After getting excited about how fun and easy it was to slice up, salt, spice, squeeze and jar cabbage - and then watch it bubble away under the airlock - I decided to use up my red onions by fermenting them.
I weighed up the onions and added a little over 2% salt, sliced them up and squeezed them and put them in another jar under an airlock, using a ziplock bag full of tap water as a weight.
Nothing happened. No bubbles, no smell, no expansion. After reading a bit online, I thought that perhaps the minute amount of bleach in the tap water (of which there would have been a film around the ziplock bag) had killed off the bacteria needed for the ferment. So I ditched it.
By throwing it in the Bokashi bin.
... and then, after reading some more, I started to get worried about having created the toxins for botulism. There was no fermenting happening in the jar, so the good bacteria would not have killed off any developing bad bacteria, and then, when I put it in the Bokashi (another anaerobic environment) and it mixed in with the rest of the rotting food, the salt percentage would have become negligible, and whatever process was going on there might have contributed to the creation of the toxins...
Which would mean that, since I scooped the onions out into the bin (spilling some, getting it on my hands etc) and had since added to / interacted with the bokashi scraps, significant parts of my kitchen are potentially infected... Online information about botulism toxins seems to indicate that it is essentially toxic waste, and even being in the vicinity of it is a bad idea. Also, that even after toxins are killed off (via boiling water or alcohol or the passage of time or whatever) that the spores would remain on surfaces, liable to leap into deadly action when the conditions were right...
So basically. Do I need to sterilise / throw away everything in my kitchen / fermenting space? Am I going to die a horrifying death? Many thanks in advance