« Tanks buried in Austin | Main | Doc on the Glass Roots Revolution » Bad can  We noticed our hominy tasted a little strange last night - Marsha noticed it, I didn't, I was eating away. However I thought to wander back and take a close look at the can. It had some black stuff around the top on the inside, and when I looked closely I could see that there was a slight opening just below the lid where the can was just slighlty scrunched. I looked around online and got a little obsessive about botulism references. There've been very few cases of botulism with commercial canning, because they normally heat the food specifically to kill the germ as part of the canning process. However it can still creep into a package that has a puncture, so there's a risk. (I called poison control and they told me "don't worry unless you get sick," and even then I shouldnt worry unless I'm sick over 24 hours, the guy said. What I found online that he didn't mention is that, if there was a case of botulism, it would probably manifest in 18 hours and you would want to call 911 and get an ambulance pdq if symptoms appear. (I don't think he seriously thought I'd been exposed to botulism, but he definitely wasn't ruling it out.) Given the low incidence of botulism it's probably not a huge risk, and it's interesting... I've had similar stuff happen before but I didn't have enough information at my fingertips to scare myself. The other message here is to take a close look at that can you've just opened. I think we're lulled into complacency about food safety, but while I was researching last night I realized there are real vulnerabilites, even potentially with commercial canning. And that nasty little germ that causes botulism won't be affected by a minute and half in the microwave... it takes at ten minute boil to kill him. jon posted this at 7:42 AM |
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Food safety is probably the single biggest health issue in the US in terms of cost.
I believe I recall FDA (or USDA) statistics that indicated one in four hospital admissions in the US trace to food borne illness.
Hope you don't have the B. It ain't funny.
Posted by: David Armistead | April 1, 2008 8:27 AM
Will be thinking of you. The same thing happened to George once, and we also looked online and got scared (i would say shitless, but that just seems wrong). It turned out ok. If you get the least bit sick, GO IN. Nothing to fool around with. I can't remember what was in the can-o-poison george ate, but something about it being acidic helped his cause according to the epidemiologist at the CDC we talked to. (amazing who you can track down when you're freaked out).
Posted by: jeneane | April 1, 2008 8:47 AM
Jon --
I grew up in a farming community. We had a garden and mom cooked every day -- three times a day (and as adults she wouldn't let us forget it either!). In our community there was a story of home canned food that killed the entire family from botulism. It may have been an urban legion.
But you bring up a very good point -- we trust our commercially processed food to be safe and healthy. That trust level is one of the reasons so much of our food switched from home grown, home canned, and home made. Along the way, food processors realized they could make it "more safe" (and have longer shelf life) by adding things to the food that mom never did.
We know a lot more about food than we did when botulism was a real threat in home canned foods. We know that we do need to be careful about eating food out of tainted containers (pulling for you and Marsha!), but we also know that fresh food has more nutrients in it than canned foods, that organic food has more nutrients in it than conventional food (for the science on that claim go to www.organiccenter.org ), and that we can train our tastebuds to like healthy food -- if we try.
Jon, please post again in about 8 hours so we'll know you're okay.
Cheryl Greene
Posted by: Cheryl Greene | April 1, 2008 9:02 AM
I dropped by the doctor's office today. She looked at the state of the can and said we were pretty lucky it didn't make us sick... but, she said, if we were going to be sick, we would've felt something within the first three hours. She also said that botulism is truly rare and the body can sometimes handle it before the poison's an issue.
Then again, CDC says "symptoms generally begin 18 to 36 hours after eating a contaminated food, but they can occur as early as 6 hours or as late as 10 days."
Anyway, I think we're fine.
Posted by: Jon Lebkowsky | April 1, 2008 3:54 PM