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or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2061731/Loyd-Grossman-curry-sauce-Victims-botulism-case-brother-sister-10.html and
“The product recall relates to 350g jars of Loyd Grossman Korma sauce with a best-before date of February 2013 and a batch code of 1218R 07:21.”
So, what’s the story behind these movies? Some animator likes ripping stories direct from the headlines?
Maybe if someone hired an animation of “Bin Laden determined to strike in the US”, things would have been different? http://newsdirect.nma.com.tw/SingleItem.aspx?asset_id=OEM_20111102_OINT_002_V1#
This is a Japanese company that intends to make visual interpretations of news stories on the theory that the visual interpretation makes them easier to understand.
I post (some of) them because I like to observe the subtle effects of trans-cultural transformation, ranging form overall them to facial expression to the very very disguised Japanese accent of the narrators.
Glad you asked, I was wondering if anyone noticed!
I’d like to know how the food was contaminated – do they use some materials that sit and gather mold before being put in? Ordinarily I’d expect a few bad ingredients to be diluted enough in the batch that there wouldn’t be enough toxin to poison someone.
The speech sounds unnatural but I would never have guessed it was Japanese.
I believe that Clostridium botulinum survives and grows inside the containers it has contaminated, and produces the toxin therein. So it takes only a tiny bit of it initially to cause enough toxin to form (eventually) to be dangerous.
If the toxin does form in canned food, it is normally broken down by cooking. But, if the food is not cooked, that obviously does not happen.
This food would have been processed to kill the initial bacterium, but obviously something went wrong with that step (probably)
In the old days when people home canned green beans for example they were often sources of botulism, because they were not cooked in a pressure cooker at 15 lbs for the right length of time. It also happens less with acid foods than others so this is why tomatoes for example can be canned in a water bath of boiling water. Since this stuff has been well known for at least 50 years its clear that someone did not do the right thing during the canning process.
Except some newer varieties of tomatoes are said to have less acid than older varieties and thus need the extra heat and time.
In 1971 a man ate an from an uncooked can of soup and died of botulism poisoning. The vichyssoise was intended to be served cold. The soup was sold as a standard commercial product, just like the curry sauce. Normal cooking (176 F) for 10 minutes would have destroyed the dangerous toxin.
The company became bankrupt and food safety improved.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Bon_Vivant_botulism_case
Botulism is an anaerobic bacteria which thrives in sealed jars and cans unless adequately sterilized.
Since I’ve never actually done canning, I’ll leave the precise discussion of acidity to others.