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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
> "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."
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).
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 56.0 ms ] threadtl;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.
I keep them in baggies in the freezer so that they don't stink up the fridge.
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
I am sure I am overlooking something that would lead to an unintended ecological disaster.
Possibly the least expected ending to that article, and very heartwarming.
Count me in.
>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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6CLumsir34
Fertilizer or something?
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."
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).
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!
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.
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.
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.