Technology

Hey — I’m one of the former r/Canning mods quoted in the article.

The issue with trying to get data on unsafe canning from Reddit is twofold: firstly, people who undertake an unsafe canning practice who fall ill (or die) don’t typically come back to Reddit to report on their situations. If you’re fighting for your life in a hospital bed, you’re not likely going to login to Reddit to post “Well, I followed some bad advice here, and now I’m in the hospital”. So while we do know from a small number of documented sources that people who have got sick (and died) did so from following bad advice online, it isn’t as if they routinely self-report this.

(And conversely, if you just wind up with the shits for several days you may not even connect it in your mind to eating bad home canned food — and you’re probably less likely to go online and brag how you were able to shit through a sieve because you followed a bad canning recipe).

Secondly, time is a significant factor. Something you cook up in a pot on your stove and eat right away will be perfectly safe for all but the most immune-compromised of people, but stick that same food in a jar without proper processing and put it on a room temperature shelf and it becomes a time bomb, with the danger ramping up as more time passes.

That passing time doesn’t really work with publishing deadlines, and considering the unlikelihood of people self-reporting doing bad canning and hurting themselves (or others) there really isn’t any way of “waiting to see if someone hurts themselves”. People sometimes can stuff and then leave it on a shelf for years — so the harm may not be realized for quite some time.

Sure, it would have made for a better article if there had been a slam-dunk obviously unsafe recipe/practice posted and someone had died in the process — but gathering such data could take a very long time, and I’m sure Ms. Harding can always post another article in the future should such data become available.