[mjb]

There's a critical difference between home fermenting and home canning.

In home fermenting, you have living lactic acid bacteria of various kinds, and they out-compete the bad bacteria. You may help them along with some salt and acid. In home canning, you kill most of the living bacteria in the sample and seal it. If you get the acidity wrong, clostridium and other spores then come to life and poison your food product. They can do this easily, because there's nothing to compete with them and because the environment is anaerobic. Safe canning requires other specific acidity and salinity, or pressure canning at a high enough temperature to kill bacterial spores.

If you follow some basic rules about salinity and only ferment raw vegetables, the practice is very safe. Half-ass canning, on the other hand, or mess with cooked foods and meats, and you're walking a dangerous line.

[VLM]

All true which make the linked survey results at

http://nchfp.uga.edu/educators/natl_survey_summary.html

pretty ridiculous. I can stuff, but I follow the Ball book / USDA rules. Oddly enough everything turns out great and no one gets sick.

Honestly some of the USDA statistics are so ridiculous that I'd suspect they're getting trolled.

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

So if I test the compound (sauerkraut) with PH test strips, and find it acidic then I'll be safe?

[gus_massa]

Most of the food is acid anyway, so it's not enough to get and acid mixture, it has to be acid enough to kill the spores. And the acidity varies with time, so I'm not sure how much acidity the initial mixture must have, IAMAFSE.

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clostridium_botulinum

> [...] type-B strains were isolated from slightly acidic soils (average pH 6.25).

> C. botulinum is a lipase-positive microorganism that grows between pH of 4.8 and 7.0 [...]