Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #1651: My mice need aroma therapy.

 

 

I’m just about to order some essential oils for my mice.  Along with an essential oil diffuser.  The poor things seem a bit stressed of late, and I figure that a bit of aroma therapy might help them more nearly align their chakras and generally improve their auras.

That’s sarcasm.  Mostly.

Mice are vermin.  Full stop.  Yet I am, in fact, purchasing an essential oil diffuser and some essential oils for my mice.

It’s as logical as 1-2-3. 4 maybe 5.

1:  Mice like my garage.

Source:  Clipart library.com

I’m now into Swedish Death Cleaning, the Garage Phase.  Just another in an ongoing series of attempts to get rid of stuff.

Currently I’m going through my detached garage.  Figuring out what can be given away.  What’s good for scrap metal.   What’s trash.  What has to go to the household toxic waste station at the local dump solid waste transfer station.  And so on.  The idea is to return this space to its original intended use a hobby woodshop.

But for now, the main issue is that it’s filthy.  Just filthy.  And the principal source of the filth is mice.  And all that mice do.  And do.  And do.  In every conceivable location in that garage.

So, as long as I’m cleaning it out, I want to add some rodent repellents.  Ideally, some effective rodent repellents.

2:  Mice hate peppermint.

Or so they say.

It’s not as if I haven’t tried rodent repellents before.  It’s just that what I’ve tried has failed.  And, I suspect that, as with my long and winding road for deer repellents, what will and will not work will be highly dependent on circumstances.

In any case, there appears to be some research suggesting that, if given alternatives, mice will stay away from areas heavily scented with peppermint, cinammon, wintergreen, and similar.  Let me just summarize that by saying that mice hate peppermint.

3:  Commercial mouse repellents are expensive, per unit of peppermint.

So I go to the Home Depot website and look up their top-rated mint-based rodent repellent.   They will cheerfully sell me a gallon of it for $34.  Reading the fine print, I see that what they are selling me is a gallon of water, with a little squirt of peppermint oil in it.  Above, the first ingredient is soap, followed by 0.5% peppermint oil.

So I’d be paying $34 for a little over half an ounce of peppermint oil.  Call it $60 an ounce or so.  Plus some other stuff.  Of which, arguably, the cinnamon oil has value as a rodent deterrent.

(I note, parenthetically, that I have tried “sachet-style” rodent repellents before, without notable success.  Hence my focus on liquids.)

4:  Peppermint essential oil is cheap, but volatile.

Source:  Amazon.com

Meanwhile, on Amazon, I can buy four ounces of peppermint essential oil (of unknown quality) for maybe $12.  Plus, it’s Energizing!

That price strikes me as about fair, as the stuff is more-or-less a weed.  My wife has mint patches established in several flower gardens, and it’s not so much a question of cultivating it, as keeping it in check.

As a bonus, the comments show that people do, in fact, use it as mouse repellent.

The drawback is that you need to keep reapplying it.  Recommendations seem to be to strew oil-soaked cotton balls around, and re-soak them once or twice a week.

That’s way too much work.  There has to be a better way to do this.

5:  Essential oil delivery systems are cheap.

Source:  Amazon.com

People who are into essential oils as room fragrances use some sort of system to deliver the scent.  You can simply warm a puddle of oil.  You can mix the oil with water and run it through an ultrasonic humidifier.

Or, you can buy a gizmo that will periodically spritz the essential oil into the air.  Said gizmo generally being called an “air freshener”.

In the end, I went with the $11 Air Wick Essential Mist.  It’s a battery powered air freshener that uses a small bottle of essential oil, and spritzes that into the air every few seconds, eight hours a day.  Again, per those useful Amazon comments, you can pry the lid off the bottle and replace the contents with the essential oil of your choice.  Each fraction-of-an-ounce bottle should be good for about a month.

As mice are nocturnal, I’ll set that up to spritz at night.

The only obvious negative is that, by reputation, these eat batteries.  But with an exposed battery compartment, that can be easily fixed by hard-wiring a wall wart to replace the three AAA batteries.

Edit:  Contrary to what The Internet told me, pure peppermint oil does not work with this device.  It won’t atomize it, or, at least, not at unheated-garage temperatures.  I redid this, mix pure peppermint oil roughly 50/50 with vodka.  That now seems to be working.  The upshot is that you need to thin the oil, and it looks like vodka (water and alcohol) will work OK.

Ergo, my mice need aroma therapy.  Q.E.D.

As I said, completely logical, linear and rational.  My little air-freshener-as-mouse-repellent costs about $25 to set up, and the four-ounce bottle of peppermint oil should last for maybe half-a-year.  That’s all plus-or-minus battery replacements.  And it will require monthly maintenance to refill the essential oil container.

If nothing else, the garage is going to smell a whole lot better than it does now.

It might even keep the mice away.  We’ll see.

Post #1650: COVID-19 cases are rising?

 

A man with one watch knows the time.  A man with two watches is never quite sure.

And so it goes with methods to impute the “true” counts of official new COVID-19 cases, based on the increasingly sketchy reporting.  I now have two methods for doing this — neither of which is without flaws — and both are telling me that, out of the blue, U.S. new case counts are now rising. Continue reading Post #1650: COVID-19 cases are rising?

Post #1649: Capital Bikeshare at Tysons: 170 slots, 14 locations, 6 round trips a day.

 

This final bit of analysis of Capital Bikeshare is here just in case anybody in Vienna actually believes the cheerleader-style reporting you may read regarding  Capital Bikeshare.

Here’s the actual use of the Bikeshare racks around Tysons, for the past 12 months. To understand this, realize that the underlying unit of data is a “trip leg”.  It’s a transport of a bicycle from one rack to another, or, in the case of a round trip, from one rack back to that same rack.  E.g.  if you rode one of these bikes from the Metro station to work in the morning, and then back in the evening, that would be two trip-legs.

To get a better estimate of the actual number of users, I divide trip-legs by two to get “trips”.  (Except for round-trips, for which each one counts as a trip).  I’m betting that in most cases, this is a far better estimate of the number of unique users on any given day.

Then, I divided these 12-month totals by 365 to get them on a per-day basis.

The upshot is that, on a typical day, the entire Capital Bikeshare investment in the Tyson’s Metro area — 14 racks, total of 170 bike slots, and an unknown number of bikes — typically benefits six people.

Let me point out that this is a mostly-mature system at this point.  Most of those racks have been there for years now.  And let me further point out that it looked just like that the last time I analyzed the data for Tysons Metro in isolation.  And it looks like this out in the far Maryland ‘burbs as well. And in Reston.

If you can look at that, and say, oh, boy, let’s spend a quarter-mil to install those in my Town  — then let’s pay Lyft (the owner of the company that operates Capital Bikeshare) whatever annual maintenance they charge, on top of that.

If you can say that, then I think you and I live in alternative realities.

I don’t even care if it’s somebody else’s tax dollars paying for it. Building more of these, when we already know what the outcome looks like out here in the exurbs, is just the worst kind of government.

In case anybody wants to check my work — nobody ever does — the underlying data are here:  https://ride.capitalbikeshare.com/system-data.

Finally, let me reiterate that in the central urban core of the DC area, Capital Bikeshare is a fine idea and it works well.  (I’ve said that in almost all of my prior posts on this topic, and repeat it here to be sure that you understand I am not anti-bike or anti-Capital-Bikeshare.)  The heavy use of the bikes in that area contributes to a reasonable cost-per-ride.  But in those areas, a) there are lots of nearby places to go from and to, where racks can be sited, and b) as I recall, a typical bike rack slot turns over an average of six times a day.

In other words, there are maybe two-orders-of-magnitude more riders per bike slot in the dense urban core than in the far-flung suburbs.  Bikeshare provides value in that urban core.  It does not out here.

Realistic transportation policy needs to recognize that and be shaped accordingly.  Early on, local governments could be forgiven for taking a chance on a technology that, in hindsight, just doesn’t work out here.  Now, by contrast, with all the accumulated evidence, there’s no longer any excuse.  We know it doesn’t work, in the sense of having an outrageous average cost per mile of transportation, due to negligible use rates.  Why are we still expanding it?

Post #1648: Perhaps I’ve done a bit too much on-line shopping of late.

 

Once upon a midnight dreary, as I sat alone with Siri,
Christmas presents still to purchase, Cyber Monday deals to score,
     There perched I with nerves now snapping,
     packages in need of wrapping,
Gifts awaiting Christmas trappings, overlapping on the floor.
“Tis the season” grumbled I, “all glory that there isn’t more.”
Else I’d never find the floor.

Ah, so vaguely I’d remember, items ordered mid-November
As a Costco member, now were squatting glumly by the door.
     Eagerly I wished the morrow;—
     vainly I had sought to borrow
From my charge-cards I might borrow happiness from days of yore,
For the spirit of the season urges buying more and more,
Overnighted to my door.

Then my mind seized on the burden, gaze ashamèdly averting
From the pile of acquisitions spilt across my kitchen floor.
     So that now, bank-balance bleeding,
    poverty I’ll soon be pleading,
To my creditors unheeding I shall pay forevermore.
Bankruptcy shall be proceeding, that is where my life is borne.
Christmas spendthrift to the core.

Presently a doorbell-ringer forced me not to longer linger,
“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
     Packages they need a-wrapping,
     creditors may come knee-capping,
Sorrows I was now recapping, yapping as I crossed the floor.
“Wouldst thou stay, converse a moment?” —here I opened wide the door;—
Packages and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams of Fridays Black no shopper dreamt before;
     Etsy with their goods bespoken?
     Hoping nothing had been broken,
And my only thought unspoken was that I would buy no more!
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the words, “Oh, sure”—
This I heard, and nothing more.

Dragging boxes undiscerning, sinews of my back now burning,
Soon, again, I heard a tintinnabulation as before.
    “Mayhap”, said I, “Barnes and Noble?”,
    breaking from my trance immobile,
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore—
Lamentation to dispel with caissons bearing lit’rature?—
‘Tis the wind and nothing more!”

Motionless amidst the clutter, gazing outward toward the gutter,
Up now stepped a stately Postman, clothed in blue to reassure;
     Not the least obeisance made he;
     not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with bureaucratic mien of those who serve whom they abhor,
No kindness shone, nor outright malice, standing at my entry door.
“Sign”, spake he, and nothing more.

Then amidst my sad stockpiling, could not help myself reviling,
Poker face and postal uniform that he so blandly bore.
     “You, man, are a public servant,
     surely you must be observant,
Tell me what the sender’s name is ere I sign my name once more.
Alibaba? Ebay? Target? Amazonians galore?”
“Matters not, you will buy more.”

Much I marveled this ungainly fellow to discourse so plainly,
Answer so offensive, ‘neath my breath I sotto voce swore;
     Yet amid this Christmas season,
     no soul capable of reason
Could deny the reasonableness of his prophecy of more.
Flesh or spirit, care not I, deliver boxes by the score!
“Sign”, saith he, and nothing more.

For the Postman, standing lonely at the threshold, he spoke only
That one phrase, as if his world admitted but that single chore.
     With his mail-sack then he puttered,
     not a further word he muttered.
Thought I — might I utter phrasing, solely him to reassure?
“U.S.P.S. is my fav’rite, other shippers I deplore.”
Saith the Postman, “oh, for sure”.

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
“Doubtless,” said I, “The Post Office badly lacks esprit-de-corps.”
     Doubtless the Postmaster General
     glories in this true disaster
Of a workforce who no faster than a snail our burdens bore—
Till the packages we wait for — are but ghosts on Lethe’s shore.
Post December 24.

Ignore now this Postman’s riling, other places call beguiling,
Best Buy, Zappos, Wayfair, Walmart, to me now these all implore.
     Time is wasting, I was thinking,
     Christmas is upon us sinking.
Shopping days are shrinking, slinking past the deadlines I abhor.
Mystery of kraft-wrapped beauty, parcel that I so adore!
Sign for it, then order more.

Signed I now without obsessing, gave me now his Postal blessing,
Knowing not the sender, tossed the package by the kitchen door.
     Turning now to be about
     his still-unfinished postal routing,
Humming dirges that his doubting melancholy burden bore.
Leaving, he could not restrain from off’ring up one parting score:
“I’ll return, you shall buy more.”

Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if man or devil!—
How payest I for all these goods that you deliver to my door?
     Christmas spending goes undaunted,
     in my home by lenders haunted,
Driven to me by my lack of lucre for the deals I score.
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”
Quoth the Postman, “Nevermore.”

“Be that word our sign of parting, friend or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—
“Get ye gone onto your route and bring me goods o nevermore”.
     Leave no package as a token
     of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my poverty unbroken!—mat of welcome step no more.
Take thy bag from off my stoop, and take thy form from out my door!”
Quoth the Postman “Nevermore.”

Source:  (c) 2022, Christopher Hogan, with considerable theft from Edgar Allan Poe.

Post G22-065: Round, brown, and slightly moist most of the time.

 

But few people have one.  And that’s a situation I’m trying to change.

A couple of months ago, I put away some seeds from the pawpaw trees in my yard, with the idea of starting and giving away pawpaw seedlings in the spring.  Preserving viable seeds turned out to be quite a process (Post #G22-062).  After a thorough cleaning, the seeds need to be kept moist, and kept cold over the winter.  So a couple of plastic bags of seeds-in-damp-potting-soil have been living at the back of my fridge for the past two months.

Today it was time for a mid-season checkup. 

They’re still brown (no evidence of mildew or fungus).  And they’re still damp, though it’s clear that they have dried out somewhat, so I’m going to top them off with a bit of fresh water.  (In hindsight, I should have weighed them before I tucked them into the fridge.)

But, in general, things are proceeding according to plan.

Except that I don’t actually have a plan.  I started this in response to a request for pawpaw seeds.  I noted how difficult it seemed to be to come by pawpaw seedlings locally. And pawpaws are the only known host of the zebra swallowtail butterfly.

So when you get right down to it, my entire rationale for doing this is butterflies (aw!). 

And thus I have fallen into the classic charismatic megafauna trap.  As humans, we focus on saving animals that are attractive (pandas).   Or noble-looking (elephants).  Or have cultural context (bald eagles).  Or, in this case, cute, and the Virginia state insect (zebra swallowtail butterfly).

The dead of winter is the perfect time to step back and take a more objective look at this effort.  Given that we’re in the middle of the great insect apocalypse, and given that growing trees in suburban yards is more-or-less a zero-sum game (if not a pawpaw, then some other tree), what is it, exactly, that I’m hoping to accomplish.

Is propagating pawpaws the smart thing to do?   Aside from the technical gardening challenge of doing this, and helping one insect (because it’s so cute!), is this really the best use of my time?

A summary of expert advice for an insect-friendly urban environment.

As my first attempt at being somewhat more systematic, let me use Google to find seemingly-serious websites offering advice on how to create an insect-friendly urban environment.

To frame that properly, I need to state clearly that urbanized areas constitute only a tiny fraction of U.S. land area.  So, from the outset, this list is going to be oriented toward personal actions that residents of urbanized areas may take.  My little survey clearly is not going to have the right “weighting” in terms of global impact, because those urbanized areas constitute such a small part of the entire U.S. insect habitat.

You can look at that any number of ways, and arrive at the same conclusion.  The U.S. Census has a formal definition of what it considers to be an urbanized area:

Source:  Census data via University of Texas.

Bloomberg has a nicely detailed summary of U.S. land use.  You reach much the same conclusion from that as you do from the map above.  Urban areas account for a few percent of the total land area of the U.S.

Source:  Bloomberg, Here’s How America Uses Its Land,By Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby,

So, almost beyond a doubt, policies or actions applicable to the other land categories will have a much larger impact than what gets done in urbanized areas.  Pasture/range, forest, cropland, and parks (and other special-use lands) vastly outweigh urban areas in terms of insect habitat.

The easiest way to quantify that is to focus on the diagram above.  Roughly speaking, there’s one acre of crop land and two acres of pasture/grazing land for every resident of the U.S.  Most of the production from that land is consumed domestically.  Adults consume more than kids.  If I had to guess, I’d guess that growing a year’s food for two U.S. adults takes up at least six acres of land.  Compare that to my suburban lot, and, arguably, what I choose to eat is going to matter a lot more than how I landscape my yard.

But you do what you can.

For urbanites.

That said, below I have tabulated the advice most commonly offered to Joe and Jane Urbanite, to help protect and preserve the insect population.  This is literally the first nine reputable sources that showed up in a simple Google query of best things to do to help insects.  The full tables may be a bit tough to read, so scroll down for just the good parts.

Just the useful bit:

When I start from this perspective, I’m pretty sure that displacing other species of backyard trees, in favor of pawpaws necessary for a single butterfly species, is probably not the most effective thing I can be doing to help beneficial insects survive in my yard.

#1:  Overwhelmingly, the first piece of advice is to reduce the area of your lawn, in favor of … well, just about anything else.   Eight of nine sources said some version of that.  Minimally, don’t mow it.   Maximally, return it to more-or-less a wild area.  Maybe plant it with wildflowers.  Maybe plant it with insect-friendly plants.

I think I’m going to take this one to heart next year, as I have a large section of my back yard currently covered in black plastic, trying to kill the weeds.  And a whole lot of saved flower seeds.  I think that’s all going to become a flower bed next year.

#2:  Skip the pesticides and herbicides.  I think I have that one knocked.  The more I grow in my vegetable garden, the less inclined I am toward any type of insecticides.  Herbicide?  I spell that h-o-e.

#3:  Address your outdoor lighting. I had no idea this was quite so much of an issue.  Everyone gives the same advice.  Minimize outdoor lighting.  And if you use outdoor lighting, go toward the red/yellow/amber spectrum, not white.  Apparently, there is some truth to the idea that old-fashioned yellow bug lights attract fewer bugs.  What also appears true, however, is that the switch to LED street lights. however good that is from the standpoint of reducing energy consumption, is a step backward in terms of harm to the insect population.   Apparently, those old fashioned yellow high-pressure sodium lights were reasonably benign, compared to the white light issued by LED or mercury vapor/halide lamps.

For me, this is fixable.  I have exactly two small outdoor lights.  Both have white bulbs in them.  I’ll swap those for bug lights, and problem solved.

#4:  Create bee nests, bug hotels, and other protected habitats.  Or, alternatively, just leave the edges of your yard looking like crap all the time.  That works for me.  I now have a great excuse for leaves, branches, pine cones, etc. along the margins of my yard.  It’s not sloth, it’s environmentally sound policy.  Plausibly the wilder it looks, the more insect-friendly it is.

But you can also buy bits of made habitat.  I bought one of those solitary-bee or mason-bee nesting boxes in Spring 2016.  Never touched it.  Here’s how it looks this morning:

To me, that looks like an underwhelming amount of new-bee production for six years.  A lot of the tubes remain untouched.  Maybe a half-dozen have clearly released a live bee, as evidenced by the hole in the end of the mud.  A few more might hold bees that will emerge this spring.  That said, those bees will re-use those tubes, so it’s not clear exactly how many bees this investment produced. Or, for that matter, whether those bees would simply have laid their eggs elsewhere, absent this cute little device.

That said, I already own a couple, so I guess I’ll get the refill tubes, clean them up, and re-hang them.  What could it hurt?

I’m going to stop there, except to note that planting native plants (such as pawpaws) is pretty far down the list.  And so, as I had begun to suspect, it’s likely that going to all this effort to produce pawpaw seedlings is not very efficient.  Laboriously saving the seeds, to produce the seedlings, so that others may displace some trees in their yard with pawpaws, so that the zebra swallowtail has a place to lay eggs … that’s a positive thing to do, but it should hardly be first on the list.

Best guess, after fixing my outdoor lighting, the single smartest thing I can do is transform large portions of the edges of my yard to wildflowers.  Around here, it takes considerable effort to keep “wild” patches of yard from being overgrown with less desirable plants.  So it’ll take some doing to get a setup that has any hope of maintaining itself, even if I mow it once a year to keep the trees down.

After that, it’s probably a question of being pickier about what I eat.  I’m not sure about the extent to which eating organic produce actually avoids use of pesticides, rather than merely substitutes some classes of pesticides for others.  But I am pretty sure that foods vary widely in terms of the average amount of pesticide and herbicide used per edible calorie.  I think my next step is to see if research can generate any reliable information on that.

Post #1646, COVID-19 through 11/30, still no significant trend

 

It seems as if “tripledemic” has finally been dropped by the news media.  For the simple reason that COVID is failing to play its part.  Near as I can tell, there’s still no trend in new cases, we’re way past the point where prior winter waves started, and there’s nothing happening in Canada.

Like so:

Continue reading Post #1646, COVID-19 through 11/30, still no significant trend

Post #1645: Swearing off angertainment for the new year.

 

A recent Washington Post opinion piece used the term “angertainment” to describe the antics and publicity stunts that seem to be the meat-and-potatoes of  Republican politics these days.

The case at hand was the narrow victory by Representative Boebert of Colorado.  While she is particularly noted for inflammatory stunts, I’m sure we can all recall other examples.  You might recall local political ads suggesting that a candidate planned to hunt down and kill Democrats.  On the national scene, surely you remember statements encouraging violence against the vice-president.  Or maybe it’s just a case of using taxpayer funds from one state, to fly asylum-seekers between two other states.  Because, why not?

That Post opinion piece offered two general descriptions of “angertainment”.  It’s “… an approach to governing that mistakes “owning the libs” for getting things done for constituents.”  Alternatively, it’s behavior specifically chosen to elicit news coverage along the lines of “You won’t believe what this GOP candidate is saying or doing!”

I guess I’d characterize it maintaining political power by appealing to the mob’s anger, rather than actually trying to solve any problems or address issues.

But as I was reading through yet a different Post article — this time on beach erosion in Florida — it occurred to me that the comments sections on most Washington Post articles are themselves nothing but angertainment.  Person after anonymous person, spewing venom and expressing their hatred for fill-in-the-blank.

So I made a comment to that effect.  In the angertainment opinion piece.  As politely as I could.  And was immediately flamed, called names, told I was an agent of Trump, and so on.

Thus more-or-less immediately proving my point.

I think I had a little epiphany, after that.  And after reading through the comments on a story about beach erosion in Florida.  In a nutshell, the U.S is going to lose a huge swath of coastal land as a result of climate change, with all the hardship, displacement, and loss that implies.  And 99 percent of the comments boiled down to “Florida sucks, and they deserve it”.

After reflecting on that a bit, I’ve decided that I’m just not going to read comments sections any more.  I’ll read what the professional journalists write.   And skip the amateur bile.  No matter how entertaining it might be to get all stoked up on the anger expressed.

For newspapers where comments are heavily moderated — such as the New York Times — there is still some climate of reason in the comments sections.  And the comments there are frequently worth reading.

But in the Washington Post — and, frankly, almost everywhere else — the comments sections really seems to be in a race to the bottom.   Just a bunch of angry people, who got stirred up by the newspaper article, and who feel the need to mouth off.

So I’m just not going to go there.  Surely, even in retirement, I can find a better use for my time.

Post #1644: No-salt turkey jerky, the re-run

 

Nothing exceeds like excess.

For this second round, I decided to amp up the turkey jerky processing.  I purchased several more discount turkey breasts from my local Safeway, to try out the idea of making jerky from fully-roasted turkey.

Recall from the just-prior post that the USDA safety guidelines for jerky call for you to cook the meat (to 165F) before drying it.  That being the case, why was I going through the hassle of butchering and slicing raw turkey?  I looked around on the internet and, sure enough, some people simply make jerky out of roast turkey.  No need to cut up the raw meat.

In this round I gave that a try.

It works, kind of.  It’s certainly a lot less messy, and a lot easier.  But the cooked turkey tends to fall apart rather than cut cleanly.  So I ended up with a lot of variation in the thickness of the “slices”.  That’s a bad thing, when making jerky, as it generates variation in the extent to which the meat absorbs the marinade, and variation in drying time.

I used the same marinade as in the last post, but increased the salt substitute by 50% and dropped the liquid smoke.  The final product this time has just enough saltiness to be satisfying, without being spicy.

The whole process yielded two pounds of rather ugly-looking turkey jerky, at a meat cost of $3.50 per pound.  That’s starting from turkey breasts at $0.59 a pound. Compare that to what appears to be the going rate on Amazon of about $1.50 an ounce.

Plus, I get yet another pot of turkey soup out of it.  Because, who doesn’t want yet more turkey soup, on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.

Judging from what was left in the Safeway meat case, I could probably keep this up for another week or so.  But I think I’ve had enough.  Two pounds of jerky is a lot.

The only thing left to do is to estimate the sodium content of this turkey jerky.  I didn’t use any salt (sodium chloride), but the turkey itself has some naturally, and likely has some from whatever it was injected with by the meat processor.

Near as I can tell, four ounces of turkey contains about 100 mg of sodium.  The rule of thumb is that you get an ounce of turkey jerky for every four ounces of raw meat. So this should end up with roughly 100 mg of sodium per ounce of turkey jerky.  That puts this in the same league as Strollo’s, the lowest-sodium jerky on the market, with just 65 mg sodium per ounce.

Mission accomplished.  It’s completely possible to make a tasty low-sodium turkey jerky at home.  And you can make it from leftover roast turkey.

Post #1643: No-salt turkey jerky

Edited 2/22/2024

I made and ate no-salt turkey jerky, and lived to tell the tale.

I added a little salt-substitute (potassium chloride) for taste, at the rate of four teaspoons per cup of marinade.  (See recipe below).  In hindsight, a little more wouldn’t have hurt.  But the only sodium in the jerky is what was already in the turkey when I started.

The long and the short of it is that you don’t need salt to make jerky safely.  But it helps.

If you skip the salt, you’d be well-advised to do exactly as the USDA recommends for the rest of the processing steps.  Mostly, that means cooking the meat before drying it.  And then drying it quickly and thoroughly.

Below you see the results of an experiment with jerky made from ground beef heavily contaminated with e. coli.  The bars show how much live e. coli remained in the meat.  Shorter bars are better.  (Note that this is a log scale, so every tick mark on the scale is a ten-fold increase in the concentration of e. coli.)

Source:  Taken and substantially modified from:  Judy A. Harrison, Mark A. Harrison, Ruth Ann Rose, Survival of Escherichia coli O157:H7 in Ground Beef Jerky Assessed on Two Plating Media,Journal of Food Protection, Volume 61, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 11-13, https://doi.org/10.4315/0362-028X-61.1.11. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0362028X22014806).  Annotations in red are mine.

By eye, cooking the meat (right half versus left half, above) matters more than adding salt/nitrite curing mix to the meat (white bars versus black bars).  Though, if you want the absolute minimum risk of contamination, you should do both.

After contemplating those results for a bit, I don’t think I’d try no-salt with anything but solid meat jerky.  As shown below, using turkey.  Ground meat seems a little too bacteria-friendly to allow you to slack off on any aspect of the processing.

Depends on your tolerance for risk, I guess.  But that’s true of all home-preserved food. Continue reading Post #1643: No-salt turkey jerky