YHK - yet another hacker news clone

The fire retardant in the seafood chain

67 points gumby 2 days ago 19 comments

enoint 2 days ago | parent

I make a lot of chili. Ethoxyquin is a good reason to mix your own chili powder.

pvab3 1 hour ago | parent

How does Ethoxyquin get into chili powder?

code_duck 1 hour ago | parent

It's used as a preservative/additive for chili powder, paprika, and ground peppers in the US.

gumby 1 day ago | parent

I don't know why they don't just use nitrogen in the storage vessels. Ship holds, for example, already have this capability.

brudgers 1 day ago | parent

About Ethoxyquin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethoxyquin

jazzyjackson 1 hour ago | parent

> if left untreated, is known for spontaneously combusting as it decays and oxidizes.

Does anyone remember the 90s when as a laymen it seemed like an open debate whether humans would occasionally combust spontaneously? I guess it stopped happening once falling asleep with a cigarette lost popularity

But my point is I wasn’t aware that “spontaneous combustion” was a real thing one has to worry about it. Linseed oil rags will do this too, and that’s why patent leather shoes are coated in plastic now instead.

dreamcompiler 1 hour ago | parent

Human spontaneous combustion is a silly myth. Other kinds like oily rags and apparently fishmeal are very real.

Zancarius 1 hour ago | parent

Grain dust and flour also come to mind. Essentially anything with the appropriate fuel/air mixture can combust, often explosively, even if we otherwise think of it as food!

SAI_Peregrinus 1 hour ago | parent

Those events aren't spontaneous combustion, an ignition source is needed to cause a dust explosion with flour, grain, or sawdust. Spontaneous combustion of something like linseed oil happens with no external ignition source. Spontaneously combustible substances undergo exothermic reactions in normal conditions, e.g. when drying, curing, being exposed to air, or similar. They have low enough flash points that their own heat is enough to cause ignition, which is why you never hear about concrete spontaneously combusting despite having an exothermic curing process.

jazzyjackson 1 hour ago | parent

Maybe it was more of being a middle schooler than a wider social phenomenon, but silly myths got a lot of play in the days before Google!

icantevenhold 1 hour ago | parent

Arguably even more now…

tdeck 1 hour ago | parent

This can happen to mulch as well if it's left in a very big pile for a long time.

cogogo 53 minutes ago | parent

Regularly happens to the same pile of mulch at a lot in Boston. No idea why they have been allowed to keep storing it.

https://www.universalhub.com/2026/mulch-fire-brings-all-jake...

aitchnyu 1 hour ago | parent

HowStuffWorks used to be full of expert animations of automatic transmissions and helicopters around 2006 but they had a multipart article on spontaneous combustion, with anecdotes of 1890s people who retained too much ethanol.

kevmo 1 hour ago | parent

Americans' breast milk is full of fire retardants, found in 100% of samples taken.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/08/24/1194759...

sarabarasa100 1 hour ago | parent

I just find it wonderfully weird that no process has been found to just handle powdery flammable things better, instead of adding stuff to it to make it less risky to handle it wrong.

fwip 54 minutes ago | parent

In this case, handling it wrong simply means letting it sit there in a pile.

metalman 49 minutes ago | parent

been looking at the title, but didn't want to read more bad news, bug then my brain thought this about something other than the actual real planetary food chain, and sure enough it's about industrialy made food substitutes. as to the fish meal catching fire, there are other solutions, pulling a partial vacume and flooding with CO², refrigerating/freezing, or useing other (fuck me), antioxidents, like various oils like chiken grease or hey!, fish oil, but of course Muney, jingle jangle muney muney muney, and the kind of people who own ship loads of fish meal, will never, see, smell, or eat any of the resulting comodities, so it's fine right. tried that janky salmon a few times, but never liked it, and stick to local caught fish from the ocean I could see if I were to stand up.

re: spontainous combustion, there is a biological process called 'the heat of evolution" that is used to describe the heat given off by ALL ripening and oxidising biological materials, and MANY foods will combust if packed too tight and insulated, case in point are bannanas that must be kept seperate and refrigerated and the whole bannana industry was built on specialy designed refrigerated ships, as there was no good way to ship them before refrigeration. as for 'heat of evolution' there are charts that give the btu's/ton per hour used in refrigeration design, as the heat is substantial and will overwhelm the systems, with fire a real possibility. this is different than dusts and powders exploding due to the 'right' mix and a spark, which might just possibly coincide with a decomposition fire, if a ship was that unlucky. but with so many ways that things can go wrong, it is astounding to find out someone got the idea to prevent food fires by covering everything in poison.