Suppose you have a cargo ship packed to the gills with raw cuts of meat (no containers, no packaging, nuthin’). Now suppose there is no refrigeration on the ship.
In fact, the ship will sail the tropics until utter rot results! I am curious as to how this would progress. Would the hold be poppin’ full of rats and maggots going at the meat mountains? How much stank would ensue, and how quickly?
And would would the ultimate end result be? How long would it take for the liquifying sludge (if that would indeed be an intermediate stage) to dry up and be nice again? Or would the ship forever and anon stink of dead flesh?
Use your imagination and knowledge of the sciences to answer me the above questions. Thanks!
I’m wondering about ventilation, the maggots and rats will give off CO2 while the tropical heat will cause evaporation of water. CO2 is not condusive to animal life, and the H20 vapour will prevent oxygen entering unless there is a smart ventilation system.
One might, just might, land up with a hold full of pemmican.
If the hold were sealed then one could land up with a sort of haybox bake oven.
Rats would only appear if there were some onboard when the vessel set sail - probably not unlikely, but I just thought it worth mentioning, in case we had to give equal time to the theory of spontaneous generation, or anything like that. Flies could embark mid-voyage.
Well it is used for very slow cooking at a low temperature, a bit like putting something hot in an efficient thermos and just leaving it overnight. Good for making porridge.
I suppose it is a bit similar to roasting pits where you chuck in hot stones, palm leaves (?) and bury the lot.
In this case the ship is in the tropics, so it is going to be pretty hot regardless of insulation.
Say 100 degrees Fahrenheit or 38 degrees Centigrade (Google is great for conversions).
If the hold is sealed (and the OP made it sound like that) then the meat will gently stew itself.
It will be like one ruddy great electric slow cooker set on low. Those things are poor on insulation so they add heat rather than conserve it.
I suppose one could conduct an experiment with a hunk of meat, a tupperware box and some duct tape - fill box to gunnels, seal up and place next to central heating unit.
Years ago, I once worked at a potato chip factory.
One day, when we were running desperately short of raw potatoes, a railroad boxcar arrived from Florida. Unfortunately, somewhere in a Chicago train yard, they railroad had allowed the refrigeration unit on the car to run out of fuel, several days earlier – in summertime. We knew something was wrong as soon as the car arrived, just from the smell.
When we opened the door of the car, the contents looked more like potato stew than potatoes. A horrendously stinky liquid flowed out of the car, and continued for many minutes. The contents were a mushy.semi-liquid mess.
The boss ordered one unlucky dock worker to climb into the car and search around in the back corners of the car, to see if there were any usable potatoes at all in the car. There weren’t. It was a complete loss, and we filed a claim with the railroad for the full value.
What was done with the rotten potatoes?
They were shoveled into the grinder, and then flushed away down the sewer, like we did with potato peels, unpopped popcorn, etc.
Not for humans, certainly. I suppose they could have been fed to pigs or chickens – they might have gotten some food out of them. But they were really mostly rotted. I think the cost of transporting them (we were in the middle of the Twin Cities) would have been higher than their value as food. Possibly they could have served as fertilizer.
In fact, that was where they did end up. They went thru the sewer system to the Pig’s Eye sewage treatment plant, where the solids are recovered and sold to farmers for fertilizer.