am i the only person who likes cold soup straight from the can?

Jews can eat anything; it's just a resistance we build up after twenty years of weekly dumpling servings.

But c'mon... that cold mushroom soup is good.

but that's OK -- just like eating longpig if yer on gilligan's island!

And cold baked beans. And mushy peas. I can't think of much I won't happily eat straight from the tin.

I read somewhere that improvements in canning has made this conventional wisdom mostly obsolete. After that I no longer avoided dented cans and I will even sometimes choose a lightly dented can because I know it will go to waste otherwise. And I feel sorry for it.

This is the best I could come up with on a quick Google search:

It’s okay to eat the food from dented cans...as long as the dent isn’t sharp enough to have pierced the can or isn’t on the seams that run down the side or around the top and bottom. But if the contents of a can (dented or not) spray when the lid seal is broken by the can opener, the food may harbor Clostridium botulinum—a bacterium that secretes the neurotoxin that causes botulism, a frequently fatal disease. Wipe up the sprayed contents immediately with a paper towel. Note any code or batch number that’s on the can before (carefully) throwing it in the trash. Use a disinfectant cleaner on the counter top and use a paper towel to wipe it up. Then report the incident to the manufacturer and to your local Health Department.

from: http://www.cspinet.org/nah/11_00/gk_an5.html

*according to The Man

I STAND CORRECTED. ewwwwww.

cold pizza is amazing if you eat it within the first day of getting it; afterward it's a bit too cardboardy. i've never tried eating cold canned stuff and never want to.

i eat the crud in my eyes when i wake.if i have a scab i'll peel it and chew it for awhile. i've eaten my butt lint. and just to be normal here..i smoke and sleep too much..
-- kevin enas (masterblank...), July 4th, 2001.

!!!

WTF

I hate the fucking internet.

(eating navel lint -- whether or not it really is butt lint -- is still pretty nasty.)

It takes a 15 minutes of boiling to denature botulism toxin! That's longer than I thought it would take. So just quickly nuking can still be a problem.

Yeah, bacterial toxins are super hardy.

We did rounds on botulism after that recent case, found out about the deaths from carrot juice borne botulism in 2006 (http://www.cdc.gov/MMWR/preview/mmwrhtml/mm55d106a1.htm). This was Bolthouse carrot juice, the same thing my wife drinks (I prefer their Passion Orange Guava). Got home that night, found a huge bottle of Bolthouse carrot juice in the downstairs fridge, 2 weeks past expiry date (2 for 1 deal the last time we bought it). Botulism has nothing to do with best before dates but I dumped it anyway.

I have a prior history of food borne illness. Got the worst ever case of food poisoning from Yuki-jirushi (Snow Brand) low fat milk in 2000 when I lived in Kyoto. Turned out they had Staph Aureus in the milk plant, weren't cleaning the pipes properly (I used to work in an ice cream store, I know how hard it is to clean mild contamination off machinery). They were also taking expired milk and dumping it back into the pasteurizer. I got horribly horribly sick in the middle of judging an English speech contest in a suburban high school in Osaka. It was a huge scandal in Japan, the dairy originally tried to cover up what happened, recalled milk products only a few days later. Months later I had 2 Snow Brand guys show up at my apartment door unexpectedly, both wearing dark suits in the hot summer weather, bowing and apologizing profusely, and presenting me with a box of absolutely marvelous chocolate biscuits.

Mr. Jaq got staph poisoning from ice cream in the Bellagio a few years ago. I've never seen a sicker person, and it came on incredibly fast. Horrible stuff.