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Sounds like the Canadian Food Inspection agency screwed the town out of spite. Like they had a target on Ngo's back. Anyone have more details? From the linked Eater article:
>He suggests that a prior conflict with the CFIA over product labeling motivated them to close the factory before the inspection began. Ngo claims that he had been vocal about their interactions, and speculates “if they shut [us] down, nobody makes any complaints anymore.”
>After the government-run lab found Ngo’s product to be safe, he went on to win a court case and an appeal against the government. Even after those victories, the CFIA moved to restrict the sales of his product to the province of Newfoundland. “If I sell there, who will use my product?” Ngo says, pointing out the small population of Newfoundland and its non-existent Vietnamese community. “I could sell maybe one or two cases a month[...] we can’t survive.” The CFIA declined to comment, citing the amount of time that has passed since filing its initial complaint.
They could have stopped production in the moldy factory but allowed sale of the remaining product.
I don’t think he was targeted but he met the reality of bureaucracy. One agency actually funded him and approved the building and allowed him to operate for 11 years. Another agency said you can’t operate or sell because of the growing mold. Another agency said dump the forbidden fish sauce in the sewer. Another agency said to bury it.
Smelly, rotting fish sauce that needs to be handled in hazmat suits? In Europe that's called a "condiment".
I recall reading there were zoning laws in the classical era about where you could manufacture garum (the Roman fermented fish condiment). Here's one attributable example I could find, from the tail end of the Eastern empire. This is 2.4.22 in the Hexabiblos (1344–1345) ["–" sic] of the Byzantine jurist, Constantine Harmenopoulos of Thessalonica; it legislates a ~450–600-meter exclusion zone (three stadia).
The archive.org page I linked is in Byzantine Greek with a Latin translation. I've quoted the Greek part here, and I used Deepseek V4 Flash for OCR-cleanup and machine translation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_Harmenopoulos
https://archive.org/details/constharmenopul00heimgoog/page/2... ("Ἐπαρχιχὸν ΠΕΡῚ ΓΑΡΕΨΩΝ" / "Edictum DE GARI COCTORIBUS")
> "22. Ἡ τέχνη τῶν γαρεψῶν καὶ ἡ τῶν τυροποιῶν οὐ τὴν τυχοῦσαν ποιεῖ τοῖς παρακειμένοις βλάβην· πολλὴ γὰρ ἡ ἀπ᾽ αὐτῆς ἀτμὶς δυσώδης τε ἀμέτρως ἐστὶ καὶ ἐπιβλαβὴς ἐπὶ πολὺ διάστημα. Ὅθεν χρὴ τοὺς τοιούτους ἅπασαν μὲν πόλιν μὴ οἰκεῖν μηδὲ κώμην. Εἰ δὲ χρεία τούτων εἴη πρὸς τὰς χρήσεις τῶν πόλεων καὶ τῶν κωμῶν, ἀφεστάναι στάδια τούτους δεῖ τρία. Εἰδέναι δὲ χρὴ ὡς ταῦτα πάντα τὰ προειρημένα ἐπὶ τῶν ἐκ νέου κατασκευαζόντων εἴρηται· εἰ δὲ χάρται εἰσὶ παλαιοὶ ἢ καὶ δουλεία τις προλαβοῦσα, κεχρῆσθαι δεῖ τοῖς ἐξ ἀρχῆς περὶ αὐτῶν συμπεφωνημένοις."
> "The craft of the salt‑fish merchants and that of the cheesemakers causes no ordinary harm to those nearby; for the vapour arising from it is exceedingly foul‑smelling and harmful over a great distance. Hence such persons ought not to dwell in any city or village. But if there should be need of them for the uses of the cities and villages, they must keep a distance of three stades [~555 m]. And it must be known that all these aforestated things have been said concerning those who set up (such establishments) anew; but if there exist old charters or some prior servitude (i.e., an established legal right or prescriptive practice), one must abide by what was originally agreed concerning them."
Petition to restore “aforestated” to common parlance.
Why would cheesemakers be smelly?
> causes no ordinary harm to those nearby
I don't see what's the big deal. If it causes no harm, why have any regulation?
There's a farmers market here in Zurich where some Italians drive up and sell Italian products like cheeses, sausages, etc. but one thing I buy from them I've never seen anywhere else - they are rotten salted anchovies packed with peppercorns. Stink super bad and are falling apart but when you're making a sauce you drop one in and the anchovy dissolves and delivers tons of umami - glutamates - and you no longer smell the rotten fish smell. I'm sure professional chefs must know about these.
I keep them in baggies in the freezer so that they don't stink up the fridge.
Salt-cured anchovies. They're not rotten at all—they're spectacular! They're perfect on pizza, with fresh tomatoes, and in countless other dishes, either rinsed straight from the jar or melted into a sauce while cooking.
Where I live (a small seaside town), everyone makes their own jars of salt-cured anchovies. They are traditionally sealed with a loose lid consisting of a slate disc with a stone or other weight on top. They need to mature while still being able to breathe, and they must always remain covered by the proper amount of salt.
(The way you describe yours—as extremely smelly and falling apart—doesn't really suggest they're high quality. Normally, a properly cured anchovy should remain almost completely intact, so you can remove the tail and backbone and end up with two whole fillets. The peppercorns are a bit unusual as well.)
Rotten? Do you have any more info about this product, even a name? Salted anchovies are common in at least Spain, Italy & Portugal (and you usually rinse off the excess salt and optionally store them in olive oil for a while before consuming), but I've never seen a "rotten" anchovy...
For some reason this immediately got me thinking about Garum[0], probably because you mentioned anchovies, salt, umami and glutamates in the same paragraph :D
also, as you said chefs must know about this:
> Garum remains of interest to food historians and chefs, and has been reintroduced into modern food preparation.
I mean, instead of investing so much effort to get glutamate into your food, why not use MSG directly? Sounds like much less hassle? Reminds me of the time when Big Food over here in Germany replaced MSG with "yeast extract" so they could claim that their foods contained no artificial flavor enhancers (although the yeast extract also contains a lot of glutamate).
Since this is just salted, fermented fish, which the scientist in the article claims he would like to taste, why does it need to be buried in plastic? Why not slowly pour it into a sewer, over the course of several months?
From the linked Eater article:
>Perhaps the most promising and most discouraging event for the factory happened in 2016. That year, the provincial government approved a cleanup plan, and a private company began the process. But the cleanup was halted soon after it started when it became clear that the contractors were dumping several dozen vats of rotten fish sauce directly into the ocean. According to Ryan, the provincial government ordered the factory’s drains to be blocked to prevent any more sauce from seeping into the ocean.
https://www.eater.com/2019/5/23/18634704/st-marys-irish-loop...
I think dumping it slowly would be better than a hazardous waste landfill, but government bureaucracy is not capable of handling this situation.
Sewers go places, and it is nearly a million liters of extremely concentrated stinky. If you do this, you take a single location source of stinky and smear it over a much larger set of locations that will then ALL be extremely stinky, in a way that isn’t easily cleaned with water as the fats and oils (also extremely stinky!) are of course not soluble.
The real story here is how a corporation can just pack up and leave it's mess for the government to clean up. With public money.
Recently in my city they discovered that a laundromat had polluted the ground water. The owners are long gone. Unfortunately chemicals are forever. The municipality tried to send the bill to the current owners but that is not real justice either.
> The real story here is how a corporation can just pack up and leave it's mess for the government to clean up. With public money.
This is unfortunately a common issue in Canada :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_wells_in_Alberta,_Canad...
Listen, I hate shitty corporations too, but if you read the article it’s the government who shut down the business because of mold growth in the factory.
Anyway, just saying there’s some nuance here. Like maybe if a government shuts down a business like this there needs to be some negotiation and an exit plan.
Isn't the ocean filled with salt and already knows how to biologically degrade fish? I sort of think that you could deposit this at sea somehow, just need to spread it out sufficiently.
I am sure I am overlooking something that would lead to an unintended ecological disaster.
"just need to spread it out sufficiently"
Use a crop duster type aircraft - what could go wrong?
Edit: Growing up in a fishing village I'm fully aware of the potential for WMD level stench that the fishing industry is capable of generating.
"The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds" - prior failure of intuitively appealing disposal option.
Yes, it needs to be handled with care, but it's essentially the same procedure as with the waste products of desalination water plants. One caveat though - once you start diluting this stuff you have to keep going since the high salt content is the only thing that ensures it's fairly sterile.
Where I grew up farmers "muckspreading" would occasionally foul the locality. It was gross but after a day or two it would be back to normal.
I've been to Phu Quoc. One or two of the villages had that amine smell. It was like chemical munitions.
Reading between the lines, perhaps the factory owner blamed the shutdown on locals complaining to regulators and decided to stiff them on the way out.
Can't remember where i've read that nor even if it's a real thing or not so do take the following with caution.
I think Roman Empire garum (fish sauce) factories where one of, if not the first thing in known history to trigger lawmakers to set a minimum distance from factories to residential areas (something like 1 mile iirc).
It’s organic solids. Just get it to the ocean. It’s not like it’s crude oil or volatile chemicals.
I wanted to crack a joke that Swede's do like their stinky fermented fish, why not sell to them… But I figured why not see if other cultures might also like it, and was floored with how many there were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermented_fish
It will be a very easy solution when one takes a less bureaucratic stance and be less hostile to foreign cultures: just mix the sauce with sea water and (really) slowly release it into the ocean. If Japan can release radioactive water into the ocean safely, I’m pretty sure you can do it with the fish+salt solution too. Yes, there is nothing in the fish sauce except these two ingredients.
Better though, take samples and test against food standards from countries where they actually produce and eat fish sauce. If the sauce is still good (could be due to the high salt content, not sure though), just let Ngo bottle it and sell the good stuff, internationally!
malicious compliance? The government shut down a fish sauce factory while it was in the process of making fish sauce. So the factory owner said fine, I'll stop operations right now.
They are foing to store it underground in plastic covered hole? Would this really cause an issue just to dump it into the ocean maybe spread out a bit?
When I was growing up, there was a town nearby with a paper mill. If we would drive near that town... Wow! that place stunk.
I grew up in a seaside port and fishing community. 1st thing, what landlubbers think is stinky is not operative here, your thoughts are moo, like the opinion of a sea cow.
The seacoast smells like rotten fish all the time, it's called low tide. The most vibrant sea biomes are shallow coastal waters. The capacity of the North Atlantic, rich with oxygen, to handle fish parts is basically limitless. Hell, you can probably sell this stuff to lobster- and shellfish- men. The quantity here is one whale carcass (yes, that's a mammal, but you get the idea) and whale carcasses happen all the time.
Dump it in the Bay of Fundy, one tide will get rid of all of it. Worrying about the environmental impact of dead fish is like worrying that dumping manure on a field will leave it fallow.
What you are really smelling here is a govt funding boondoggle.
> But this person who ended up becoming my wife, she's like, "I love fish sauce. I need more of it in my life."
Possibly the least expected ending to that article, and very heartwarming.
Slightly Offtopic but the voice in the embedded youtube Video is so sounds so unnatural and creepy.
I guess its AI generated and no one bothered to check the end result.
Can they not use some microbes to digest the sauce and reduce it to inert things like water and salt? I'm not a biologist, so pardon this naive take.
I purchased a bottle of good Vietnamese fish sauce after reading a thread on HN about its mythical flavor profile.
Added a few meager drops to a noodle soup, and I was so overwhelmed with nausea that I threw out the entire pot, and threw the entire bottle of fish sauce into the trash.
I can't imagine want an unholy stench this decades-old fish sauce plant must produce. I would have evacuated permanently, without question.
> I would 100 percent taste the forbidden fish sauce. I would do it for science. My wife would kill me if I'm not already dead.
Count me in.
The talk of glutamic acid made me wonder if fish sauce is related to MSG. Gemini confirms MSG is just salt and glutamic acid, which is to say fish sauce is naturally derived MSG.
Fun story:
I was riding a motorcycle across Vietnam a few years ago. Made some friends on an excursion, and we all went to dinner together. The restaurant was a little outdoor kitchen and some picnic benches in front of an apartment building.
When we arrived, the mom was taking orders. She spoke enough English to serve travelers. One of my new friends ordered a sandwich, and fell in love with the sauce it came with. I offered to find out what was in it, but the mom had gone upstairs. Dad didn't speak a word of English.
We managed to ask him about the sauce, and he beckoned us to follow him behind the counter. He pointed at a mason jar of white powder: sugar. He pointed at another: salt. He pointed at a third: salt … wait, we already did salt…
It was MSG. This chef in a rural mountain town had just a handful of ingredients in his kitchen, and one was MSG.
As a 90s kid who grew up hearing of MSG is the same breath as processed foods, sulfites, and other health boogymen, it was wild to encounter it as just another ingredient in someone's pantry.
They should blow it up like they blew up that whale carcass. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
Just out of curiosity, would dumping a ton of bleach into the mixture get rid of the smell by breaking apart all of the components? Or maybe high concentration acid?
Absolutely foul, but the food science part is greatly interesting. Just glad I am unable to smell that place.
Why on earth are they not composting it, but instead putting in a landfill and locking it up? What a dumb idea.
Hmm, curious, could there be any use for this substance?
Fertilizer or something?
I am surprised that after this long the smell isn't gone. If one were to open all these tanks and spread it around on the ground in a layer, wouldn't it dissipate after a few months when the bacteria finish up?
Can you die from a umami overdose?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/st-mary...
tl;dr
After 20 years of legal battles abandoned factory containing tanks of rotting fish in St Mary’s NL is getting cleaned up, paid for by provincial taxpayers.
It was just ripening!
Oh Canada!
Can you actually taste the goo and not get killed instantly? This sounds so crazy to me. lol