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Safe To Eat

Food & Drink

I’ve always been skeptical about health warnings on canned foods, especially as I’m somewhat familiar with the canning process (which basically renders food bacteria-free). Now my suspicions have been justified by SCIENTISTS:

Microbiologist Richard Page, of Alliance Technical Laboratories, looked for a host of nasties, including the potentially deadly bacteria E.coli, salmonella, listeria and Clostridium perfringens, as well as for yeasts and moulds, which affect food quality but aren’t necessarily unsafe to eat.
Then food technologist Brian Smith, of Booth Smith Food Technology, analysed the results — and reached a very surprising conclusion.
…
There’s a reason canning has been a popular way of preserving food for the best part of two centuries. Canned food is subjected to a very high heat process to kill bacteria, and once sealed the contents are effectively sterile.
Sterilisation means heating to very high temperatures, killing all microbes. In 1974, tins of food from the wreck of a U.S. steamboat that sank in 1865 were tested. There had been a deterioration in appearance and vitamin content, but scientists found they were safe to eat.
…
“All of the best before dates you are looking at would absolutely not be for bacterial risk. The reasoning behind them would be due to quality,’ says Richard Page. “It may be the manufacturer knows that after a certain period of time there is a certain degradation in the taste or the flavour, colour or smell.”
Or it might just be because they want to sell more pineapple chunks.
Meanwhile, Brian Smith says food manufacturers do give “quite a margin of error” when setting best before dates — in some cases as much as 50 per cent.
So while “use by” dates should always be adhered to, “best before” is more an indicator of quality than a health alarm bell.

I remember eating some of my Y2K canned goods nearly ten years later, and none — I mean not one — tasted any differently than if I’d bought them the same day. Ditto some of my SHTF Grab ‘N Go supplies, just a couple years back. Most of the warning dates are just in case some guy eats 30-year-old corned beef hash he found in Nana’s pantry, and keels over — but even then, while the fats in the food might have caused the taste to deteriorate, the health risk is close to zero.

Read the article for all the details. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the kitchen to make me some food:

Nom nom nom…

5 Worst Young Adult Fiction Novels

Friday Feature, The Worst

Some names may have been changed slightly because lawyers, who have fuck-all sense of humor when it comes to satire.

  • “Threesomes! The Hardy Boys And Nancy Drew Compendium”
  • “Harry Potter And The Half-Price Hooker” by J.K. (Just Kidding) Rowlins
  • “Little Whore-House On The Prairie” by Laura Tingles Wilder
  • “Little Women: Sex With Dwarves” by Louisa May Allcock
  • “The Princess Bridegroom (an LGBT mystery)” by Willyum Old Man

Your suggestions in Comments.

 

 

Random Fact

Culture, Numbers & Statistics, Politics

I read somewhere recently that about a quarter of the world’s prisoners are incarcerated in America.

Non-Americans are going to draw all sorts of conclusions about this, and most of them will be wrong. Here are the facts.

All the stupid surveys apart, the United States is one of the most free countries in the world — which by the way is why so many inhabitants of shithole countries (to quote some famous guy) want to come and live here.

We take our freedoms seriously, and one of the freedoms we cherish is the freedom to fuck up. Fucking up can be the result of larceny, or failed experimentation, or any such human endeavor which falls outside the usual norms and conventions. This is why we are a leader of innovation in the world — pick an industry, and we’re in there kicking ass — and it’s also why we throw more people in jail: because we are a nation of laws. (Too many laws for my liking, but that’s a rant for another occasion.)

Here’s the best example. Want a gun? Go ahead and get one: there’s a special on S&W revolvers at Academy Surplus. Use it in any way you want: self-defense, plinking at tin cans, target competition, whatever. You’re free to do all that, and except in Euro-style shitholes like New York and California, you don’t have to be licensed or belong to a club or any of that jive. Go ahead and enjoy your gun; it’s your individual right, the second-most important right in our Constitution.

However: use your gun to commit a crime, and it’s to jail you’ll be going. And we Americans don’t issue sentences of just a few years for that kind of crime either (unlike some countries I could name). No, we slam you in a cell for decades or the rest of your life (sometimes we even shorten your life if you shortened somebody else’s).

That’s why we have so many people in jail. They were all free to choose, and they chose poorly. On the whole, it’s a better system than all the others, unless of course you’re a control freak who wants to do what’s best for people because you know what’s good for them, better than they do. (These assholes we call “Democrats”, and this is why they’re trying to turn the U.S. into Europe. But that too is a rant for another time.)

By the way: the reason that China, with its enormous population, doesn’t have as many people in jail as we do is that their people aren’t free. Another reason is that the Chinese summarily execute more people than we do, thus helping their incarceration numbers. Ditto North Korea, a shithole to beat all shitholes.

Sensible Precautions

Drive Time

It’s one of those things that few people think about carrying in their car; but like a gun, you’ll never need it until you do need it, and then you’ll need it really badly.

I speak here of the car fire extinguisher — which admittedly is hardly ever necessary when you’re driving your minivan to the supermarket — but which, if you’re pushing your car a bit, may be essential. Here’s one example, from a recent BBC-TV episode of Top Gear:

The car in question is the newly-relaunched version of Renault’s Alpina A110 which, fiery end apart, is a lovely car. Here it is, next to its predecessor from the late 1960s:

Yes, it’s a little bloated compared to its sleek and sexy ancestor (see here for my opinion on that phenomenon), but it’s svelte enough, Renault have kept several of the design motifs more or less intact, and I love them for that.

Anyway: if you’re going to buy one of these beauties, and if you’re going to enter the Monte Carlo Rally with it, you may just want to add a fire extinguisher to the options you choose in the showroom.

Of course, this piece of advice is aimed at my Brit- and Euro Readers because needless to say, we Murkins will never get a sniff of the pretty A110 Over Here. [1,000-word rant deleted]