The Abandoned Fish Sauce Terrorizing a Small Canadian Town
defector.com180 points by ohjeez 3 days ago
180 points by ohjeez 3 days ago
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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...
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".
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 ;]
> 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".
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 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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
If somehow someone hasn’t seen this, they are in for a treat.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM&pp=0gcJCWgCo7VqN5t...
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.
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!
There is nothing out there - all there is is sea and birds and fish.
And 20,000 tons of crude oil.
And fire.
And the part of the ship that the front fell off.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.
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.
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.
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."
> Literally the only issue here is the concentration of it.
And the fact that there is 900k litres of it.
> ”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.
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.
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.
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.
> as the fats and oils (also extremely stinky!) are of course not soluble.
Just use a lot of Dawn dish detergent
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.
So, but… where do most fish go when they die?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why not? That's only one big truckload. Oceangoing ships capable of hauling such a small load are easy to come by.
wrapping it in plastic and burying it in a landfill will also not be cheap
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.
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...
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
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.
The joke about KFC's "11 secret herbs and spices" is that they are
• Salt
• Pepper
• MSG
You can find msg in your local grocery store, usually under the Accent brand.
I've seen two pound jars of it in Costco.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Rehashing another of my comments: The smell is caused by 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.
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.
Acid is a good way to modulate the flavor. There is a reason why in Vietnamese dishes are often served with limes.
> 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.
They should blow it up like they blew up that whale carcass. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
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.
Why on earth are they not composting it, but instead putting in a landfill and locking it up? What a dumb idea.
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.
Salt isn't conducive to things growing - or composting. High salt levels kill bacteria and hurt plants.
Fish sauce is very high in salt.
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?
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.
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 don't have much familiarity with composting or fish sauce production, but wouldn't the high salt content make it a bad fertilizer?
Can you die from a umami overdose?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Can you actually taste the goo and not get killed instantly? This sounds so crazy to me. lol