisines in the world [1]. For reference, they have Russian, Dutch, English, etc. listed, which (again, no disrespect intended) are the ones you often hear people complain/joke about as being bland.

[1] https://www.tasteatlas.com/best/cuisines

I'm from Australia where we really don't have any 'national dishes', so we just eat a wide variety of everyone else's dishes. I've never heard of ackee, saltfish, oxtail stew, or Jamaican beef patties. Does that make me uncultured? I'd argue not. Do you know what a schnitty is? Or a sausage sambo? Everyone here does, but I certainly don't expect the rest of the world to know about them because 'of course' they're everywhere and significant.

Everyone's perspective is from their local area, so please don't expect everyone globally to know about your local food, no matter how broadly you think it's known.

As an american i'm quite certain the Australian national dish is made with marmite as opposed to the misconception that kangaroo is unseasoned

I think you're vastly overestimating the popularity of Jamaican cuisine. I've never in my life seen a Jamaican restaurant. I've had Jamaican food at a Jamaican friend's house, it was pretty good, but I'd never heard about their beef patties until literally today just reading about them on here. If you live in a part of the world where it's more prominent, good for you, but not everybody does.

Usually, when I travel, it helps me to better understand and respect that other people may have different perspectives or experiences than me. This is probably the first time I'm seeing someone so cultured achieve the exact opposite, so thanks for familiarizing me with that.

P.S. When I search "what is a beef patty" on Google it quotes and links me to Wikipedia [1] which says absolutely nothing about Jamaica. Perhaps consider enlightening Wikipedia if you'd like to make the world a more cultured place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patty

I lived in São Paulo. A giant metropolis that is home for countless international diasporas. I’ve eaten in Vietnamese, Sirian, Thailandese, Russia, Polish restaurants, never ever found a Jamaican one.

Same in Edmonton, the other side of Canada.

Going to school in Jamaica, Queens (ironic, I know) I would get a beef patty from a deli/bodega on a roll with cheese or on cocoa bread (said to be the only way to eat it by random dude hanging out in store who called my cheese order blasphemy) Another specialty is pizza shops carry them and you can get one split open, covered in mozzarella and topped with pepperoni. You'd never think you'd get them in an Italian eatery but there you have it, beef patties. I still get fresh Tower Aisle beef patties from the local C-Town deli from time to time.

coco bread :D

But with cheese and in coco bread are both common, yeah. Most old school Italian pizza places in Manhattan/Queens carry them in my experience. (e.g., Sacco Pizza on 54th & 9th)

Any confusion can easily be resolved by asking the person offering to sell you one what it is. I do not need terminological rules between me and fast food vendors; if I buy a 'muffin hot dog parfait' and it turns out not to be the tasty dish I was expecting, I may complain about it but I have the choice to just not go there again.

I support the idea of truth in advertising laws but I think they should be limited to factual claims. Courts shouldn't entertain lawsuits over such silly things either.

I am shocked to learn there is no dog in a hot dog. Calling my lawyer...

In Germany if they applied the laws consistently it would actually be illegal to call it a hot dog if it wasn't dog. Supermarket had to rename "chilli beans" to "kidney beans in chilli sauce" because there's no bean species called a chilli bean

When rules like this lead to complaints about "veggie burgers", part of me wants to counter that hamburgers neither contain ham nor burgers (etymology: the food is named after the German city of Hamburg, origin of city name lost to time but literal translation of original name compatible with "Castle (Burg) belonging to person called Hamma").

I don't think "burger" is protected. Thankfully.

Thankfully, the ban was walked back. But it did get voted through in some stages: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3w5v75deewo

Patting the beef?

it is impossible in canada to sell swedish meatballs - cant have the onion or breadcrumbs

> it is impossible in canada to sell swedish meatballs - cant have the onion or breadcrumbs

I don't know if that's just an attempt at humour, but it doesn't feel like it, so I'll correct you: that's factually incorrect, you can buy them commonly.

https://www.realcanadiansuperstore.ca/en/swedish-beef-meatba...

https://www.compliments.ca/en/products/meatballs-swedish-680...

Did you know in Germany it's illegal to call a product "soy yoghurt" because yoghurt is a dairy product?

Specificity and rules in German bureaucracy? A real shock, let me tell you.

As a result of this, half the stuff in a German supermarket doesn't say what it is on the packaging, just the brand name. So soy yoghurt doesn't say soy yoghurt, it says Alpro and you just have to guess or interpret the fine print to know that it's soy yoghurt.

Even actual yoghurt can't say yoghurt. It has to say mild yoghurt, on some technicality.

Second order effects of well intentioned regulation. As is tradition.

It clearly isn't well-intentioned, but a money grab by the meat and dairy industry.

That sounds like industry lobbying got the better of them, we have similar fights going on here around calling things plant "milk" or "butter" and the rest. What a shame, I can't imagine it's a lot of fun having to forensically examine every item on the shelf.

Wisconsin ("America's dairyland" according to the motto, although other states produce more these days) tries occasionally to introduce bills to prevent non-dairy beverages labeling themselves "milk" in the state on the grounds that it's misleading. I always wonder if they succeed, will peanut butter be next on their radar?

Here in America it’s the same - the people selling the fake stuff (sorry, “plant based stuff”) get around it by using fanciful spellings, that’s why we have “Cheez” and “OatMylk” and stuff. Also a VERY popular one: “Crème” - sounds fancy and French!! McDonalds offers a “Strawberries & Crème Pie.”

The dairy industry was upset about alternative milks and said it has to be from the mammary gland of a mammal to which one alternative milk advocate responds, what do you call the liquid that spills out when you cut a coconut in half?

That's coconut water.

Indeed you’re right, would have to simmer the flesh and strain for the milk, makes me think I’m misremembering or maybe the pro-alternative milk guy was skipping over that part to make a point… thanks :)

As long as people’s preferences are respected and they are not misled buying a plant-based product when they wanted an animal-based one and vice versa I find this kind of name reservation a misguided approach. We always had peanut butter for example, almond milk was always almond milk.

Just make sure I don’t run the risk of exposing my sophisticated Italian descended taste buds to some trash soy-based simulacra product due to deceptive packaging and I really don’t care if they call it cheese, milk or whatever.

The problem is, if you open the doors to the good-faith vegan kind of stuff that isn't trying to lie, you also open the doors to a product called "Milk" which, only if you read the fine print on the label, is made of one part milk, two parts water, and 2 parts seed oils and "flavorings". Sold to unsuspecting people at a discount.

Choose one of the bureaucracies and shut it down. It doesnt even matter which one you choose, it will be a better outcome

I choose the EPA.

Smelly, rotting fish sauce that needs to be handled in hazmat suits? In Europe that's called a "condiment".

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 archive.org page I linked is in Byzantine Greek with a Latin translation. I've quoted the Greek part here, and I used Deepseek V4 Flash for OCR-cleanup and machine translation.

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

https://archive.org/details/constharmenopul00heimgoog/page/2... ("Ἐπαρχιχὸν ΠΕΡῚ ΓΑΡΕΨΩΝ" / "Edictum DE GARI COCTORIBUS")

> "22. Ἡ τέχνη τῶν γαρεψῶν καὶ ἡ τῶν τυροποιῶν οὐ τὴν τυχοῦσαν ποιεῖ τοῖς παρακειμένοις βλάβην· πολλὴ γὰρ ἡ ἀπ᾽ αὐτῆς ἀτμὶς δυσώδης τε ἀμέτρως ἐστὶ καὶ ἐπιβλαβὴς ἐπὶ πολὺ διάστημα. Ὅθεν χρὴ τοὺς τοιούτους ἅπασαν μὲν πόλιν μὴ οἰκεῖν μηδὲ κώμην. Εἰ δὲ χρεία τούτων εἴη πρὸς τὰς χρήσεις τῶν πόλεων καὶ τῶν κωμῶν, ἀφεστάναι στάδια τούτους δεῖ τρία. Εἰδέναι δὲ χρὴ ὡς ταῦτα πάντα τὰ προειρημένα ἐπὶ τῶν ἐκ νέου κατασκευαζόντων εἴρηται· εἰ δὲ χάρται εἰσὶ παλαιοὶ ἢ καὶ δουλεία τις προλαβοῦσα, κεχρῆσθαι δεῖ τοῖς ἐξ ἀρχῆς περὶ αὐτῶν συμπεφωνημένοις."

> "The craft of the salt‑fish merchants and that of the cheesemakers causes no ordinary harm to those nearby; for the vapour arising from it is exceedingly foul‑smelling and harmful over a great distance. Hence such persons ought not to dwell in any city or village. But if there should be need of them for the uses of the cities and villages, they must keep a distance of three stades [~555 m]. And it must be known that all these aforestated things have been said concerning those who set up (such establishments) anew; but if there exist old charters or some prior servitude (i.e., an established legal right or prescriptive practice), one must abide by what was originally agreed concerning them."

Petition to restore “aforestated” to common parlance.

If "aforementioned" is a word, "aforestated" is a word.

Being a valid word or phrase doesn’t mean people understand what it means.

Like “common parlance”, for example ;]

a forest ate Ted

Why would cheesemakers be smelly?

Stinky cheeses have largely disappeared from the zeitgeist, but were used to be much more common (see, for example, the Pepe Le Pew cartoon from the 40s where his would-be paramour locks herself in a Limburger cheese factory gaining a stench that puts the amorous skunk in flight).

I just asked AI about this, wondering if the Romans were making stinky Limburger-style cheeses, and apparently not... there is a known roman legal case complaining about the smoke from making smoke-cured cheeses, and one might infer that spoilable byproducts such as whey might not add to the aroma of a cheesemaker!

There’s an anecdote in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1889) about taking cheese on a train:

https://archive.org/details/threemeninboatto00jerorich/page/...

> causes no ordinary harm to those nearby

I don't see what's the big deal. If it causes no harm, why have any regulation?

It states that it causes no ordinary harm, implying it causes extra ordinary harm, I.e. incredible harm.

Think of a merchant trying to convince you that "this is no ordinary watch". That sort of "no ordinary".

That's not half wrong.

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 the rotten fish smell. I'm sure professional chefs must know about these.

I keep them in baggies in the freezer so that they don't stink up the fridge.

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.

While your comment is true, it is reductive. While celery seed does in fact contain nitrates which are turned into nitrites, it’s the next step that’s important. Unlike synthetic sodium nitrite, 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.

The subtle differences in how our bodies process synthetic vs natural ingredients significantly impacts our bodies and health.

>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 nitrates, why not add vitamin C directly, rather than doing it in a roundabout way by adding celery seeds which also happen to contain vitamin C?

[1] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/170920/nutrients

[2] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/170379/nutrients

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.

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. There are thousands of synthetic chemicals in the American food supply and we just don’t entirely know how they’re affecting our bodies.

>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".

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

They can't actually label it "nitrate free", only a superficially sounding term like "no nitrates added", with the hope that people (like you) think it's the same as "nitrate free".

I typically see it labeled "uncured."

That's just the usual US marketing bollocks. Whether it is cured with nitrates or with celery extract, bacon is definitely cured. If it is not cured, it is not bacon.

I am more sympathetic to the term "turkey bacon" than "uncured bacon".

Because people like the fish flavor ?

Same reason we use tomato paste instead of a MSG + food coloring or parmesan instead of MSG + some protein I would say.

Its also a common misconception that all glutamates are MSG (thats one salt of glutamate) and that all umami compounds are simple glutamate salts.

So while MSG is an excellent "neutral" umami ingredient, fermented products like this have a whole host of complex flavors that are often very desirable beyond just their glutamate salt.

>I mean, instead of investing so much effort to get glutamate into your food, why not use MSG directly?

Because the various uammi sources also add other flavors. I like being able to choose between soy sauce, fish sauce, worcestershire sauce, soy bean paste, mushroom powder, anchovies, chicken powder, yeast extract, and, yes, msg (with 2% i&g) because each of them affects the recipe i'm working with differently. Is your diet nothing but chicken breast, raw flour and shortening because they're the simplest sources of protein, carbs and fat?

> I mean, instead of investing so much effort to get glutamate into your food, why not use MSG directly?

HN never disappoints when it comes to bizarre takes.

It's a legitimate question. The answer seems to be that the anchovies have a variety of glutamate salts with enjoyably different flavours.

If the only glutamate in the anchovies was MSG, or if all the glutamates in them had the same flavour and nutrition properties as MSG -- both of which were open possibilities to me before the discussion GP's question prompted -- then no, there wouldn't be much point using anchovies instead of MSG.

Rotten? Do you have any more info about this product, even a name? Salted anchovies are common in at least Spain, Italy & Portugal (and you usually rinse off the excess salt and optionally store them in olive oil for a while before consuming), but I've never seen a "rotten" anchovy...

Instead of "rotten" I should have probably used "fermented". They're dark brown, not dry but not in a liquid, individual anchovies that are starting to fall apart. They smell like a stronger version of fish sauce.

Why not just use colatura di alici?

If it's the salted anchovies I'm thinking of what I'm thinking of (like in the yt video in your sibling comment), salted anchovies are a lot cheaper and more versatile (the downside is that more processing is required on your end). Colatura is great in sauces, but you can use whole anchovy filets to make a gilda in addition to adding flavor to a sauce.

I prefer not to cook that because I like the taste of it very much. I use it like Roman soldiers used to use it - a liquid that you put on whatever you're eating, like we use ketchup now.

I think the Italian fish sauce is much softer and more refined than Asian fish sauces.

This but also with pepper corns?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23QDS0xclw4

Yeah, rough-ground peppercorn.

Salt-cured anchovies. They're not rotten at all—they're spectacular! They're perfect on pizza, with fresh tomatoes, and in countless other dishes, either rinsed straight from the jar or melted into a sauce while cooking.

Where I live (a small seaside town), everyone makes their own jars of salt-cured anchovies. They are traditionally sealed with a loose lid consisting of a slate disc with a stone or other weight on top. They need to mature while still being able to breathe, and they must always remain covered by the proper amount of salt.

(The way you describe yours—as extremely smelly and falling apart—doesn't really suggest they're high quality. Normally, a properly cured anchovy should remain almost completely intact, so you can remove the tail and backbone and end up with two whole fillets. The peppercorns are a bit unusual as well.)

"...a delicious traditional variation, typical for example of the town of Fuscaldo in Calabria, where small oily fish are layered with salt and whole black peppercorns, or prepared with black pepper and chili peppers..."

This is one of the most wonderful things about traditional Italian food: every town has its own version of almost everything. And, of course, everyone passionately defends the idea that theirs is the only truly authentic one, while all the others are inferior imitations. It's part of the fun.

Where I live, people actually go on "hunts" for great food. We make yearly trips just to buy a particular product because "only that place makes it perfectly." Then we bring it home, talk about it with family and friends, compare producers, debate which one is best... There's an entire culture built around the pursuit of exceptional food.

I worked in Rome for a year, and I'd say 70% of my colleuges conversations were this.

Where I live now you have 3 places to get things... depending on which supermarket chain you prefer.

>(The way you describe yours—as extremely smelly and falling apart—doesn't really suggest they're high quality. Normally, a properly cured anchovy should remain almost completely intact, so you can remove the tail and backbone and end up with two whole fillets. The peppercorns are a bit unusual as well.)

Being a consumer of jarred anchovies available in Australia(likely not the best quality)… I’ve never once gotten a whole fillet out intact!!

I'm suspecting that this comment chain mixes up Anchovies and Sardines. I've never had anchovies which weren't pasty, tiny, and fell apart. Sardines on the other hand can totally be split in half most of the time.

Point well taken.

I think OP is mixing them up but who I replied to is particularly talking about anchovies - jarred, dissolving into food as cooked etc.

For some reason this immediately got me thinking about Garum[0], probably because you mentioned anchovies, salt, umami and glutamates in the same paragraph :D

also, as you said chefs must know about this:

> Garum remains of interest to food historians and chefs, and has been reintroduced into modern food preparation.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum

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.

I'd say dump it in the ocean, but I don't guess any boat will take it. Still, sounds like they're going to make the area around the landfill stink forever.

Instead the stinky will be spread through time.

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

The solution to pollution is dilution was a philosophy prior to modern environmental protection laws, which were a reaction to the fact that we were absolutely destroying all kinds of ecosystems, even when we thought we were just diluting toxins down to nothing.

Is fish sauce a toxin?

It's the dosage that makes the poison. If you dumped it all in the ocean in a single spot then yes, it would probably kill the local ecosystem.

Yeah sure I’m deep ocean it would kills the local ecosystem

Which is something humans do regularly e.g. every time a house is built

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 dumping it in the ocean is that some asshole will see that happening and think "gosh, i should slip my barrels of hazardous toxic waste in with that dumping activity."

> ”It may have a short-term change in the local environment, but long term it's fertilizer.”

The fish would make for great fertilizer, but the salt would not. High salt concentrations will kill many plants and probably would stick around in the soil for a long time.

There's not enough salt to sterilize the land where dumped. The salt in fish sauce preparation may be as high as 20% initially but by the time it's done, after having been drained and refilled multiple times, it's 2-4%. To sterilize land requires 5-10kg/m^2 of salt applied repeatedly.

I’m not talking about sterilizing land. Just that salt is not a desirable ingredient in fertilizer. Most plants will not thrive in salty soil, even if it doesn’t kill them.

The ocean seems to contain a great deal of salt though.

Absolutely. So the ideal solution would be to return it to whence it came, but presumably that’s easier said than done if they’re going to all this trouble to bury it in a plastic sarcophagus instead.

Or someone gets paid a lot more for the plastic sarcophagus.

The scientists who have been testing it since 2016 have looked at the evidence and they disagree with you. CBC had to do an access to information request for the results - it took four years. Here is their coverage:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/nl-st-m...

> "All fish placed in the effluent died within 15 minutes,"

The suggestion was to dilute it while slowly releasing it into the ocean. The quote from the report tells us nothing useful.

That article doesn't have any extra information that wasn't in the original poster on this thread.

As fas as everybody here knows, it's rotten fish, salt and vinegar.

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.

oh, a stinkier compost? sign me up!

> Literally the only issue here is the concentration of it.

And the fact that there is 900k litres of it.

That just sounds like it's a knee jerk reaction from regulators. For decades their reaction to pollution was "yeah just dump it in the ocean", then we figured out it was bad. So now the pendulum swung the other way where we can't dump anything in the ocean, even if it's probably benign, because if it turns out to be not benign, it'll super bad on you. "You did what? Approved dumping pollutants in the ocean? Haven't you learned anything from us dumping radioactive super-mustard gas in the oceans decades ago?" Better to play it safe. After all, you're not picking up the tab.

This sludge was actually tested and analyzed- it’s not compatible with marine life and would in fact cause an ecological disaster. It’s why they’re mixing it with peat moss and also why they’re doing the work now - the factory itself has been battered by waves and the vats are in danger of being washed into the sea.

>it’s not compatible with marine life and would in fact cause an ecological disaster

And this can't be solved by dilution?

Do you really think the super basic idea of diluting it wasn't considered by anyone involved? Why are you so hung up on this?

Someone bounced from "let's dump 40 vats at once" to "we can't allow even a slow leak". No, I don't think we're seeing rigorous scientific competence.

It's not like we humans have any aversion to killing individual wildlife, as long as the ecosystem is okay.

> as the fats and oils (also extremely stinky!) are of course not soluble.

Just use a lot of Dawn dish detergent

So, but… where do most fish go when they die?

Into other creatures that eat them?

So give those creatures a bit more Umami!

Usually not salt baths and fermentation. Well... with modern levels of fishing most fish might end up in human stomachs, but im not really sure on the numbers.

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 provincial government ordered the factory’s drains to be blocked to prevent any more sauce from seeping into the ocean.

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

I think dumping it slowly would be better than a hazardous waste landfill, but government bureaucracy is not capable of handling this situation.

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.

What's out there?

More environment

The only winning move is to pay for an academic lab to crank out enough papers that the government can agree with your lobbyists and declare your preferred dumping ground "not the environment" while retaining plausible deniability.

    Nothing's out there!

Well there must be something out there.

    There is nothing out there - all there is is sea and birds and fish.

And?

    And 20,000 tons of crude oil.

And what else?

    And fire.

And anything else?

    And the part of the ship that the front fell off.

And 900k litres of fish sauce.

Or dump it in a volcano.

Shoot it into space.

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.

The solution to pollution is dilution.

Certain types of pollution. If it biodegrades and less than a million tonnes are being dumped in total, dilution probably works. This is the case here. However you still don't want it anywhere near human settlements because it stinks

If somehow someone hasn’t seen this, they are in for a treat.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM&pp=0gcJCWgCo7VqN5t...

In 2016, they dumped forty bats into the ocean but Environment Canada did some testing on the sludge and found that it would kill fish within five minutes. The environmental cost would have been obscene - it’s acidic, extremely salty and has little to no oxygen. This would have been a disaster. It’s why they’re mixing it with peat moss before they bury it - they don’t want it to touch the water table.

I don’t really see what the problem is with letting scientists work.

Orders of magnitude more fish die offshore of this village every day. I'm skeptical of scientists who think there's no middle ground between dumping it all at once, and treating it like plutonium.

More likely there is some intersection between bureaucratic dysfunction and folks with a financial interest in a $700k cleanup project.

The real story here is how a corporation can just pack up and leave it's mess for the government to clean up. With public money.

Recently in my city they discovered that a laundromat had polluted the ground water. The owners are long gone. Unfortunately chemicals are forever. The municipality tried to send the bill to the current owners but that is not real justice either.

Listen, I hate shitty corporations too, but if you read the article it’s the government who shut down the business because of mold growth in the factory.

Anyway, just saying there’s some nuance here. Like maybe if a government shuts down a business like this there needs to be some negotiation and an exit plan.

Far more companies just go belly up and leave whatever is left lying around. If we are lucky the land or whatever supports someone else tearing it down.

In software we build without considering how to sunset or deprecate. But perhaps we would build differently if we did so.

"The value on the market [was] about three million dollars, but they would not let us sell it. And for that reason, we just [left] it there.”"

I think that's the point OP is pointing out, for better or worse (for what it's worth I believe "He suggests that a prior conflict with the CFIA over product labeling motivated them to close the factory before the inspection began" may be correct).

A company should have plans for cleaning up their product before just walking away and leaving other people to clean up their mess.

Maybe it's rather naive of me, but that's what I believe.

> The real story here is how a corporation can just pack up and leave it's mess for the government to clean up. With public money.

This is unfortunately a common issue in Canada :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_wells_in_Alberta,_Canad...

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.

"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 fish sauce in seawater is a lot more defensible. It's not like they'd have to just dump it all in one spot.

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

wrapping it in plastic and burying it in a landfill will also not be cheap

Why not? That's only one big truckload. Oceangoing ships capable of hauling such a small load are easy to come by.

Yes, it needs to be handled with care, but it's essentially the same procedure as with the waste products of desalination water plants. One caveat though - once you start diluting this stuff you have to keep going since the high salt content is the only thing that ensures it's fairly sterile.

The hang up seems to be that the ocean hasn't obtained the proper permits to be a permissable facility to hand that sort of waste.

Where I grew up farmers "muckspreading" would occasionally foul the locality. It was gross but after a day or two it would be back to normal.

I've been to Phu Quoc. One or two of the villages had that amine smell. It was like chemical munitions.

Reading between the lines, perhaps the factory owner blamed the shutdown on locals complaining to regulators and decided to stiff them on the way out.

your intuition is correct: in the Eatery link from the article that's explicitly stated. And honestly I don't blame him. He got screwed.

> Ngo 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.”

Can't remember where i've read that nor even if it's a real thing or not so do take the following with caution.

I think Roman Empire garum (fish sauce) factories where one of, if not the first thing in known history to trigger lawmakers to set a minimum distance from factories to residential areas (something like 1 mile iirc).

Despite the fearsome smell when it’s collected together in bulk, modern garum in the form of Colatura di Alici is a genuinely magical ingredient. It’s very similar to what the Romans used, except it’s made exclusively from anchovies whereas the Romans used many varieties of fish to make garum. I use it often in pasta dishes especially, but it’s a versatile ingredient for adding umami in general. It’s similar to fermented fish sauces found in South East Asia, while being quite distinct from them.

Max Miller does a lot with garum, he even made some at one point (not a process for the faint hearted!) and it was his and Historical Italian Cooking’s dishes where I first learned about colatura. Highly recommend them both, another ingredient I’ve become fond of through Roman cooking is long pepper. Not too sure about its global availability but in the UK I buy it from Indian shops. Parthian Chicken is another excellent dish, although some have an acute sensitivity to the smell of asafoetida resin as my unfortunate housemate discovered! Asafoetida is actually a substitute for silphium, a herb harvested to extinction by the Romans themselves.

Can't recommend enough! Max Miller's Tasting History is magical. It is not just a cooking show, i'd say it is 30% cooking, and 70% history. One of my favorite things on the internet.

Asian fish sauce is apparently a good replacement in a pinch

It’s organic solids. Just get it to the ocean. It’s not like it’s crude oil or volatile chemicals.

The solution to pollution is dilution.

It might not always be true, but it is here.

crude oil is also just organic solids. err... liquids.

I live near Boston, and every winter the city needs to deal with tons and tons of snow removed from the streets. The easiest solution is to dump it in Boston Harbor, but the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection banned that in 1997 (as part of cleaning up the Harbor). The solution: pile the snow up in vacant lots and let it melt into the Harbor. What's the difference? Dunno...

There's a significant difference in that solids picked up with the snow (gravel, dirt, dog shit, human...) mostly won't end up in the harbor.

I wanted to crack a joke that Swede's do like their stinky fermented fish, why not sell to them… But I figured why not see if other cultures might also like it, and was floored with how many there were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermented_fish

Also the article pointed directly to vietnamese culture.

It will be a very easy solution when one takes a less bureaucratic stance and be less hostile to foreign cultures: just mix the sauce with sea water and (really) slowly release it into the ocean. If Japan can release radioactive water into the ocean safely, I’m pretty sure you can do it with the fish+salt solution too. Yes, there is nothing in the fish sauce except these two ingredients.

Better though, take samples and test against food standards from countries where they actually produce and eat fish sauce. If the sauce is still good (could be due to the high salt content, not sure though), just let Ngo bottle it and sell the good stuff, internationally!

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...

He feels vindicated. What a sociopath.

They are foing to store it underground in plastic covered hole? Would this really cause an issue just to dump it into the ocean maybe spread out a bit?

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.

I grew up in a seaside port and fishing community. 1st thing, what landlubbers think is stinky is not operative here, your thoughts are moo, like the opinion of a sea cow.

The seacoast smells like rotten fish all the time, it's called low tide. The most vibrant sea biomes are shallow coastal waters. The capacity of the North Atlantic, rich with oxygen, to handle fish parts is basically limitless. Hell, you can probably sell this stuff to lobster- and shellfish- men. The quantity here is one whale carcass (yes, that's a mammal, but you get the idea) and whale carcasses happen all the time.

Dump it in the Bay of Fundy, one tide will get rid of all of it. Worrying about the environmental impact of dead fish is like worrying that dumping manure on a field will leave it fallow.

What you are really smelling here is a govt funding boondoggle.

You seem to be ignoring the salt that was added to those fish.

The ocean is salty.

And dumping manure on a field can prevent growth, if you do too much.

So I would think some degree of dilution would be a good idea before dumping it in the ocean.

even if you "scorch" a field with too much manure one year, that field is going to come back with a vengeance at some point. There are all sorts of natural disasters that scar the forest (like fire), but it is a renewing process

Newfoundland has no shortage of stinky fishing villages, but I've been to this one and my god man. I've talked to fishermen from the area who are put off by it. It's been sitting a LOOOONG time and there's a LOT of it. When the wind blows the right (wrong?) direction the stench covers part of the town.

As for the disposal, yeah probably over the top, this stuff will kill marine life as is, but not if it's diluted enough / released slowly over enough time. We've certainly dumped worse stuff into the ocean here.

> But this person who ended up becoming my wife, she's like, "I love fish sauce. I need more of it in my life."

Possibly the least expected ending to that article, and very heartwarming.

Slightly Offtopic but the voice in the embedded youtube Video is so sounds so unnatural and creepy. I guess its AI generated and no one bothered to check the end result.

Sounds like a normal news broadcaster voice to me. I suppose the inflection is a bit over-the-top. The speaker says her name at the end - Leila Beaudoi.

It sounded very odd to me too. I was wondering if that was normal for Newfoundland maybe. To be honest it didn't sound AI, more like it was played back slightly too slow, but not by a constant amount.

Newfoundlander here checking in! Nope. She just sounds like that. Another comment mentioned it seems to be a CBC/traditional news thing. A bunch of them sound that way.

The "accent" here is starting to fade out of the younger generations but it sounds Irish to a naive ear.

There are dozens of local CBC news broadcasts all over the country and they all feature someone with similarly strong enunciation and clipped pauses for emphasis. She certainly has one most aggressive forms I've heard, but that's absolutely the CBC news anchor 'voice' and has been for decades. No AI trickery here, just weird Canadian public broadacaster-isms.

It sounds like typical CBC reporter to me. Maybe the AI was trained on these types of broadcasts.

Can they not use some microbes to digest the sauce and reduce it to inert things like water and salt? I'm not a biologist, so pardon this naive take.

The salt is to ensure most microbes won’t survive, hence keeping it safe to eat.

So the solution to pollution is dilution - in the opposite way. Add water to a batch of it until the salt concentration is low enough for decomposition?

Problem: it'll smell much worse while it decomposes. That's surely why they don't.

I purchased a bottle of good Vietnamese fish sauce after reading a thread on HN about its mythical flavor profile.

Added a few meager drops to a noodle soup, and I was so overwhelmed with nausea that I threw out the entire pot, and threw the entire bottle of fish sauce into the trash.

I can't imagine want an unholy stench this decades-old fish sauce plant must produce. I would have evacuated permanently, without question.

> I would 100 percent taste the forbidden fish sauce. I would do it for science. My wife would kill me if I'm not already dead.

Count me in.

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.

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

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

I know that now, but I'd only heard the hysteria around it as a kid.

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

I took pictures of empty 100 lb (45 kg) MSG containers in the trash outside Bao restaurant on St Marks in NYC

The joke about KFC's "11 secret herbs and spices" is that they are

• Salt

• Pepper

• MSG

The MSG health panic was racism against Chinese people and their restaurants, nothing to do with health. So many foods and sauces contain glutamic acid yet nobody is complaining about their health being impacted when they eat them: Meat, Tomatoes, Mushrooms, Cheese, Worcestershire Sauce, Marmite, Soy Sauce, Fish Sauce, and Oyster Sauce to name a few.

When I make stews I'll often make a concoction of tomato paste, soy sauce, fish sauce and Worcestershire sauce to massively boost the meatiness of the stew without making it taste like any of those ingredients in particular.

They should blow it up like they blew up that whale carcass. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6CLumsir34

A little treat for all the seagulls keytar solo

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.

Acid is a good way to modulate the flavor. There is a reason why in Vietnamese dishes are often served with limes.

Rehashing another of my comments: The smell is caused by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimethylamine

One of the solutions in the report is to add iodine, so I guess bleach would work too. But I also guess the final product is more dangerous and may release other nasty fumes. Don't try it at home.

I think acid can prevent the smell to escape to the air, but I guess you need a high concentration to destroy it, perhaps add heat to make the destruction faster. Anyway, you have to neutralize the acid before releasing the leftovers, and the boiling acid nasty goo sounds dangerous. Don't try it at home.

Absolutely foul, but the food science part is greatly interesting. Just glad I am unable to smell that place.

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

Salty.

I don't have much familiarity with composting or fish sauce production, but wouldn't the high salt content make it a bad fertilizer?

Salt... it has lots and lots of salt in it. It's been sitting for 20+ years. It isn't going to "compost" any more than it already has.

Well that makes a whole lot of sense.

it is sitting right next to the ocean, which is where all that salt came from, just put it back

The fish came from there too.

I bet you could grow some killer swiss chard with it.

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 is news to you doesn’t mean it’s a new thing. Other cheaper solutions were looked into and they weren’t safe enough. It’s remarkably simple if you make yourself aware of everything involved. Salt in a compost though? How does that work?

A little salt in compost is fine. Too much is an issue. They actually sell salt based soil amendments for areas that have been depleted of minerals. (Sea-90 is one brand). It's very lightly applied.

It could be composted and that would kill the smell, it's just getting the ratios right and you might need an additional nitrogen source, but Canada has a lot of wood chips for the carbon.

I thought fish was full of nitrogen compounds and that's why it smells so bad

It is yes. I failed to make the point clear.

The process may need an additional nitrogen source depending on salt content of the fish sauce. Because the required N per volume of wood chips so it composts hotly may result in too much salt for the process if only fish sauce is used. In which case it could be diluted in an additional (low salt) nitrogen source.

I don't know how much salt fish sauce actually has, just it could be diluted and composted anyway if it's too much raw.

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.

They’re going zip it up, as if that won’t break eventually and then leak into the environment. I don’t need to be an environmental scientist to know that is a monumentally stupid solution.

yeah big surprise, fish placed in concentrated fish sauce die quickly. Good thing nobody was suggesting doing that.

Salt isn't conducive to things growing - or composting. High salt levels kill bacteria and hurt plants.

Fish sauce is very high in salt.

marine life is unphased by salt; this fish sauce is former marine life

Hmm, curious, could there be any use for this substance?

Fertilizer or something?

With all the salt, you'd turn your fields into the next Carthage.

Ah, I thought it was some rotten fish. Thanks.

>With all the salt, you could create another Hacker News.

Lol.

It might actually be safe to use as a condiment, as originally intended.

I am surprised that after this long the smell isn't gone. If one were to open all these tanks and spread it around on the ground in a layer, wouldn't it dissipate after a few months when the bacteria finish up?

Salt isn't conducive to bacteria.

Can you die from a umami overdose?

You can even die from a water overdose, so you can certainly die from an umami overdose. For example, imagine a person who ingests 100 kg of umami - I'd bet every penny I have that they won't survive. The lethal dose is somewhere between 1g and 100kg.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/st-mary...

tl;dr

After 20 years of legal battles abandoned factory containing tanks of rotting fish in St Mary’s NL is getting cleaned up, paid for by provincial taxpayers.

After 20 years this hasn't completely rotted and scentless? I need to read the article.

If the goo is too salty, probably bacterias can grow enough to eat the cause of the bad smell, in particular https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimethylamine

From a random google search I got this report https://uvadoc.uva.es/bitstream/handle/10324/18877/TFG-I-468... (mostly in Spanish, with an English abstract). It looks serious and as far as I understand it makes sense. They recommend to add iodine to burn/oxidize the trimethylamine or use bacteria and bubbles or air/oxygen, or a mix or bacteria+algae+light that produces the oxygen inside the mix. It looks like without an active source of oxidizer, the mix will be stinky for years.

Toooo late to edit:

> probably bacterias can grow enough

> probably bacterias can _not_ grow enough

This is not rot, but digestion. The digestive enzymes of the fish keep breaking down amino acids, producing the characteristic smell. The salt prevents most microorganisms from growing.

It was just ripening!

Oh Canada!

Can you actually taste the goo and not get killed instantly? This sounds so crazy to me. lol

Killed from what? It's essentially sterile from all the salt.

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