Comment by dghlsakjg 2 days ago
I used to live and work on tall ships.
We never had this issue, but we also likely had better storage conditions in that there was precious little chance of actual seawater reaching our food cans. Cans would sometimes rust on the rim, but I don't think I ever saw a can rust all the way through, despite some of them being likely years old.
This seems like overkill unless you are very convinced that your cans will come in contact with seawater.
With admittedly close to zero sailing experience, I would think that if your boat (no matter how big or "tiny") is getting "considerable" water onboard, you have bigger problems than your canned food.
It doesn't make sense to me either that the size of the vessel has much to do with how watertight it is.
But like I said, I don't have much experience in this!
>This seems like overkill unless you are very convinced that your cans will come in contact with seawater.
It seems like a really minor effort layer of protection with almost 0 overhead to protect a person against death. Getting botulism food poisoning at sea by yourself in a tiny boat could very well be a death sentence. Especially if a substantial portion of your food was compromised.
$20 at costco for bags and an hour bagging all of your cans before your trip is hardly overkill.
I guess a more accurate way to say it is that I never heard of doing anything like that in my career on sailboats.
Its cheap and relatively low effort, but I just don't see the benefit. Modern cans typically already have a plastic coating on the inside that will take care of things getting in through any pinholes, and to preserve flavor.
I spent close to a decade as a professional sailboat captain, including on long offshore passages. I never saw a single can of suspect food, and it wasn't something that is ever talked about. Even in survival kits you would see canned goods that weren't wrapped in plastic.
Really, if you are in the business of minimizing risk, you don't undertake an open ocean voyage in a 19 ft. sailboat.
Taking on a big risk shouldn’t make one feel cavalier about other risks, even if they’re smaller.
(Spoken like the project planner I used to be)
Sure, but there has to be a risk in the first place, and there is just no evidence that corroded cans lead to food poisoning.
The most recent botulin report from the CDC lists 19 confirmed foodborne cases in the entire US. of those 19, it looks like only 7 were related to outbreaks tied to suspected commercial food circumstantially (no tests confirmed this), the rest were from home-canning.
See table 2 here: https://www.cdc.gov/botulism/php/national-botulism-surveilla... . Note that 2019 was the worst year that the CDC has for commercial prepared food. 2018 and 2017 had one suspected commercial can related incident each.
Basically, if you are getting botulin toxin poisoning, it is going to come from inside a can that was physically fine, or, much more likely, a home cooked meal.
A project planner should hopefully look at a risk, and think: This is a 1 in a billion risk at best (assuming that the average American eats at least 3 cans worth of goods per year).
Tiny boat, probably got considerable water onboard.