Bluskale

To generate as much profit for their shareholders as possible.

Even that is not really their legal responsibility… if you’re thinking of their fiduciary duty, that means there is a responsibility to act in the best interests of the corporation & shareholders (rather than, eg, putting personal gain forefront). “Best interests” doesn’t necessarily mean “make the most money possible right now”, particularly if it can be argued that there would be long term damage to brand reputation etc by doing so.

Wait, what’s the connection between monkeys and gazelles that makes this make sense?

While freezing should kill multicellular eukaryotes (worms or other parasites), bacteria are pretty hardy, even to things like freezing. Plus, even when they aren’t, they make up for it in numbers… if you kill 99% of 10 million bacteria, you still have a hundred thousand that can subsequently repopulate if they are thawed left to grow a bit (even in the fridge). I’m not sure about these Vibrio strains, but the infective dose of some E. coli and Salmonella strains is measured in quantities less than 1000 bacterial cells.

Edit: reading a bit, probably this won’t be doing much growing at fridge temperatures (prefers warm water after all), however infections have been reported from oysters that were tested at about 900 cfu/gram of meat, so it might take (coincidentally) about a hundred thousand bacteria to cause an infection (~10g/oyster * 900 cfu/gram * 12 oysters or so). This isn’t very much… you probably have at least 1 to 100 million cfu/g of various bacteria on chopped lettuce, for instance.

I wonder if this will be embraced officially by publishers, or just left as a DIY thing for enthusiasts.