In case you couldn't already tell...
I'm deathly afraid of dying of botulism poisoning!
There, I said it. It's all out in the open now. Let's examine where this confession leads us....
Why I am Afraid
Botulism (Latin: botulus, "sausage"): is a rare but sometimes fatal paralytic illness caused by botulinum toxin, which is a protein produced under anaerobic conditions by the bacteria Clostridium botulinum.
Translation:
Botulism can kill you. It paralyzes you using a protein that a certain little bug produces. This bug grows really well in environments that are have low acidity, low oxygen content, and low sugar content. Basically anywhere there is plentiful water and no acids or oxygen, this little bug likes to grow. It's not like a fungus or other common spoilage bugs - you may not even know it's there until it gets you. Even if you cook something that had this bug in it enough to kill the bug, if it was there for a while, it could've produced enough of the toxin that you'll still die.
If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will. Okay, maybe you aren't afraid of botulism, after all, you've heard of botox, right? Well, I have no clue how you'd be reading this, a post to a blog on the internet, without having heard of botox, but I'll explain what I mean anyway. Some rather vain ladies and gentlemen concerned about wrinkles voluntarily inject themselves with low concentrations of botulism toxin, therefore paralyzing those parts of their body. This prevents those parts from voluntarily moving in ways that could produce wrinkles, and therefore typically have a relatively expressionless face, seeing as how their faces are now preventing further wrinkling by refusing to smile or frown or look contemplative (of course, the cynical may suggest they never had the ability to look contemplative in the first place, and instead substituted a confused demeanor when a script demanded it). Anyway, they're paralyzed!! Voluntarily!!
What can we do about this fear?
Well, I don't know about you, but usually when I'm afraid of something, I like to find ways to avoid the object of my fear. Sometimes this isn't possible, like with volcanoes, and then I'm drawn like a moth to a flame to the object of my obsession. Digression: aren't volcanoes super terrifying but also amazingly fascinating?! Seriously.... End digression.
Further information about botulism poisoning
The only way to truly avoid ever coming into contact with the bug that makes the botox toxin is to not eat anything. Seriously. Almost everything has Clostridium botulinum, the little bug that makes the botox toxin living on it. Okay, let's admit that's not very useful information. Let's delve a little deeper here.
- Infants are at a heightened risk for what is known as, well, "infant botulism." Most of our stomachs are really highly acidic and designed to kill off bugs before they can get to us. Tiny babies don't have an acidic stomach yet. Therefore, if they eat something with Clostridium botulinum in it, the bacteria can grow in their little digestive systems, produce the toxin, and eventually kill the baby. Therefore, while it seems like a nice thing to offer a young thing with a cough a bit of tea with honey in it or give a mother some home-canned babyfood, it's actually a really, really bad idea. Honey has the bacteria in it, and is rarely heated enough to kill the bacteria. Storebought canned babyfood is SOOO WELL monitored that botulism poisoning from that is almost entirely unlikely.
- The bug we're worried about here doesn't do well when there's lots of sugar, lots of oxygen, or lots of acid around. It also dies when subjected to lots of heat. (Digression: Everything dies when subjected to lots of heat. Take volcanoes as an example. Did I mention that they are super scary? End digression.) Unfortunately, the bug survives boiling water temperatures at normal pressures when there isn't lots of sugar or acid around.
What can we do about this information?
Well, if you're smart, you'll find ways to get what you want by outsmarting the bug. After all, it hasn't got a brain and we do.... Here are easy ways to get around the bug.
- Store things exposed to the bacteria under oxygen. This is the easiest method. Oxygen is all over the place, and most of us, whether we mean to or not, store nearly everything under a blanket of it. The easiest ways to screw this one up is to expose something to the bug and then stick it in the middle of something with no air. I.E. purees, ground meats, or cans. The bugs that grow under oxygen make themselves known pretty quickly by producing a fungal growth, off flavor, or off odor, and therefore if you see these you know to toss the item anyway. Yay for this method!
- Store things exposed to the bacteria at reduced temperature. The bacteria in question, as do all the others that make good food go bad, don't grow very well in the fridge or the freezer. Actually, nothing grows too well in the fridge or the freezer - you can try a very easy experiment by cutting a potato in 4ths. Spear each with toothpicks and suspend over a jar of water, with the water touching the potato. Put 1 jar in the freezer, one in the fridge, one in a dark corner, and one on the window sill. I actually did this experiment once when I was a kid, much to my mother's dismay when she found the potato under my bed, but here are the results: the one in the window sill grew foilage, the one in the fridge took a long time but started putting down roots eventually, the one in the dark corner grew mold (lots of it, and now you know the reason for my mother's dismay), and the one in the freezer grew nothing. This is also a good method, but depends on electricity and storage space, one of which I am nearly out of at the moment. (The one is storage space, btw, roving blackouts aren't an issue in Los Angeles at the moment.)
- Store things exposed to the bacteria under lots of sugar. The bacteria in question doesn't grow well when there's too much sugar around, but it remains ready to jump into action should the sugar content go down. This is why it is bad to feed honey to a newborn - the bacteria is fine with bees and can hang around in honey until it is eaten by the baby. The digestive tract of the newborn is low enough on the acidity and sugar scale that the bacteria thinks it found a new home to thrive in, spelling all kinds of trouble. Older children and adults have a digestive tract that is so highly acidic that the bacteria keel over, and that's how we like them - good and dead! Anyway, this is why jellies and jams are perfectly safe (for most of us over 2 years of age) - they have such a high sugar content that the bugs don't grow. Therefore, as long as you follow recommended canning procedures and use real sugar (not the fake stuff) home-canned sweet things like jams and jellies are not something to be afraid of.
- Store things exposed to the bacteria under lots of acid. The bacteria in question absolutely hate acidity. This one is actually the easiest one to do with a high degree of confidence, too! All you have to do is drop the pH of your food to below 4.6, and then you should only need to boil for about 5-85 minutes in a water-bath canner to kill off enough of the bugs to be fine storing your food for a year or more out at room temperature. You can buy pH strips to check the acidity of your food at pretty much any store with an extensive gardening section (you'd be surprised at all the reasons you should care about the pH of your soil and/or water if you like to garden), but Amazon and other online retailers also sell these items. Of course, if you're cheap, lazy, pressed for time, or some combination of the above, you can always follow the recipes from Ball. They have a financial stake in making sure no one dies from their recommended canning recipes, and you can pretty much bet that a multi-national corporation will not give you a recipe designed to kill you. Zombie apocalypse aside, they won't make much money from repeat customers if none of them survive.
- Store things exposed to the bacteria after heating it excessively. As mentioned earlier, nothing survives in high-heat situations (In the battle between paper, rock, and volcano, volcano always wins. The jury is still out on whether massive asteroid impact or volcano wins.... why don't you ask the dinosaurs?). Unfortunately, we're not just talking about living bacteria when we talk about botulism, we're also talking about spores. Spores are a unique form of life in that they can find all kinds of crazy ways to survive short-term intense scenarios that would kill "normal" life, and then wake up and start breeding when things get less intense. Spores not only survive the normal boiling water bath of home-canning, but also find ways to survive centuries of being packed in ice in Antarctica, a trip to the moon and back (exposed to vacuum and radiation on the exterior of space craft), and in the cooling water of nuclear reactors. Spores are pretty hard core. In order to expose these puppies to situations where they will die off in enough numbers to give you plenty of time to eat your produce before they take over again, you have to (a) eat your canned foods within the recommended shelf life given the identity of the food, and (b) heat them to temperatures you just can't get to here on Earth at normal pressures. Why? Food has water in it, and water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. The only way to get the food hotter is to either boil off all the water, thus reducing the "food" quality of your food, or to find a way to heat that water in it to hotter than 100 degrees Celsius. Fortunately, we've known of ways to do this for centuries. All we have to do is increase the pressure. Literally, we must subject our food to a pressure cooker! Now, here's where things get dicey, and why I start to say this might be not worth the effort....
Why canning is dangerous, even if there were no botulism
In chemistry, we have a term for something you heat up without allowing its pressure to vent to the normal pressure here on Earth at our altitude: it's called a bomb. Canning danger takes on a whole new meaning when you realize that what you are creating each time you drop a can into a water-bath canner is actually just that - a bomb. Grandma's don't say "don't come in here, I'm canning and something could explode" just because they are grandmas and that's what they are supposed to say, they actually mean it. I could post endless photos here of my own personal encounters with explosive home food-making.... The stakes rise by orders of magnitude when you involve a pressure canner. If you chose to do so, educate yourself on safe practices and risks and decide what's acceptable to you personally and to the rest of your family.
For example, I'm fine with water bath canning risks for the most part. I'll accept the risk of about one or two cans per batch dropping or exploding on me while I transfer them. Just tonight a can of boiling hot tomato sauce fell and exploded all over me and the kitchen. I tried to take photographs of my minor burns to show you, but all I got was white skin in the flash (it's got to be a pretty big deal apparently for a burn to turn up in flash photography for me). It's really no big deal to me, as an adult, conscious of the risks, but had it been my 9-year-old sister that got burned, it would be a very big deal indeed.
Anyway, I hope I've left you with a little more information than you had before. Home-canned foods can be good eats, if you're willing to do the legwork to ensure they aren't overtly dangerous.
Stay hungry, my friends, and above all, stay safe!
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