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So are we eating olives mixed with dead birds remains? It has to be impossible to clean up completely, no?
by megous 7y ago
So are we eating olives mixed with dead birds remains? It has to be impossible to clean up completely, no?
- sdfjkl 7y agoConsidering the birds seem to come out more or less whole (alas none too healthy), it's probably trivial to sieve the olives from the much larger bird corpses.
- coldtea 7y agoAs a Mediterranean with olives of my own, no. Olives are sieved and separated.
- megous 7y agoWell, dying animals usually release their contents pretty quickly. I'm still a bit worried.
- ThrowawayR2 7y agoFruits and vegetables grow out in the open. A significant portion of the produce people consume is statistically guaranteed to have been anointed (so to speak) by passing birds and other wildlife already.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- emerongi 7y agoThey sieve, blow and wash any foreign bodies out.
- threeseed 7y agoBe curious to know how they wash it. Because having olives lying next to dead birds sure sounds like a disease risk.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Mediterraneo10 7y agoOlives have to be cured in e.g. lye to become edible. Wouldn’t that kill off pathogens?
- pvaldes 7y agoNot to mention the salt Curing olives implies to wash the raw fruit in saltwater and spices and discard the water after some hours or days. The procedure is redone as times as necessary to ged rid of the sour flavour. You can not eat it raw and green, they taste horrible.
- darkpuma 7y agoIf this were a real concern as you're hypothesizing, then we'd already have the data of olive oil making tons of people sick. Even relatively tiny outbreaks of food borne illness from spinach make the news, so where are all the people getting salmonella from olive oil? When the observed data doesn't fit your theory, then you need to reevaluate your theory no matter how much common sense it seems to make. If the figures of the article are accurate, there is something in the neighborhood of one dead bird per ton of olive oil from Portugal. That's enough that if it were poisoning the oil, people would be dropping dead in droves. Consuming olive oil would be like playing Russian roulette.. but it's not.
- onetimemanytime 7y agoI guess the time between them killed and olives sorted and cleaned is minutes to hours, not enough for birds to rot
- megous 7y agoI don't know about birds, but dead mammals pee/poo themselves very quickly. I just assume it's similar.
- onetimemanytime 7y agoI guess plenty of bird poo is already with the harvest. If birds sit on trees, a lot of poo is bound to get stuck on branches
- darkpuma 7y agoBirds shit on the olives when they're still alive too. Olives grow outside. Outside is not a sterile environment. When I was working at a green bean processing plant years ago, my first job was picking non-bean objects out by hand. Usually the non-bean objects were sticks, but many times a day it was a dead snake or frog. That's just the nature of those harvesters. The beans get rinsed and nobody worries about it.
- pvaldes 7y agoWe eat olives mixed with dead fish remains and nobody bats an eye...
- darkpuma 7y agoTell that to my coworkers. They think I'm nuts for eating sardines for lunch.