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Murder most foul by green beans A Canadian primer to botulism

There’s a wonderful scene in a Joyce Carol Oates story. Or was it an Atwood tale? Doesn’t matter because the concept is so quirky:

A young bride, determined to be a good homemaker, cans all her summer vegetables merrily away. Later, a jar of tainted canned green beans does in her mother-in-law amidst much anxiety and guilt, not so very much of it seemingly suffered by the earnest young homemaker.

Great idea, thought I. Faulty canning as murder weapon, intentional or not, only to read about same more recently in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres . Ginny, the sympathetic daughter, tries to do in her sister who stole her lover by mixing poisonous water hemlock into homemade canned sausages. Wicked.

Best to watch out for those women with homemade canning weapons, or at least offer them their due respect.

I’ve long admired people with the courage to “put up” preserves, jams and jellies this time of year. I would always worry about killing someone because I got a little sloppy with sterilizing things or didn’t heat them up to the right temperature or something.

I think it stems from early experiences of opening a homemade jar of pear jam or crabapple jelly and seeing a skiff of greenish mould on the paraffin wax seal. I’d watch in horror as a matronly elder skimmed it off and pooh-poohed the whole affair as she spread the jelly on my sandwich, slyly admonishing, “Oh, that’s not going to hurt you.” No wonder I can eat street food anywhere in the world today.

Then there were the visits to the cellars of distant cousins or friends whose mom asked you to bring up a jar of whatevers for dinner from the basement. There you’d spy them: Jars of canned apricots looking like bulbous beige mushrooms, faded beans the colour of rubber boots, pickled beets with fizzy white bubbles on top, all of them sporting labels with dates. Hey, I might have been little but I could count. And pass on the canned whatevers served for dinner.

Now suddenly, the canned green beans murder story is not so funny.

Loblaws and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency are warning consumers that cans of No Name French Style Green Beans are being recalled from the marketplace because they may be contaminated with Clostridium botulinum , the bacteria that causes botulism. Wisconsin-based Lakeside Foods Inc. is also involved in a recall.

The thing about botulism is that the food may not look or smell spoiled (so much for those of us who look at and sniff the old leftovers we find in the back of the fridge to see if they are okay to eat). But it can cause serious illness or death in severe cases. It may cause nausea, vomiting, fatigue, dizziness, headache, double vision, dry throat, respiratory failure and paralysis.

There’s the famous tale of the doctor who realized he’d ingested botulism after it was too late. He documented his own slow and agonizing death as piece by piece of his body was paralyzed. I’d like to think I’d be that methodical and scientifically minded under the circumstances.

Clostridium botulinum is the arch-enemy of the canning process. It’s also used to make Botox. You poor vane Botoxing people, you — spreading poisonous spores all over your faces!

According to Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking , Clostridium botulinum is a bacterium that lives in soil and thrives in low-acid, airless conditions (oxygen is toxic to it). So canned things like low-acid green beans can be a sucker waiting to be had.

The bacteria also can’t grow in highly concentrated sugar solutions like honey or corn syrup. (However, mothers should note that when a sweetener like honey is diluted in the low-oxygen, low-acid digestive system of an infant, the spores can grow and produce the toxin. Ergo honey as no-no for babies.)

If Clostridium botulinum finds the right conditions it is able to reproduce spores that contain the botulinum toxin, a deadly nerve toxin that’s one of the most poisonous naturally occurring substances on Earth.

If we believe Wikipedia, less than a microgram can kill a person, a drop could kill 100,000, and a pound of it could kill the entire human race. Ergo it’s potential as a bio-weapon — and here we thought those were just innocent housewives fooling around with garden produce.

McGee, a qualified scientist, explains that the botulism toxin is destroyed by boiling, but the dormant spores it produces are very hardy and can survive even prolonged boiling.

Unless they are killed by the extreme conditions of higher-than-boiling temperatures, which require a pressure cooker, the spores will proliferate into active bacteria when the jar or can cools down and the toxin accumulates, waiting for our innocent tummies. He suggests that one precaution you could take when ingesting any canned goods is to boil them before eating.

As for a visual sign that you should toss and not eat, it’s the pressures of gases produced by the bacterial growth that makes tinned goods bulge. Looks like a fat roly-poly can? Then out it goes. But remember, food may look and smell perfectly fine and still be contaminated, and not likely by water hemlock.

Not to put you off canned goods, homemade or otherwise. They can be delicious — I’m primarily thinking of homemade ones here — and nutritious. Often canning things when they are fresh from the field preserves more nutrients than fresh produce that has been picked ages ago.

But it’s funny because many of us diss canned fruits and vegetables as inferior has-beens these days (although I’ll still take a tin of commercial Italian tomatoes any day in winter over fresh ones from the produce section). Maybe it’s because we see canned goods as relics from a frugal post-war past — soggy, tasteless, colourless things over-boiled to kill that botulism.

So I had to stop and wonder for a moment at a line in McGee’s book. He points out that canning was “a cause for celebration” when it was first invented by Nicholas Appert in 1810, a Frenchman who was variously a chef, a brewer and a confectioner by profession. He did it to win 12,000 francs offered by Napoleon Bonaparte to find a way to preserve food for his armies.

Appert’s contemporaries were overjoyed, saying that canning preserved fruits and vegetables “almost as if fresh.” So what were they thinking? I guess if you’d been eating everything salted, dried, fermented or over-sugared all your life, you’d consider it a wonder, too.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer. Her husband is nervous.