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The fire retardant in the seafood chain

55 points gumby 2 days ago 18 comments

enoint 2 days ago | parent

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

pvab3 51 minutes ago | parent

How does Ethoxyquin get into chili powder?

code_duck 46 minutes 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 58 minutes ago | parent

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

Zancarius 52 minutes 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 19 minutes 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 48 minutes 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 21 minutes ago | parent

Arguably even more now…

tdeck 30 minutes ago | parent

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

aitchnyu 13 minutes 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 37 minutes 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 17 minutes 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 2 minutes ago | parent

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