Rick's b.log - entry 2025/06/13

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Satellite receiver

This time it looks like the HD3 on Amazon is nearly €70, that's more than the list price at the manufacturer's site!
They did have the slightly later model, the HD4, for about €36 so I got that. The UI looks a bit bleurgh, but if it works then that'll be okay. Criteria for me is basically a free to air receiver that can either record live or schedule recordings. The HD3 scheduler works by start time and end time, while the HD4 seems to want a start time and a duration (hh:mm). Hmmm...

Habitual food poisoning explained?

Many trips to the toilet. Plenty of pain. All building up to "the explosion" (I'll let your imagination fill in the blanks) at which point back to bed feeling like I've been kicked in the gut and knowing the alarm will go off in an hour and a half.

I never bothered to go to the doctor as mom had bad reactions to damn near everything. She told me that it got worse as she got older. So I just figured that I had inherited this dietary instability. Particularly as I can give you quite a list of triggers: alcohol, orange juice, cherries in a bottle but not in a tin (I think - I don't remember which way around so I just don't buy cherries which is a shame as I like them), and Heinz baked beans make my mouth and throat swell and sore...
I suspect it may be pesticides or something like that. After all, the amount of noxious chemicals floating around (and how we all have Teflon inside us - watch the recent Veritassium video) is quite horrific.

But recently, like maybe six months to a year or so, it's been much worse. Clearly there's something that I'm eating but try as I might I couldn't put a finger on what exactly it was.

I don't tend to walk down the aisle with the spices as I don't use much spice in my food. Indeed, pretty much the only things I get from there are salt and pepper and as you ought to imagine I don't exactly go through that in a hurry.

Salt is for boiling pasta or dumping on chips. Actually the most salt I use is when making bread (it asks for 9g and that's quite a bit).

Pepper? I love the smell of black pepper. I can't sniff it for obvious reasons (achoo!) but the smell is evident when I put it on something. You might have noticed a brown powder on... most things. Cheesy toast? Peppered. Omelette? Peppered. Scrambled egg? Mixing pepper into the egg was a bit fail (it floated on top) so instead I added it during cooking. And my perfect comfort food - a bowl of linguine tossed in Président doux (non-salted) butter and peppered.

So it was pure serendipity that I walked down the spice aisle yesterday and saw this.

Food recalls happen from time to time. The usual cases are either incorrect labelling that misses the presence of an allergen, or something like listeria.
You can see in the photo that, because this was an own-brand product, they have tried to play down the severity by saying that it is a "non-conformité chimique". I trust I don't need to translate that nonsense for you.
The internet, on the other hand, is more than willing to expand upon the chemical non-conformity and inform that it is aflatoxin.

This is to say, a nasty poisonous carcinogen that is produced by certain moulds that grow in the soil, in decomposing plant matter, and so on. It can affect pretty much anything, and the effect is cumulative - if you have tainted chicken feed then you'll quickly end up with tainted chicken meat. Aflatoxins are highly carcinogenic. And since this is a side effect of mould (think of it like mould poop), it cannot be killed by heating or freezing. It occurs naturally, a lot, like a whole lot, and the way to prevent it from contaminating food is to try to prevent the mould from growing - like don't have grain (rice, etc) be too damp or stored in damp airless places. You know, common sense stuff.
The mould, however, can be killed with fire. That's why you have roasted peanuts (peanuts are a fairly common vector). Luckily for us Europeans, it is a subtropical species and doesn't tend to enjoy the cooler European weather.

In high doses, it's deadly. Wiki for details but it's pretty awful. Thankfully humans are fairly tolerant of lower doses of this stuff as I guess we have evolved as an agrarian species with this stuff always around us in some degree. These days it is known that it can damage DNA, and cause various forms of cancer. The main target organ is the liver. There is on antidote, only management of conditions.

Eating contaminated food causes aflatoxicosis which is basically aflatoxin poisoning, and like any other food poisoning you're looking at nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, convulsions, diarrhoea... and if too much was consumed then we're looking at symptoms of acute liver injury.

Luckily I didn't eat a bowl of contaminated rice or peanuts, I simply had a dusting of contaminated pepper, so my bowels tore themselves apart to eject it, but there was no vomiting, fainting, or any whooziness other than what you ought to expect from me at 4am.
The pain was rather severe, but compared to my deadly burger it only really ranks about a six out of ten (which is just slightly less than having my wisdom teeth yanked out).

Because, yes, my pepper was exactly the one that has been pulled from sale. And note that one of my jars is two thirds empty. Note also that the sell-by dates go from January 2028 to August 2028. That's a really long time span, and everything (all of the U black pepper) has been recalled.

I would like to say that it is not their fault and that the pepper seeds they received were probably contaminated - it often comes from South Asia, like India and Vietnam.
However it very much is their fault that so much contaminated product was put on sale. I say this because the company I work for produces food and there is a ridiculous amount of testing that goes on internally. Samples are regularly taken from the "matières premières", that is to say the ingredients like eggs and flour), samples are taken from products in the course of preparation, and samples are taken from the finished products. I don't know the frequency of the sampling, it isn't everything as that would be infeasible, but there's a lot. It also extends to our hands, uniforms, equipment we use, and so on. Some of these (like hands) are internal tests. We sandwich a stick with squishy jelly-like stuff between our hands and that is kept in a warm environment for something like 48h to see what nasties start to grow. A lot of the tests are external, where things are collected and put into a sealed bag for a full toxicology. Like listeria, e. coli, salmonella, and - yes - the aflatoxin. I know because I asked the Quality girl directly (and explained why I was asking such an odd question).
Where I work, we don't want to become "notorious" like Lactalis (contaminated baby milk powder which caused thirty eight babies to need hospitalisation; twenty four thousand raw milk cheeses suspected of listeria infection) or Buitoni (frozen pizzas (Fraich'Up) so bad the factory was shut down; fifty cases of E. Coli which killed two children) or Ferrero (contaminated Kinder eggs caused over 150 cases of salmonellosis, mostly children). This is why tests are many and frequent. Something bad can still get through, there's no perfect testing, but when it comes to due diligence in food hygiene, I would have to rate my employer highly. And I'm not saying that because they pay me, I'm saying that because I see the two women frequently checking and testing and collecting samples. I mean, our livelihoods do tend to depend upon us not killing our clients. Dead people don't make good repeat customers, you know. And our food is a little too processed to be of interest to undead people, so we can't even appeal to the zombie demographic. Besides, I think the girls on the production lines might be just a tad upset at having to deal with bits of raw human brain...

I got my money back after handing over the pepper. That's about the best one can hope for here in France. And since I like black pepper on my pasta, I went and purchased some more. A different brand this time. I won't be buying the U's own any more. They really should have picked up on this sooner, and it suggests to me that either no useful tests were being performed, or if it was known about then it may have been the all-too-usual case of "sweep it under the carpet, see if it goes away" (refer also to Buitoni, Lactalis, and Ferrero above).

You know... poison pepper really wasn't something on my dietary problems bingo card.

It is basically gloopy-custard-like-stuff-in-a-can. It probably sounds awful but I quite like it. It also isn't full of horrible things. Okay, it's not exactly full of good things, but given some things (ever read what's in one of those instant noodle pots?) it's not bad. A lot of milk, and some stuff to make it gloopy, and a tonne of sugar....yeah, milk and sugar, you can see why it appeals to me, can't you? ☺

I will try a controlled eating at the start of my summer holiday to see if I have any sort of similar reaction. It may indeed be a complete red herring and I can enjoy my gloopy sweet milk stuff... or it may be a good call and... and I'll walk my stupid arse to the doctor and demand an allergen test because honestly this is driving me up the wall. I know I'm okay with milk (as I drink a lot of milk, like nearly a litre a day between cereal and tea and sometimes just swigging a cup of cold milk) and gluten (bread and linguine are major parts of my diet). I know I can't cope with sulphites (what I'm guessing wine and beer have in common) and I honestly have no idea why I'm okay with apple and pineapple juice but orange juice messes me up, yet I can suck the juice from mandarines (I don't eat the flesh, not overly keen on the texture of orange-like pulp).

Thanks mom. Couldn't I have inherited something useful like intelligence? Ability with languages? Common sense? No. I get the grumbly gut. Whoo me. Or should that be: woe is me?

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