On a side note, try to keep eating figs in dried form at a moderate amount or avoid altogether if the source is "not reputable".
Dried figs are very susceptible to Aflatoxin B1(1) which is a very potent carcinogen from fungi. US food safety regulations allow 2-10 times more aflatoxin B1 in food compared to EU.
During my work, I had a chance to visit dried fig producers and saw even a couple of contaminated figs spreading to the rest of the stock like wildfire.
What you can do is to check your dried figs under UV light, and it should not shine. Here's an example image(2) I found.
Source: I have worked in the company as a machine vision engineer to develop aflatoxin detection systems with UV light.
Say I want to test figs that I grow and dry myself; reading the article, it looks like all I need to do is get a 365nm light and throw out the ones that have green/yellow inflorescence. Is that correct? How many watts should the light be?
High concentrations of salt or sugar act as an universal preservative. A dried fig shouldn't have fungus grow unless harvested after rain, or in a non mature state, or stored for too long in humid conditions.
White powder in the surface of dried fruits is not bad necessarily. Is a common sign of accumulation of fructose crystals that ooze during the drying process. Dried persimmons have it also. This powdery coat is desirable and adds a delicious floral taste, so is an error to wash the fig before eating it. Unless the fruit has been treated with something and it smells like chemicals shouldn't be a problem at all.
Smyrna [1] type figs will always have remains of fig-wasps inside. You can't produce a Smyrna without fig wasps. They are known as the best tasting figs exactly by this. The fig wasp pollinates the fruit and the fig seeds add a very desired crunchy and almond flavored taste to the sugary flesh. Much better than the other types of figs by a mile. Wasps are a few millimeters only and don't taste line anything.
Smyrna figs can be cultured only in Mediterranean and hot climates. If you don't want wasps, can be easily avoided buying only the common varieties of figs that never had seeds inside. The origin of the product in a "cold" area will guarantee this.
[1] (Smyrna is a Turkish city famous by its figs that named an entire category, so lets assume that Turkish figs are "Smyrna" type and not "common" or "San Pedro").
You can actually just hand pollinate them, as long as you have a caprifig tree. There are lots of tutorials on YouTube. It’s starting to take off as a trend among cold weather growers in places like New England.
They are not noticeable under visible light, so contaminated figs look totally normal except under UV and/or IR light. You can check out the link (2) above or this one:
The US lags behind some safety measures, but leads in others. The US was one of the first countries to ban DDT, established food safety inspection way before other countries, established OSHA well before workplace safety had worldwide focus, and so on. It's also been late to the party in other areas.
When evaluating why rules might differ between countries, the less strict rule shouldn't necessarily be interpreted as "putting corporations before health" or the like; it's absolutely possible that US consumer safety bodies determined that the added risk from some tradeoff isn't high enough to warrant the additional cost, but some other cultures have different risk tolerances.
Such tradeoffs are very normal and very okay for regulatory bodies to do (provided they're doing so with sound justifications, which I haven't seen any reason to doubt here).
As an outsider I get the impression that the US works in bursts on these things. For your examples:
* Massively using DDT, therefore seeing the problems before others or worse than others, so banning it.
* Putting commercial interests ahead of safety in food production, then having issues with that and snapping back with inspection regimes. (things seem to have swung back the other way significantly on this one though – the various food lobbies seem to have a lot of power)
* Putting easy business and fast growth ahead of worker safety, then noticing the problem with that (broken workers are not efficient workers!), and establishing OSHA to try deal with the issue.
So the US looks to have a high risk tolerance generally, but when a limit is passed things snap back hard. A few things seem to be overdue a snap-back: HFCS levels in food, guns, etc. – maybe we'll see these in coming years.
The US was a world leader in this sort of thing for a while, before losing interest, is a reasonable way to think about it.
I wonder how much of an influence thalidomide was. The US failed to authorise thalidomide essentially because one person in the FDA put up a huge fight. This was, in retrospect, clearly correct, and would have given a lot of political cover for introducing safety regulations (in the thalidomide aftermath the FDA was a leader in introducing more modern safety requirements, say).
The stuff you’re talking about is old, though. It’s more difficult to find areas where the US is _still_ leading on this. For better or for worse, the EU is increasingly the world’s regulator (in much the same way that California is the US’s regulator on certain matters; when a really big market regulates, it tends to drag everyone else along with it).
On food, in particular, the US has a slightly weird approach; certain things which would clearly never be approved today are allowed if they’ve been around long enough. The US is virtually the only place to allow use of potassium bromate in food, say; if it was submitted today it would likely be barred as a carcinogen, but it predates the ban on carcinogens in food.
Incidentally, as to _why_ this is, I suspect that it's
(a) because safety, as a concept, has somehow become highly politicised in the US (albeit recently in weird directions; bundling of anti-vax-ism into the far-right and increasingly the mainstream right has lead to the odd situation where the traditionally anti-safety faction are pushing for _higher_ regulation in one narrow area) and
(b) because the US's regulatory apparatus is much more politically influenced than that in most developed countries, due to how the US civil service works.
You highlight past efforts but we talk about now - there is no reason US shouldn't have same or better food safety standards than say EU or Switzerland, if consumer safety and health is priority. But reality is a far cry from that and everybody knows that. We talk about baseline, not premium products that most population doesn't buy, ie how safe are the cheapest things that are legally sold in given market.
The reason is simple - food lobby, pushing for example HFCS everywhere despite everybody knows how damaging it is to health, for decades. But half of US grows corn. I am sure there are few categories where US leads but that's not overall trend.
It goes deeper, much deeper, see Boeing 737 Max and global loss of trust in FAA, that was just too big to fail corporation pushing through regulation like knife through butter, until SHTF repeatedly and they couldn't keep blaming foreign pilots for incompetence anymore.
US is simply much more corporate friendly rather than population friendly compared to say Europe, be it employee protection, general food safety, fines to corporations etc.
> there is no reason US shouldn't have same or better food safety standards than say EU or Switzerland, if consumer safety and health is priority.
This is the crux of my point though, everything is relative and composed of trade-offs. A more strict standard is not necessarily better.
We know mercury is toxic and builds up over a lifetime: why is it acceptable to sell any fish which is known to aggregate mercury? Why not only allow extremely low mercury fish?
We know red meat has some carcinogenic effects: why not ban its sale, or only allow species of animals with less of this effect?
> We talk about baseline [...] how safe are the cheapest things that are legally sold in given market.
This is the other side of that trade-off here. Everyone wants access to products. We could reduce the risk of basically any product by increasing its cost.
A very reasonable heuristic for regulators might be "Find an acceptable risk point at which further risk reduction would not warrant the marginal increase in cost". Another reasonable heuristic might be "Minimize risk at all costs: if the market can't bear the product, so be it". Another reasonable heuristic might be "Label all risks, then let individuals sort things out".
We're focusing on the first one here, but we accept the others in different cases: the second applies more to medical testing, the third to items like tobacco and alcohol.
I'm all for reducing the risks that we can reduce -- nobody is arguing against keeping turpentine out of your juice.
My whole point is just that we can't look at two acceptable safety limits, see one that's more stringent, and then conclude that it's a better regulation.
> the less strict rule shouldn't necessarily be interpreted as "putting corporations before health" or the like; it's absolutely possible that US consumer safety bodies determined that the added risk from some tradeoff isn't high enough to warrant the additional cost, but...
Not that I'd blame it on figs, but one look at the US healthcare system (i.e., costs, as well as the health / illnesses of the people who need that system) and it highlights the need to question *everything*.
The problem with say "X is low amounts is safe" and "Y is liw amounts is safe" is that we don't understand the effects of X + Y, nor what happens when adding some unknown Z.
The more that comes out on gut bacteria (i.e., maybe the human body can handle X and/or Y, but our bacteria friends can not) the more our safety levels look suspect.
But those are all from half a century ago, aren't they? My impression is that from about the end of WW2 up to the 1970s, the US was ahead in these sort of things, but has been increasingly lagging behind since the neoliberalism of the 1980s and 1990s, and has been extremely reluctant to add any new regulations since.
I have to say, I don't get the recent attribution of some sort of ethics into capitalism. Capitalism as a system provides methods to optimize whatever you want -- it just defines mechanisms of self-interested parties participating in markets.
It is absolutely fair to say that the things the US is optimizing for are not what one might like, but the issue is with the objective function, not the algorithm.
European social democracies are still absolutely capitalist, they just provide guardrails and regulations to focus markets more toward producing social output. See the recent US push to green energy -- the government points the optimization machine at a target, and the markets react.
We can and should complain when our government isn't steering investment to the areas we want. When that happens, though, capitalism as a system isn't the problem (and would be just as functional if you incentivized the things you liked instead.)
When I want to go to Canada but my driver takes me to Mexico, I don't blame the car.
>Like: "better having our children killed in school than allowing firearms producers to lose one dollar"
This has nothing to do with firearm producers but the second amendment: the right to bear arms is codified in our constitution. Firearms hold a special legal place.
4. Gun industry now big enough to lobby against any changes to the 2A
Thus, #4 causes the lack of removal of the 2A.
Does it have democratic legitimacy? Probably, but no more so than the 18th had.
Does that contradict "(the preference of the USA is that it is) better having our children killed in school than allowing firearms producers to lose one dollar"? Not at all.
The NRA has 5 million members. Nearly half of American households have a gun. You can't just waive this off as "muh lobbying". Americans like their guns.
Gun owners don't care if sig sauer loses a buck. They care about their cool toys.
5 million is bigger by headcount than Big Tech, while half the households is smaller.
Big tech lobbies for what serves its interests. NRA lobbies likewise. So does Stonewall, effecting change with fewer members and fewer interested parties.
When it comes to guns, what makes the USA different from the rest of the world? Tradition ("we've always had the 2nd A so it must be good") and lobbying ("nothing can prevent this" says only nation on earth where this regularly happens).
In the context of democracy, size is everything. Like, by definition. If the majority of Americans want guns, then you're never going to get a super-majority to vote to take guns away.
> Big tech lobbies for what serves its interests. NRA lobbies likewise.
The difference is that the NRA isn't a trillion dollar corporation. Its millions of individual Americans participating in the democratic process.
Do you think that people should never campaign for what they believe in? That people should not participate in the democratic process? Or do you only think that when the people in question disagree with you?
> In the context of democracy, size is everything. Like, by definition.
But (a) not in the context of lobbying, and (b) that still demonstrates a preference for dead children over lower gun sales.
> Do you think that people should never campaign for what they believe in? That people should not participate in the democratic process? Or do you only think that when the people in question disagree with you?
You're putting words in my mouth there.
They're free to campaign for things that I'm free to denounce as dangerous and myopic.
Abortion isn't done by gun, so that's a red herring.
Also, pro-choice has two disjoint aspects, such that any given pro-choice person may be either one alone or both together:
1. "Are unborn foetuses persons? No, they are not."
2. "Can you force someone to donate a kidney to save someone else's life, which is about the same risk? No, you can't even do that if the donor is already dead."
> We prioritize personal safety, not dollars
You think you do; I argue that the meme that guns provide safety is a false belief promoted by the people with an interest in guns.
Abortion still kills a child. Why is it ok prior to its birth but not afterward? Seems like an arbitrary line to draw.
> You think you do; I argue that the meme that guns provide safety is a false belief promoted by the people with an interest in guns.
That seems ridiculous given that a gun levels the field on attacker vs aggressor. Since you provided no evidence, that could be easily flipped right back around.
If an unborn child isn’t a person, then how come when someone murders a pregnant woman they are charged with 2 murders? Are we saying all of those charges are now invalid and we need to re-hear some cases?
People with the position 1. I gave earlier specifically deny this statement.
I agree the line is arbitrary, which is also why I'm vegetarian — I draw the line for personhood to include many non-humans, and thus think killing (some) animals has moral equivalence to murder.
Conversely, a foetus starts off with no brain, so there is definitely a developmental level where I don't see it as a person — I won't care about squashing a fly, why care about a foetus whose brain is less complex than a fly?
There's some pictures floating around of the foetuses of different species, and it takes a long time for human ones to be differentiable from any others, so a moral position that they are already persons by this point should also make someone vegetarian for the same moral reasons they don't eat babies. (Obviously people don't work like that; consistency just isn't part of how humans do this sort of thing).
I'm in the second category of pro-choice, in that while I take no strong position on the personhood or absence thereof for an unborn foetus (I do take a strong position that embryos are not), I do value bodily autonomy to the level of "you can't force someone to do something as risky as donating a kidney even to save another life". Also that organ donation should be opt-out rather than opt-in, but that's a different topic.
> Why is it ok prior to its birth but not afterward?
We don't even have to think about whether or not the arbitrary line is that side of birth, because adoption is a thing.
It's like how nobody's going to care if barbers sell the hair they cut off, even though it's bad if a surgeon sold someone's amputated leg.
> That seems ridiculous given that a gun levels the field on attacker vs aggressor.
(I'm assuming you meant "attacker vs defender" because attacker and aggressor are synonyms).
It does no such thing outside of war, attackers have first-move advantage. Inside a war, the only reason it gives equality is that you tell who the enemy are well before they're in weapon range.
Also, guns aren't a single thing: a pistol, a hunting rifle, shotgun all have different qualities with regards to damage, range, and accuracy. I'm not going to look up which weapons are and aren't allowed in the USA as a whole (I'm not that interested in foreign law) but even limiting to just pistols gets you a significant variation in accuracy and destructive power.
> If an unborn child isn’t a person, then how come when someone murders a pregnant woman they are charged with 2 murders?
Charges are a legal question not a moral one, and that varies by jurisdiction and time. Whatever the moral reality is, it didn't change with the passage of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unborn_Victims_of_Violence_Act nor does it change when leaving the borders of the USA. However, even here, looking at the background to that law, that would still be analogous to "if someone has ingested a poison which will kill their liver, but they can be saved by going to hospital, is it homicide to kill them before they get to hospital?" as the apparent inspiration for the law was people who wanted kids but the unborn were subjected to fatal injuries before birth.
> Conversely, a foetus starts off with no brain, so there is definitely a developmental level where I don't see it as a person — I won't care about squashing a fly, why care about a foetus whose brain is less complex than a fly?
Except the fetus' brain will develop into the most complex brain on the planet, if left alone. The fly's will not. A fly carries disease as well, that's why we kill them. (Humans also carry disease but only some of us consider them vermin)
> I'm in the second category of pro-choice, in that while I take no strong position on the personhood or absence thereof for an unborn foetus (I do take a strong position that embryos are not), I do value bodily autonomy to the level of "you can't force someone to do something as risky as donating a kidney even to save another life". Also that organ donation should be opt-out rather than opt-in, but that's a different topic.
The choice was already made. There are many ways to continue to have sex but not impregnate or get impregnated. What you're saying here is we must continue to allow this type of birth control to exist. We have pills, condoms, various spermicides, "pulling out", and the rhythm method (probably even forgetting some) and yet we have to continue to allow this "after the fact" method?
> We don't even have to think about whether or not the arbitrary line is that side of birth, because adoption is a thing.
It's like how nobody's going to care if barbers sell the hair they cut off, even though it's bad if a surgeon sold someone's amputated leg.
I have no idea what you're saying here. Viewing a child the same as hair or an amputated leg is a disturbing thought / visual.
> It does no such thing outside of war, attackers have first-move advantage. Inside a war, the only reason it gives equality is that you tell who the enemy are well before they're in weapon range.
It absolutely does. If someone robs you on the street, they are the aggressor. If they have a knife and you have a gun, guess who wins? If both of you have a gun, well now you're equal. The size of the gun doesn't particularly matter in this situation.
> Also, guns aren't a single thing: a pistol, a hunting rifle, shotgun all have different qualities with regards to damage, range, and accuracy. I'm not going to look up which weapons are and aren't allowed in the USA as a whole (I'm not that interested in foreign law) but even limiting to just pistols gets you a significant variation in accuracy and destructive power.
What is this even supposed to mean? Of course different guns have different characteristics. They all use various ammo and have different barrel lengths. Bullet weight, powder amount and barrel length all determine the velocity, and therefore the force, of the bullet impact.
> However, even here, looking at the background to that law, that would still be analogous to "if someone has ingested a poison which will kill their liver, but they can be saved by going to hospital, is it homicide to kill them before they get to hospital?" as the apparent inspiration for the law was people who wanted kids but the unborn were subjected to fatal injuries before birth.
Let's assume the thing growing inside the womb is a child.
Imagine a person you've never met. They will die if not for a miraculous treatment that requires some of your blood everyday for 9 months. But for the treatment to work, it also requires that everyday the person blood is mixed in your body. There is a small chance you'll die because of this treatment.
Should we force you to accept the treatment or should you have the option to not do it?
If you refuse the treatment and the person dies, would it be fair to equate you to a murderer?
You’re creating a twisted, unrealistic example. A pregnancy is not out of the norm and can be stopped prior to impregnating. There is no force, the person made a decision and changed their mind. Murdering a child in the process.
Imagine here is a terrible earthquake and many people need blood transfusion to survive. You happen to have the blood type O negative and know it can be used to save lives. You go to the donation center and right before the needle goes in, you panic and change your mind.
The same day a woman has a miscarriage because of trauma from the earthquake and a lack of emergency blood transfusion. Did you murder that child?
It was later revealed that this woman was 12 years old and raped by her father, but the miscarriage was judged suspicious by the authorities and are charging her with murder.
After all people who get pregnant made that decision. Pregnancy can be stopped prior to impregnation. She probably changed her mind and faked getting hurt in the earthquake. Also if she's a murderer, it's not a stretch to assume she's also a liar. She lied about her father and probably got pregnant by seducing one of her male friend.
Remember people, a child is dead! We have to investigate.
Portraying any of the first ten amendments as an after the fact is beyond dishonest. No version predating the bill of rights was ever run in prod. They decided that those ten features were necessary before they even released the thing.
I'm not American, to even partake at this level I have to Google which amendment is guns, which one is speech, and which one is self-incrimination.
But Googling did reveal a few surprises like #27 being proposed during the same Bill Of Rights era of amendments, it only got ratified in 1992.
And Delaware ratifying the constitution in 1787, the BoR amendments being proposed in 1789, Rhode Island ratifying the constitution in 1790, and the BoR amendments being completed in 1791.
Firearm law has not been a constant through the years. There were pragmatic restrictions that have slowly been eroded and left us with where we are now.
You mean like the assault weapons ban that had no effect on safety yet keeps getting pushed for? Or magazine limits that somehow miss that you can carry and load more than one magazine thereby still accomplishing nothing? Or the red flag laws that were just used to take an individual’s property without due process because someone doesn’t like guns?
Which gun control laws actually work to stop criminals from getting guns? Especially when they can be 3D printed.
Which frankly sounds a lot like “rules for thee, not for me”.
I get that some people love their hobbies, and don’t like to be inconvenienced by the law. But, I find trying to justify gun ownership, and their relationship with abolishing tyrannical governments, childish and comedic to an extreme nowadays. Like, I want a drone, but I’m not going to throw a tantrum every time the FAA issues a new ruling.
We get it. You like guns. You don’t want to give them up. Stop making shit up, you will never stand in arms against the government, and you will not be part of a “well regulated militia”. Hell, I bet all my savings that, if there was a draft right now, to strengthen the military against a genuine and imminent threat, most gun owners would not volunteer, because shooting at cans, and at the clouds during the 4th of July is pretty much all they really do.
> I get that some people love their hobbies, and don’t like to be inconvenienced by the law. But, I find trying to justify gun ownership, and their relationship with abolishing tyrannical governments, childish and comedic to an extreme nowadays. Like, I want a drone, but I’m not going to throw a tantrum every time the FAA issues a new ruling.
The FAA introducing a new ruling around drones cannot lead to a tyrannical gov. Full stop, your example is not the same.
> We get it. You like guns. You don’t want to give them up. Stop making shit up, you will never stand in arms against the government, and you will not be part of a “well regulated militia”.
Now you're getting irrational and can predict the future. Not gonna respond to this part.
> if there was a draft right now, to strengthen the military against a genuine and imminent threat, most gun owners would not volunteer, because shooting at cans, and at the clouds during the 4th of July is pretty much all they really do.
You're talking to a wartime veteran. Please tell me more how I didn't honor my oath.
Clearly you're being juvenile in your opinions and ready to throw a right away because you, just you, don't believe it's valuable. You believe people do not have a right to protection and likely want guns banned so that the left can turn this place into a dictatorship without any resistance.
> You believe people do not have a right to protection and likely want guns banned so that the left can turn this place into a dictatorship without any resistance.
Finally.
You said I’m being “juvenile”. You are clearly delusional.
What would any sane person call someone who thinks that the “left” in the US, whatever that means, is out to create a “dictatorship”? What will your guns do against an Apache helicopter?
If there is a danger to democracy, that would be the loads of people who clutch to their guns thinking that the “left” is coming for them, people who claim that they are “ready to resist”.
Because these paranoid types are two Breitbart articles away from becoming Three Percenters.
> What would any sane person call someone who thinks that the “left” in the US, whatever that means, is out to create a “dictatorship”? What will your guns do against an Apache helicopter?
You call me delusional, then ask what Id do when the gov uses their weapons against its people. Not realizing this is exactly what we’re protecting against and clearly forgot natives have the advantage.
You’re also forgetting that Marxism requires a conversion to a dictatorship, and then that dictator giving their power up to bring in socialism. This should’ve never been said.
The rest of your post is a bigoted insult, which I won’t respond to (and is in fact against the rules here).
Do you think your irrationality changed my mind that the left doesn’t care about kids and in fact wants the murdering of kids to be legal nationwide? Do you think because you called me delusional that I’m more or less willing to have a gun control conversation?
Yes, you solved nothing, disproved nothing. The only thing you were successful at was creating more division and showing just how much the left hates kids and breeding.
You may have noticed that the firearms industry is one of the biggest proponents and lobbyists for the current interpretation of the second amendment. Other interpretations are possible, and of course it can be amended again, if people decide it's harmful. But that's unlikely to happen as long as there's a powerful lobby interested in keeping things the way they are, even if it means hundreds of children are shot in schools every year.
More like it’s unlikely to happen while people like me still exist. Take away the NRA and we’ll just create a new one. Why are some determined to stifle citizens voices?
> Yet the right to free speech and assembly have far more restrictions in place.
That’s patently false. There’s an incredible number of federal and State regulations involved in the purchase, transfer, transport, and even storage of a firearm.
What restrictions on speech and assembly would you consider more onerous than any of those?
I find that most people that claim guns themselves are the problem, and that there aren't already enough restrictions, don't have much or any experience with them.
I don't really know how people manage to read the second amendment any other way than "due to the fact that a militia comprised of every able-bodied person is fundamental to a free society, every person has the right to own, carry, and operate anything that constitutes arms." It's pretty simple, really.
Better go renew my warrantless search and seizure immunity permit, and my journalism permit.
America has an amazing level of freedom of expression, to the point I've seen a lot of Europeans get outright shocked that the concept of "hate speech" doesn't exist in our laws.
It is most definitely not on the air in the US. It is only available through “private” cable and satellite networks. We still have, and enforce censorship laws on public over-the-air broadcasts.
Question. What will it mean for the 2nd amendment when the police and armed forces of the world consists of semi-autonomous bullet proof robots and drones?
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
If guns that fire bullets aren't relevant to the security of a free state does it change the legal arguments?
I think you guys should probably amend the 2nd amendment already
How about if militia isn't relevant to the security of a free state? The US has had a standing army for quite some time now, and by far the most powerful one in the world. And the only thing that looks like a "well regulated militia" is the National Guard.
The second amendment could be interpreted as meaning that only members of the national guard can own guns, but it's not.
> How about if militia isn't relevant to the security of a free state?
This is the interesting thing: in the context of the framers, a standing army would not diminish the importance of the rights of militias at all (and might increase its importance).
Keep in mind that the US declared independence due to perceived government overreach from Britain, which had a huge standing army. One of the primary functions of the second amendment is to ensure that ad hoc militias are possible, to keep the government and its army from overreach.
Corporate political influence in the U.S. depends primarily on the popularity of the products, jobs, and investment returns they produce.
And successful companies create rich people, who sometimes make a lot of personal donations to politicians and parties. That gets lumped in with corporate influence depending on the details, even though they are personal donations.
Just because it’s not perfect doesn’t mean it’s not good or can’t be productive. But I have to also think of all the ways prohibitions have failed.
Possibly, trying to find ways to make government officials less susceptible to outside influence in non traditional ways. Or, in the case of police, paying much better than minimum wage. Where I am, I think they make something like 42,000/yr.
Or maybe they just all need some meditation practice? Some mindfulness and maybe they won’t think they need to soak up so much money.
Because Reagan sold everyone out to corporate greed in the 80's and it's been going straight down from there. Profit above all. Year over year growth to infinity or die.
The US probably has more rights for corporations than anywhere else in the world. That's not all bad for the US. It means with most global industries the corporate HQ and a lot of the money ends up in the US.
Lol loving the complicated answers to this question but as an American I'll tell you that I live in an ontologically evil country that only cares that you survive long enough to reach the height of your productivity. After that you can go kick rocks/suffer death by cancer (and make sure it's on your own dime). 9 times out of 10 the US will consistently pick capital over people.
And yet some of the best and most effective research about preventing and curing cancer happens in the US, and almost entirely with public funding. Reality is not so single-tracked and people aren’t nearly as homogenous and collaborative as you imply.
Because many politicians see individual enrichment as a goal over law making. Corporations pay to prevent consumer protections that would limit their revenue.
US law serves only one thing. Profit. It doesn't matter if it's food safety or criminal justice. You'll find horrible laws everywhere and when you ask why, then the answer will be that they make somebody some money.
20 ppb listed in the EU document is for animal feed materials, not for the actual food. I
EU:
> For maize and all products derived from maize, including processed maize products, maximum limits (μg/kg) of 2,0 ppb for Aflatoxin B1 and 4,0 ppb for sum of Aflatoxins
B1+B2+G1+G2 are set
> For Food (incoming material): Maximum limits (μg/kg) of 5,0 ppb for Aflatoxin B1 and 10,0 ppb for sum of Aflatoxins B1+B2+G1+G2.
> For feed: Feed materials 20 ppb for Aflatoxin B1
That seems to be the opposite of what we watched happen over the past 3 years during the pandemic. You'll remember how much of a hole the USA got in at the beginning, when the CDC's own test was broken but they wouldn't let anybody else do the test either. So we lost the first, most important, weeks in being able to monitor the progress of the virus. And since then, the FDA has steadfastly prevented anyone from creating a vaccine that's effective against whatever happens to be the current variant.
I mean, there clearly is now because people have been saying it. I was curious about the origin and the first instance I see online is a line from Ed Harris in the 2017 movie Geostorm:
"I'm turning the clock back to 1945, when America was a shining city on a hill, not just a bank disguised as a country."
Though it's certainly possible there were earlier formulations.
When I was young my grandma told me an interesting rule of thumb from her childhood in the old country:
If there are no bugs in the grain after it has been stored for a while, don't eat it.
The rationale was that if bugs didn't want to eat it (they didn't have tightly sealed packaging at that time), it was probably chemically contaminated.
I expect she was describing something else. Bugs, especially things like weevils [1] tend to lay microsized eggs in grains of all sort. Even when hermetically sealed they'll be able to hatch and thrive. I tend to buy relatively large quantities of things like rice, flour, etc and finding bugs in hermetically sealed bags after some lengthy time is not uncommon.
It's not bugs getting into your food from the outside, but being packaged into your food! If you don't have bugs it means they've been killed in some way, and one of the easiest to do that is chemical. Incidentally, weevils (the most common) are harmless and tasteless to consume. It just means a bit of extra protein in your food!
Is it extra protein, if they lived only off the rice in the bag? Presumably all the protein inside of them came from rice that would have otherwise been there.
I guess it helps digest and synthesize some of the proteins for you.
We eat grazing animals because they turn grass into muscles (proteins). It's similar for insects. That said, I don't know how the protein amount in one insect compares to the protein amount in rice.
> One of the most oft-repeated stories about Frederick’s relationship with the potato concerns the ingenious tactic of reverse psychology the King embarked on to increase interest in potatoes: rebranding it as a ‘royal vegetable’. By ordering his soldiers to plant potatoes in royal fields and lightly guard the crops, allowing the locals to sneak in and pillage the vegetables – the Prussian king would conclude: what is worth guarding is also worth stealing.
This reminds me of Rory Sutherland's "Lessons from an ad man" where he tells this story, and then follows-up with another myth-like story about Ataturk wanting to modernize Turkey, but rather than ban head coverings for women, he required prostitutes to wear one.
The story about lightly guarding potatoes seems to be common European trope, I've heard it in many countries. Variations include the one you mentioned, and one where potatoes were placed in a warehouse with increased security, in order to attract the attention of the peasants who were allowed to steal them.
I just came across the Frederick the Great story somewhere else this morning. That version also claimed he even told the guards to accept bribes from people trying to steal the potatoes.
Seems to me like a pretty unscientific way to conclude whether a food is edible (or good for you). But it makes sense of course, if you didn't have access to modern science due to poverty or era.
Even modern grain infrastructure relies on delcarations of chemical usage and not itemized testing. Real time testing equipment is prohibitively expensive and lab testing takes too long to do it before mixing a load of grain into a silo. On site tests are done but for indicators of moisture spoilage, protein deterioration and disease, but not chemical contaminants.
There is such a drug, sort of: Disulfiram. Though the effect isn't technically to make alcohol taste foul, it's to make consuming it give an almost instant, terrible hangover.
Some inkcap mushrooms which are otherwise edible have a mycotoxin with the same effect, coprine. There are persistent rumours that other mushrooms can contain some of it too, not verified as far as I know but there's enough poorly understood variation in mushrooms that I wouldn't dismiss the possibility.
Another really interesting one is about eggs. If you buy eggs from a supermarket in the US they will usually need to be refrigerated. But if you go buy eggs straight from a farm (or in many places outside the US) they'll be fine outside for weeks. When eggs are first laid they have a protective outer coating on them, called either the bloom or cuticle.
The external cleaning process mandated by the FDA results in the destruction of the bloom, which leaves the eggs vulnerable to all sorts of nasty stuff. Moving abroad one of the weirdest things was seeing eggs, on occasion a bit 'dirty', stacked at room temperature for days to weeks. Turns out it's perfectly safe!
Eggs are a major driver of salmonella incidence globally. Washing the eggs greatly reduces the incidence rate relative to not washing eggs. This can be seen clearly in the statistics when countries start washing eggs.
Statistically speaking, unwashed eggs are not "perfectly safe". It is the reason countries started washing eggs.
Which stats? Only 4 countries/regions wash/refrigerate their eggs (US, Canada, Japan, Scandinavia) and the reason the USDA gives for requiring such is freshness. [1]
The US washed its eggs to reduce rates of salmonella, it is literally in the article you linked to. That it was effective can be seen by incidence rates. The difference in salmonella rates between e.g. the US and many European countries is almost perfectly accounted for by the difference in handling eggs. With a little googling you can find plenty of papers on the subject.
The OECD and other sources rate the US, Canada, and Scandinavia has having the highest food quality and safety in the world. It goes beyond salmonella, they apply the same zealous cleanliness requirements to many other food products. This isn’t controversial, it is on the OECD website among many others.
Famously, many EU food products could not be imported into the US unless they were processed in Scandinavian food processing facilities, because other European countries had facilities that did not meet US standards. It was good business for countries like Denmark for a long time.
You failed to provide a single reference, continue making grand unsupported claims, and also are making imaginary claims about the article referenced above.
Eggs stay fresher longer in the fridge. It's as simple as that. Whether you refrigerate them depends often on how long they are going to be hanging around.
Because it could be covered in salmonella and other things. Even just washing them might not be enough if you’re not careful to not cross contaminate. Washing them and keeping them cold works great.
It’s funny to me that elsewhere in this thread people are complaining about how Americans are less stringent with food safety, and yet here you are getting lambasted for defending an American food safety practice that objectively has a slight increase in safety, but at an arguably high cost.
As others have pointed out, just washing them is exactly the wrong thing to do. But if you don't wash them, you don't need to keep them cold. Not washing them works great too.
But they could be covered in poison. So we clean the poison off which has the side effect of requiring they be put in the fridge. They stay fresh longer too. I don't know why much of Europe is OK with having poisonous eggs. There are hundreds of Salmonella outbreaks in Europe because of eggs every year.
We just don't eat the egg shell. Poison on the outside doesn't matter much as long as it doesn't get in.
There are hundreds of salmonella outbreaks in Europe every year, but also in the US. Salmonella is mostly fought in the animals rather than in the eggs. But both the European and American way of handling eggs works.
from that page: shelf life of a room temp egg is 21 days; for a refrigerated one it's 50 days. Eggs are washed to control salmonella (eggs are also somewhat dirty when laid, having likely touched poop). US started washing eggs in 1970. Japan started in the 1990's after a salmonella outbreak. Scandinavia also washes. Countries that don't wash-and-refrigerate can require vaccinating chickens against salmonella. It is also commonly recommended to wash unwashed eggs before cracking them.
The major component missing here is why the US washes eggs, which is that they don't vaccinate against salmonella. The places you're observing that store eggs outside a fridge probably all have some kind of poultry vaccination program, for example, the red lion on UK eggs: https://www.egginfo.co.uk/british-lion-eggs
The USDA claims the only countries that wash/refrigerate their eggs are the US, Canada, Japan, and Scandiland. The whole argument against washing the eggs is to protect against bacteria, salmonella among them. The thing they focus on primarily for the reason we still wash/refrigerate them is freshness. They carried out a study and found washed/refrigerated eggs were fresher after 15 weeks than those stored using other methods.
I think the lack of refrigeration is mostly a convenience for supermarkets and transport, at least in the UK. I don't think I've ever encountered a household that didn't refrigerate their eggs after purchase, but they're almost always on regular shelves at sale.
It has the potential to be contaminated with salmonella, and they felt mitigating that risk added enough value to counterbalance the loss of the bloom.
There is a lot of truth in that. If no other mammals are eating those bright red berries in the woods, you probably don’t want to either.
If mature rodents are unsure about a food source they’ll wait for some young go-getter to have a bite then watch to see what happens to them. I put poison packs everywhere in my apartment but after the first couple died none of the other mice would touch them.
There are a few exceptions to this rule however. For example saponins. One of the most common plant poisons in the natural world that might kill your dog. If you ever read an ethnobotany piece and it mentions that a certain plant is used to kill fish in a pond, it's likely a saponin-rich plant (which also means it's likely to be good to make soap out of). But since these compounds are so common humans have evolved specific enzymes to break this down and they leave us mostly unaffected (indeed some have even been turned into important drugs).
It's kinda like lignin. When wood first evolved, there was nothing that could break it down. And for thousands of years the world was "littered" with wood from dead trees until fungi finally learned how to break it down. I'd say plastics might be the next lignin as we see more and more organisms already learning to break it down, but there are too many different types of plastics that I doubt all of them could be broken down
I think the point I'm trying to make is that the "toxicity" of a chemical or compound is often in proportion to how much time the rest of the ecosystem has had to evolve a way to deal with it
But there was also thread here on news.ycombinator about a paper which says that this theory is not entirely true.
I can't recall the paper. I think, paper said "the lignin breakdown by fungi" was already invented.
The abundance of dead wood (which became coal) is described by existence of wast marshes.
I'm sorry without link is my text not valid very much. Maybe someone could find the paper and link it here.
> A widely accepted explanation for this peak in coal production is a temporal lag between the evolution of abundant lignin production in woody plants and the subsequent evolution of lignin-degrading Agaricomycetes fungi, resulting in a period when vast amounts of lignin-rich plant material accumulated. Here, we reject this evolutionary lag hypothesis, based on assessment of phylogenomic, geochemical, paleontological, and stratigraphic evidence.
Right but our entire infrastructure has been built to resist that. Most likely it'll happen at a slow enough pace that we could adapt, but just imagine if soil fungi could suddenly eat PVC pipes
Most traditional architectural techniques didn't try to resist rot so much as plan around it. I.e. have the structural integrity so that you could take out and replace parts of the building without the whole thing coming down. It's why Japanese temples are the oldest standing buildings around today
I imagine we'll have to relearn some of those lessons at some point
I think a lot about this. How on a geological timescale, most of our rubbish will be compressed down to a layer of oil with a bunch of increasingly heavy metals and radioactive isotopes towards the bottom. It'll be a rich vein for building a civilization for whoever comes along in half a billion years. (My bet is on the octopus).
On the odd occasion they’d get mice in the house, my parents living in Melbourne had difficulty would have difficulty getting rid of them.
Five years ago I moved out into a tiny rural town, and saw and heard mice very regularly (the house’s previous owner had only been around every couple of weeks). But I haven’t had the slightest difficulty in slaying them: I put a couple of traps in areas I’d seen mice traversing, and was catching them within hours, occasionally as much as a day or two, from hearing or seeing evidence of the mouse. (And if I saw one, I’d give it a verbal warning to flee for its life. Don’t know if any heeded it.) Within a few days I stopped even bothering with bait. In that first year, I lost count somewhere around fifty. Each year the number has dropped. This year, I’ve had only one since last autumn (it’s now mid-summer), slain before I even saw or heard it.
Anyway, we decided (lightheartedly) that it must be the difference between town mouse and country mouse.¹
¹ See Aesop’s fables, if you’re not familiar with the expression.
Darwin agrees. I've watched live how this goes with a young family of rats. The first 2 got caught in the trap and the others were already pretty scared off by the closing mechanism kicking in. Left it like that for a couple of minutes, then I put the caught ones somewhere else then reinstalled the trap. The next 3 nor the mother came anywhere near the trap. Not even after moving it to a different location, nor with different types of food inside, nor with a different trap with a somewhat different shape.
Similar idea about corn. Select the corn with insects - they are your taste testers. Of course, remove the critters before boiling your corn-on-the-cob.
This is nasty but these wasps and the fig trees that are their home are the subject of one of the best nature documentaries I've ever seen, The Queen of Trees:
If you can locate a good HD copy it's worth waiting and watching that. Ian Holm narrates the stories of a bunch of different animals, from fig wasps to other bugs and larger creatures like bats, monkeys and even humans that rely on the tree. It has some of the most horrifying but also incredible imagery I've seen in a nature show and some real groaner lines from Holm to boot. My friends and I watch it every year or two and it never fails to amaze me.
Fig wasp cannot lay eggs in the female figs (those that we eat). They reproduce only in the male figs (caprifigs). But they cannot differentiate them so they enter the female figs, pollinating while entering. After they enter they hardly can escape, as their wings are lost when trying to enter the tiny hole.
The fig wasp is tiny, like a millimeter. Actually the absolute majority of all wasps are - we think of a sizeable hornet when we hear "wasp" but those are the mythical giants of that world.
Unless you go really looking for it, you wouldn't even see the fig wasp. If there was a visible wasp it's likely something that was simply feeding on it.
This reminds me that figs are extremely controversial in the vegan community for this exact reason. To me it seems a little silly given the inevitable consumption of insects in food, but to each their own I guess.
Figs are not even remotely controversial in the vegan community. As far as I can tell, it's a fringe topic and the vast majority of vegans don't consider figs to be non-vegan.
In my opinion, in order for this to actually be a controversial topic amongst vegans, the following would need to be true:
1. The variety of fig that you're most likely to eat would require wasps to pollinate them.
2. Fig farmers would need to directly breed, control, or otherwise manipulate/exploit fig wasps in order to ensure that their trees would be pollinated.
My research tells me that neither of these are true.
Food grown using manure is much less vegan and even that isn't widely discussed in the vegan community.
My experience with vegans is that they're pretty pragmatic and apparently the "controversial" topics (figs, honey) are usually brought up by meat-eaters who want to paint them as hypocrites or make fun of them.
Don’t know what vegan communities you’re a part of, but none of the ones I’ve been in care about fig wasps, or the other incidental insects that inevitably get eaten accidentally due to eating lots of vegetables.
Yes figs are pollinated by a species of wasp that literally dies inside of it. There are a few varieties of the common fig that self-pollinate so if you don't have a dead wasp in your fig that's actually rather uncommon. To be fair though the males are the ones that die and they're rather small so you likely wouldn't notice it. Just a small protein boost
It's actually quite a striking example of coevolution. There are hundreds (855 according to the Catalog of Life) of different species of figs and almost just as many corresponding species of fig wasps for each species.
Makes me wonder if we should think of the fig wasp more like an organ of the fig than a separate individual. Just like we do with mitochondria which at some point were a separate living organism and still maintains a separate set of DNA
> figs are pollinated by a species of wasp that literally dies inside of it
Are figs like other fruits in that a flower is pollinated and then the fruit grows out of it?
I bought a house 2 years ago and have a fig tree in the back yard. The first summer, the tree produced only about a dozen or two figs, but I never got any as they disappeared as soon as they started turning color (wildlife). This summer, the tree produced nearly 100 little figs but none of them ever matured/ripened and none were taken by wildlife. I didn't notice that many bees/wasps in the area of that tree (though all the other fruiting plants in my yard did extremely well - and I got to eat almost 1/3 of it!).
I'm just wondering if the tree produces the fig regardless of pollination but that pollination is required for ripening. Or if pollination is required to produce the fig at all (like how most fruiting plants work).
You got what is called Smyrna type fig - the type that needs pollination by the fig wasp in order to ripen. Since you seem to not have such a colony of wasps around, the figs won't ripen. If you want to grow and eat really good figs that doesn't require pollination, there're varieties plenty to choose from. You need to look and buy from a reputable nursery, not from generic store or nursery. Check with the community at ourfigs.com
Now that I know this, I will probably remove the tree - eventually. It's near the deck and I don't want wasps around. Additionally, there's a big snake that likes to sun itself around the tree. Not that I mind so much, but a lot of visitors get really nervous!
One of these years, I'll get a better variety and plant it further up the hill, and move the stones that hold the heat that the snake likes so he can go hang out up there :)
Wow what a great community, thanks for sharing. Got any other similar communities? There's also:
* www.bananas.org/
* tropicalfruitforum.com/
* permies.com/forums
I'm keeping a list because I find it difficult to find actual human stories about their experiences with certain plants and I'd like to some day build something to parse online plant-centric communities like these. Especially if they're this niche!
Store bought varieties of the common fig are likely a self-pollinating variety but the wild variety of the common fig, as well as most of the rest of the 800+ species of figs, are not self-pollinating
The conflict regards eating meat right, not relying on other organisms for their production? Because then a lot of fruits or other types of plants can't be eaten if they rely on pollination, right?
If that's the case, then a lot of foods can be considered not vegan by that definition. That includes some trees that are fertilized by dead animals, inadvertently, or by petroleum based fertilizers. Death of wasps by a very natural process is similar in spirit to the latter two. Not just eating meat (which eggs can sort of be considered, same for drinking milk).
I wouldn't say a wasp that died in a fig was exploited intentionally by any human, at least, unless the wasps are introduced to figs in order for them to pollinate them. If the absence of action also is considered exploitation, then eating fruit from a tree that a rat has died under could be considered exploitation of animals by that criteria.
Yes, this is a bit of a reductio ad absurdum, but a dead wasp in a fig is already a bit down that road. There is certainly a difference between drinking milk from a cow and a (likely) accidentally dead wasp in a fig.
I’m not a vegan, but I think this take is way off. If you purposely exploit an animal for food, especially in unfavourable conditions, like putting chickens in cages and harvesting their eggs, farming animals for meat, that’s not vegan.
If you are out in the woods and eat the fruit of a tree that an animal died under and fertilised, that’s fine. It probably also doesn’t extend to animals that were dead long enough to turn into oil.
California's almond industry is notorious for the devastating effects it has on honeybees and the diseases it spreads. By that definition, California almonds are also not vegan
Interesting. We had a fig tree growing up, and I must have eaten hundreds or thousands of them as a kid. I never remember seeing wasps, and I'm pretty sure I would have noticed!
That's because there weren't any wasps. Only some fig varieties depend on them. Parthenocarpic cultivars don't (however the resulting fruits are sterile I think).
It seems that normal fig wasps do dissolve with how long it takes to grow the fruit after pollination, but the wasps they found were separate from the normal ones and may have entered later
It's a bit more remarkable than you're making it out to be. There are 855 species of Ficus (figs) and almost every one of them has a corresponding species of fig wasp. A wasp that pollinates basically only that species of fig
The figs you buy at a supermarket are of a self-fertile variety of the common fig (Ficus carica), but even the wild variety of this species is not self-fertile
So, I have a touchy stomach as most Americans, but I am also a pacific islander and have gutted fish many times while in Palau. I once dated someone who found eating shrimp with a head difficult as it "had eyes looking back at me." It definitely is good we have an FDA (and the equivalent in many countries) that keep food clean, but people need to remember and realize the food they eat was alive, interacted with other living things, and like figs, even grew because of them.
I'm not sure if there is a remedy (or really, if it's such a bad reaction many including myself have that it requires any remedy), I guess it's just good to be aware.
Pretty sure that if it convenience stores started hanging the head of the animal you are buying body parts of just over those (e.g. by law) the amount of vegetarians would increase 10 times or more, some of those people who would likely convert know this, for them anything that helps them avoid thinking about meat as recently living beings is a feature not a bug.
I think it's mostly habit, I remember seeing lamb's heads at the butcher when I was a kid[0] and found it a bit unsettling but that did not prevent me from enjoying lamb chops.
The more we become detached from thinking of meat as animals the harder the impact of realizing it again could be, but if it became normalized people would just stop being shocked quickly.
I thought it was this way in English because the wealthy aristocrats (Norman invaders) spoke French, so they used the French words for the meat on their plates (beef, lamb, pork, etc) while the poor peasants who raised the animals called them by their Anglo-Saxon Germanic names (cow, sheep, pig, etc.)
I know that 'beef' is derived from the french word 'boef', but isn't lamb simply the juvenile form of a sheep?
I was under the impression that 'lamb' meat was from a juvenile sheep, and 'sheep meat' would be from an adult animal, or is 'lamb' the general term for sheep meat in english?
Mutton is the term for meat from a mature sheep, but it is rarely sold outside of halal and speciality butchers in the UK these days, which is a pity as it's better for stews.
Lamb is meat from a young sheep - raised to be eaten young.
Mutton is meat from an older sheep, generally from sheep no longer good for wool production, too old to bear lambs, etc.
Mutton is a relative rarity outside the farm gate in shops and city butchers .. in an economic sense as soon as a sheep is big enough and well fed enough to be sold on to super market chains, why invest further time in that animal?
Unless, of course, wool production and| lamb production (ie. older ewes and some rams).
Almost all of them. English doesn’t because the word for the animal is Germanic from Old English (pig, cow, sheep) and the word for the meat is from Norman French (pork from porc, beef from boeuf, mutton from mouton).
While this is the case for almost all animals and their meat in Japanese, oddly enough lamb meat is ラム肉 ramu-niku, where ramu is loaned from English "lamb". The animal is 羊 hitsuji, but while 羊肉 youniku is possible, you'd rarely if ever use that in speech (and I had to look up the onyomi reading!).
That said, lamb is quite rare in Japan, it's eaten primarily up north in Hokkaido.
> if it convenience stores started hanging the head of the animal you are buying body parts of just over those (e.g. by law) the amount of vegetarians would increase 10 times
If Apple store started hanging pictures of mine workers who produced the rare earth materials that went into the phone and living conditions of the minimum wage factory workers in Vietnam who assembled the phone their sales would go down alot.
Not because of empathy though, people know that and don’t give a single one. It would be simply a bad advertisement, as if Apple started talking about sshfs, open source and other geeky topics in their presentations. It would simply become unluxury.
For a similar reason people prefer packaged meat and frozen fish at a supermarket and avoid non-ventilated rooms with piles of meat and fish, because the smell is undelicate and associates with lower standards.
Pretty sure top CEOs would feel irritated as well if they had to watch and listen about their wagies’ unembellished life conditions for an hour everyday.
We are much more selfish than ignorant. I’d say most people aren’t ignorant at all. They are just okay with it as long as it stays away.
Ever been to Vietnam or any other country in SE Asia? They literally hang livestock (usually a goat or pieces of cow) out on the open road as an advertisement to come eat at a restaurant or buy meat from a vendor. Go to any wet market and you'll see every kind of animal laid out in pieces on tables covered in flies and whatever else...
Not in the Balkans, people love spit roasted lamb, the spits goes through the mouth, you can even get the head served on a plate. Living in the country side, nothing gets wasted, my folks would eat beef tongue, chicken soup would have chicken feet in it, and so on.
I wouldn't count of it, the cultural and historical context is pretty different with Asians (if this experiment was done in America), and even pretty different in general; I don't think it would reduce more than 50% of meat eaters but close, we have seen strong graphics work in other context like cigarette boxes so it's not rare to be unable to "get use to it".
This does not apply to large swaths of Asia, which comprises the majority of the world’s population. Which societies, cultures, or regions do you mean, exactly?
Pretty common practice in butcher shops in the Middle East, Central Asia, Iran, China, South East Asia and Japan. India is an exception, although some places in meatloving states such as the Southern states still do that.
There is no beter sign that the meat you buy is fresh so. And, in thay regard, propably better for everyone involved, including the animal, than meat sold pre-packed in supermarkets, where the animals led short, miserable lives in some agro-industrial "farm".
Shops in my Indian hometown and in England regularly do this with buffalo heads, ox heads, goat heads, etc. People buy those at a premium to make specific delicacies.
Ah for God's sake. I am an inveterate carnivore, but every day I learn how badly we torture animals in the name of mass production. I certainly dislike buying meat and fish from a supermarket, instead of the small family farms I usually get it from.
> Eyestalk ablation is currently prohibited in Europe for organic production.
I believe you should buy the most ethically raised/sourced meat you can afford and to not judge those who can’t afford the price of such high standards for raising livestock.
There was no judgment towards the meat buyer in my comment at all. The issue I have is with big factory farming, optimising for cost over every other metric.
Access to healthy and ethical food consumption does have a economic/class line drawn around it but that doesn't mean that a person who is decrying what should be considered substandard sourcing and production of food is mocking the plight of those who can't afford it (and often don't even have access to it).
I don't mean to be squeamish about this, but I'm glad I'm not a fig eater. I know fig wasps are totally normal, but I assumed they'd be completely dissolved or at least unrecognisable. Finding not only recognisable wasps but also many other insects is a bit of a shock to me.
But the article says it's not uncommon to find insects in stored food. So what other insects have I been eating? My fruit consumption is mostly limited to bananas, apples, grapes, and the occasional strawberry or plum. I do know that fruit flies like a banana, and we've had enough drosophila infestations that I'm under no illusions about my accidental consumption of them.
Excuse my naive question, but is this something I should worry about at all in buying figs? I don’t mind the idea of eating insects but I’m trying to understand how noticeable this would be from a textural/visual/taste perspective.
The figs you generally buy at a supermarket are usually of a self-fertile variety of the common fig (or are sprayed with a specific hormone to induce fruiting) but almost all of the 800+ other species of figs have their own corresponding species of fig wasps that pollinate just that one species of fig. Luckily for you these wasps are tiny and you're very unlikely to notice them. Just a minor protein boost to your fruit
With fresh figs, you're supposed to turn them inside out when you eat them. If you really wanted, I guess you could pick out the wasp if it's still noticeably intact.
It's a joke about the plot of The Last of Us, which pins the zombie outbreak on a fictional cordyceps variant that zombifies people (inspired by ones infecting ants or spiders).
I know, I was also joking, and I mistakenly assumed that would be obvious because who would write, "oh no I just ate some cordyceps!!" but then I looked it up, and I guess you can in fact eat those, and people do, so the joke is on me.
I'm Turkish and fresh figs are readily available in season in Turkey. My dad has thought me to always turn a fresh fig inside out and use my eyeballs to check for bugs before I devour one. It's more common than you think.
There's a fantastic book, called the secret life of groceries by Benjamin Lorr. In it, he mentions that at the FDA they call Trader Joe's "Recall Joe's" for their disturbingly high number of recalls
I read it in a book and thought it explained a lot of what our corporate, and media driven society has become. There are agendas and you can almost track their movement, and how the window of what is socially acceptable has moved. I think everyone should know and study the overton window concept.
Let’s hope my wife never sees this article or she might stop eating altogether.
I know there is all sorts of insect stuff in food but as long as it’s measured in parts per million then ok just don’t think about it. There is a lot about food that it helps to not think about. ;)
Believe it or not but before Gordon Ramsey was making a name for himself as a professional a-hole he had a really great show in the UK called F-Word which tried to educate people about where their food came from, and it would often follow various food animals from birth to slaughter to being prepared for a meal. It was very informative and one of the best things he has ever done, it’s a real shame it doesn’t translate well to US audiences.
(And probably most US audiences would be horrified how food animals are raised over here - no green pastures nor doting farmers tending their herds and flocks)
Figs are pollinated by fig wasps that die in the fruit. So I think figs are a pretty unique case and not indicative of something you have to worry about in most other fruit
There are 855 species of figs and almost every single one of them has a corresponding species of fig wasp that pollinates only that fig
"Most are not" only applies to figs you buy at the grocery store that are a variety of the Ficus carica species. This variety is sometimes able to fruit without pollination (sometimes requiring application of a fruiting hormone).
But the vast majority of figs are not the common fig and not this specific variety of the common fig
On Dutch television they showed that sun-dried tomatoes often contain insect parts. When drying in the sun (in Turkey) they attract insects and washing does not remove everything. No reason to worry was the message.
> This reminds me of what I read somewhere about how, when vegetarian Indians started living in England in large numbers they would often have dietary deficiences. The story was that traditional processing left a lot of insects, and the much needed nutrients they contained, in their diets. Industrial processing of the same foods did not.
> Source: “in the mid-1970s it was found that orthodox Hindus who had been quite healthy on a vegan diet in their native India began to suffer from a high incidence of metaloblastic anemia after living for some time in England consuming the same diet. The cause was traced to vitamin B-12 deficiency, which in India was prevented by insect contamination of grains.” (pp. 168-169, “An orchard invisible : a natural history of seeds” by Jonathan W. Silvertown.)
Oh, I've tried the portrait-orientation template, it left everyone around confused.
I always reccomend his lab notebook post [0], although I think he has edited it through the years. The testing of different writing tools against different solvents is just great.
I've purchased many different brands of dried figs and 90% are coming from Turkey, which all have bugs, bug poo or mold in them. The fresh figs I purchased were from either the US or Brazil and didn't have this problem but were extremely expensive.
I don't know which grade is imported by which brand, but we eat a lot of dried figs here (in Turkey), and I know no one felt sick after eating, even considerable amount of these things.
Fresh figs are so expensive because they're extremely delicate and have extremely short shelf life if produced naturally.
Human body is much more resilient than it looks and our food contains much more than meets the eye. Somebody noted FDA's limits about bugs, so I'll not reiterate it here.
The wasps are how figs pollinate. They're meant to die there. So if you're eating figs that lack a dead wasp it's likely because it's had a hormone applied to it to induce fruiting despite not being pollinated
It applies to almost every single one of the 855 recognized species of figs. There are cultivars and techniques to make the common fig fruit without being pollinated, but I wouldn't characterize it as a "myth"
It's going to be okay, the human system can cope with a lot (both physically and mentally). This amount of unexpected stuff in the food is considered normal, in fact, even encouraged. The immune system in particular suffers when people are placed in an overly sterile environment.
Ever had your breads start growing blue stuff, while sitting out on the counter? Ever stop to think that those things were growing there for a couple days, before they got big enough to see?
The similar thought that stuck with me was regarding the human immune system. The thought that there's a myriad of things constantly happening in the human body, a continuous contest of different lifeforms, and that the immune system is the things that tries to keep on top of it all. Sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. It really makes me think just how complex, interconnected, ever-changing everything is.
When I was working in a bacteria research lab I often thought about how cool/terrible it would be to have magic glasses to actually see the invisible, biologically thriving worlds that are present on basically every surface of this planet, in the style of the movie 'they live'. [1] It would be either terrifyingly fascinating or fascinatingly terrifying.
This invisible world is even on all of the surfaces in and around our bodies, right now! We are all each host to a personalized ecosystem of microbial organisms. Something like 1-3 percent of 'your' body mass actually belongs to other organisms that we can't see.
P.S. all reading this pls stay up to date on the tetanus vaccine! It's not just in rusty nails, it's pretty much everywhere.
There are infinite parallel universes. We co-exist with many of them, able to affect them only in the grossest, most indirect ways. Often we can only observe them with special tools and by inference and detection of signals subject to much other noise.
I can rant about the interconnection of our microbiomes to the larger macro-biome (made up of the microbiomes of everything else around you) and how that makes things like living in the woods with hounds a better lifestyle than city life... but thats close to preaching :)
I do like the woods and the hounds but I'm willing to roll the dice in the name of hedonism. I'm down to be a party/war barge for my little microbiological amigos. No harm no foul, game recognize game etc. Jeez, I am so high right now.
Let's not forget Mimolette... we were staying in Paris, hungry; I hit up a local bodega (or whatever all-night store is in French) and bought a package of what looked to me like nice aged Cheddar.
Back in the hotel, we are pigging out on this delicious french cheese when my son (14 yrs old, knows everything) mentions that the cheese we are enjoying almost surely was infested with live mites.
Would someone with a severe allergy to wasp venom go into anaphylactic shock from eating this? I know a guy who works in a vineyard and has to take some pretty nasty wasp venom shots every couple months in case he gets stung.
I used to buy and eat organic brussel sprouts from Trader Joe's. Then one day, for some reason, I decided to take a closer look, and found a little green worm crawling about. After removing it, I found another, and another, until I lost both the count and my appetite.
I read that it's normal for brussel sprouts to have these kinds of worms in them, so I must have eaten lots and lots of them. Shrugs, but I can't stand the sight of the worms, so I have never bought brussel sprouts, anywhere, ever since.
I still eat them at restaurants. But only if they're fried or grilled, because that decreases the chances that I'll see a worm.
Unfortunately thanks to this article I'll probably avoid dried figs now because I can't disassociate the visuals.
Raspberry would often have insects (including what I guess are stinky bug larvae), salads, persimmons, grapes, abricots, plums, chestnuts to name a few fruits that often carry either worms in the fruit or over.
It seems like insects are halal only if they have a "clean" diet. So things like cockroaches are haram but locusts and fig-inhabiting insects are halal because they feast on what humans feast.
If you do find a wasp, then it's a good sign you're getting quality fruit. Figs are dependent on fig wasps to pollinate so if your fig doesn't have one it was either sprayed with a specific hormone to induce fruiting or is of a variety specifically bred to be self-fertile
.. a neighbours 6 yr old daughter had to be rushed to the ER and was sourced back to the figs she ate minutes before. She had to be intubated, that's how serious her esophageal constriction and anaphylactic shock was. While rare, those with growing/compromised immune systems should be aware, esp. Organic since no chemicals are used.
Dried figs are very susceptible to Aflatoxin B1(1) which is a very potent carcinogen from fungi. US food safety regulations allow 2-10 times more aflatoxin B1 in food compared to EU.
During my work, I had a chance to visit dried fig producers and saw even a couple of contaminated figs spreading to the rest of the stock like wildfire.
What you can do is to check your dried figs under UV light, and it should not shine. Here's an example image(2) I found.
Source: I have worked in the company as a machine vision engineer to develop aflatoxin detection systems with UV light.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aflatoxin_B1
2: https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/21073?page...