Model Forum / General / Railroads / October 2005

Why do you say that?

I really enjoy olive oil & parmesan cheese with a dash of salt on my hot
bread. )))

Bob

I bet he handled himself pretty well for a guy with flippers for arms, eh?

That is precisely why -unfortunately- in these sorts of instances, everyone is a liar
until proved otherwise.

Yup.
Track down the information on Jan Schlichtmann, et. al. VS:

UniFirst, an industrial dry-cleaning operation that used solvents,

W.R. Grace, which operated a factory that manufactured food-processing equipment, and
which used solvents to clean machinery and to thin paint.

Beatrice Foods, which owned the J. J. Riley tannery and an adjacent undeveloped
property that had been used as a chemical dumping ground.

Woburn, Massachusetts:
In 1979, it was discovered that wells supplying East Woburn's drinking water were
contaminated with industrial solvents. The contamination was localized to huge
reservoirs of polluted ground water. Investigators also determined that the
neighborhoods, which received their water from those wells, suffered from an
abnormally high number of leukemia cases.
In 1982, a group of families living in the affected area sought out Schlichtmann  to
help them seek damages against the corporations listed above They maintained that
these corporations were responsible for contaminating the community's drinking water.
All of the families had members who had contracted leukemia or other forms of cancer.
Several children had died. And thus, Woburn became a national symbol of environmental
tragedy.

Froggy,

Ed,  Froggy has a good point, and you are at least partly wrong.  I'm
_very_ familiar with canola oil, and the oil growers and processors
have pulled the wool over a lot of eyes.  When canola (CANadian oil or
OLA) was first introduced successfully in the americas after the name
change from rapeseed and the accidental mixing of cheap food grade
rapeseed and industrial oil which caused a number of deaths in Spain,
it was touted as the answer to all the problems of other vegetable
oils.  In point of fact, it was simply easier and more profitable to
produce in Canada and sales of it needed a market push.

Remember when the Center for Whining in the Public Interest got on the
backs of movie theatres for using coconut oil?  A lot of theatre
owners immediately switched over to canola because of perceived public
pressure (how's that for forcing a major market and a stock play?)
Within a few weeks, the complaints from customers started rolling in.
I was there. Up front and in person.  I was on the receiving end of
those complaints.

Real unsaturated canola (the supposedly healthy stuff) goes rancid
extremely rapidly, and smells like dead rotting fish.  Rancid oils are
essentially free radicals, and are not in any way healthy, nor do they
improve the image of popcorn or any other food but dead rotting fish.

Popcorn sales plummeted.  Theatres began to smell like the Fulton Fish
Market.  The theatre industry complained, tried air-popped popcorn in
desperation (can you say popped cardboard?), and largely switched out
of canola oil to peanut oil, corn oil, blended oils, or back to
coconut oil.  Eventually, the processors got wise to the rotton fish
smell, and resolved the problem.  They are _very_ quiet about how that
was accomplished, but the only way that seems possible is that they
"cracked" it, or started adding hydrogen to partially saturate the
oil, thus removing the fraction that could go rancid - and - any the
un-rancid unsaturated oil, along with any benefits it held.

During that period of rancid oil, I developed an active food
sensitivity (technically, it isn't called an allergy, but is very
similar) to the stuff, to the point that eating a few kernels of
popcorn cooked in it would send me worshipping the throne, and just
walking into a theatre popping corn with it would make me nausious.  

Snopes merely touches on this subject with the following caveat:

"Cooking at high temperatures with unrefined rapeseed oil now appears
to be related to an increased risk of lung cancer because at high
temperatures cooking oil gives off chemicals capable of causing
mutations in cells. Unrefined rapeseed oil is particularly notable for
this, but other oils also have this association. Those intent upon
doing large amounts of wok cooking with any sort of cooking oil should
therefore lower their frying temperature from the 240 C to 280 C
called for in Chinese cooking to 180 C. "

Popcorn, of necessity, is cooked at a high temperature, and the hot
rancid oil vapors are especially foul.  Reducing frying temperatures
is another "screed" by the Center for Whining in the Public Interest
that is picked up as fact without examination.  Saturated oils, like
coconut oil, can be heated to high temperaures safely.

Thankfully, my reaction to canola isn't as strong after years of
avoidance and the change in formulation, but there is no way that
anyone will ever convince me that canola is a legitimate GRAS product.

Call it an urban myth or whatever, but I wish the stuff had never been
bred/engineered.  The only way that I even knew what was being said
about canola was that my own experience with it was so violently
negative and I was trying to find out why it was making me sick.

Rapeseed was a good oil for a specific purpose - lubrication -
although some people are apparently less bothered by erucic acid and
rancidity than others.  If you can find it, Grapeseed oil IS a good
oil for consumption, but it is in short supply and has limited market
penetration.  Even coconut oil is now being recognized as a "good" oil
by those people who don't buy into the "cholesterol is a disease and
not a marker of other problems" myth.  Remember, when in doubt -
follow the money.  It leads to remarkable enlightenment on how the
markets work.

Again, I had no contact with canola oil before my personal experience,
and my personal experiences are independent and pre-date any internet
rumors.  As a matter of fact, the WWW wasn't even fully developed at
that point.

BTW, Snopes seems to claim that since rapeseed is a member of the
mustard family, including cabbage, watercress, mustard, and turnips,
that it is benign.  That is simply sloppy science and reporting.  The
mango is in the same family as poison ivy.  Would they then claim that
poison ivy is innocuous?  My wife can't eat anything with horseradish,
which is in the same family as rapeseed, yet she seems to tolerate
rapeseed.  People have individual genetic makeups, and outside of
blood and tissue typing in transplants, the medical profession and
news media largely ignore these differences.

Back on topic, cutting plexi with a bandsaw is a lot more successful
for me than trying to use a jigsaw.  The constant motion in a single
direction seems to reduce chipping and eliminate splits and cracks.
YMMV.