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Engineering Food at the Molecular Level
Krishna Dagli writes to mention a New York Times article about the possibility of manipulating food at a molecular level. Though some of the initial suggestions are a little pointless (lower-fat ice cream, harder-to-melt M&Ms), weighter goals could eventually be achieved here as well. From the article: "Given the uncertainty about the risks of consuming new nano products, many analysts expect near-term investment to focus on novel food processing and packaging technology. That is the niche targeted by Sunny Oh, whose start-up company, OilFresh, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., is marketing a novel device to keep frying oil fresh. OilFresh grinds zeolite, a mineral, into tiny beads averaging 20 nanometers across and coats them with an undisclosed material. Packed into a shelf inside the fryer, the beads interfere with chemical processes that break down the oil or form hydrocarbon clusters, Mr. Oh says. As a result, restaurants can use oil longer and transfer heat to food at lower temperatures, although they still need traditional filters to remove food waste from the oil. Mr. Oh said OilFresh will move beyond restaurants into food processing by the end of the month, when it delivers a 1,000-ton version of the device to a 'midsized potato chip company' that he said did not want to be identified. "
I'll take my food from the field any day over from the factory, thank you very much.
I'm all for engineering but when it comes to what I eat I'm very oldfashioned. No reconstituted, GM, reprocessed anything.
MP3 Search Engine
Is it just me, or does "Sunny Oh" sound like it should be a brand name of fried snack food?
when interfering with natural food processes like this. Are you doing mankind a favour or creating a stream of cancer patients 20 years down the line.
Artificial preservatives and flavourings were the bees knees apprently when they hit the shelves first until it turned out many were carcinogens or just really not what you body wanted to be accumulating. Now look at the consumer demand for organically grown and prepared food.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
about cooking items coated "with an undisclosed material"?
I'll take my potato chips without undisclosed materials, thank you very much.
Who put this thing together? Me, that's who.
May cause Anal Leakage. WTF?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Essentially (yes, I did not RTFA) we are talking about injecting nano-particles into the frying oil to make it last longer?
Even though some nano-materials could be highly dangerous to human health? In other words, we may end up with highly dangerous cancer-causing products used in kitchens? To fry greasy stuff that we know are bad for our health anyway? Talk about a double whammy: if your heart attack does not kill you, cancer from nano-particles will. And do you want fries with that?
Then again, this is business as usual in the USA, so I guess it will probably be used soon.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Wouldn't it be better to grow food instead of engineer food? Moore's Law doesn't have to apply to everything.
From what I can tell zeolite is an approved food additive. But does it become something that's been entirely untested once you grind it up into nano-particles, and then coat it with some other undisclosed substance (presumably another food safe additive)?
Moon dust was a big problem huge problem for Apollo astronauts as it got past seals. I've heard that it's supposed to consist at least partially of nano-particles. The question is, do ordinary substances behave a lot differently when we grind them up into nano-particles?
My guess it that the FDA rules don't mention particle size when specifying food additives, so something like this could fly under the radar until someone thinks that maybe nano food additives might be a little different.
AccountKiller
This article made me think back to this...Store Wars
For those that haven't seen this before;
Anyone know who the author is?"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
if we can assemble molecules to this degree now- howabout ice 9? the amazing substance that was never fully thought out enough by it's author.
ice 9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-9 among other interesting tidbits, should become a solid WITHOUT increasing in volume, this means for suspended animation- the cells don't burst.
is there no way to stack water molecules, so they stack neatly and tightly?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Even in nature, larger fruits and vegetables(of the same variety) generally less taste as their surgar production is spread out of the larger area. A good example I have is with tomatos. When water and sun are plentiful, they grow HUGE, but have virtually no taste. Now when you have just enough water to GROW the tomatos(not big, just grow), you will get tomatos that are about 75-50% of the size of thier "brothers" but all that sugar is stored in a much more compact area... and mmmm mmm good.
This was what we referred to as Stressing a plant. Once fruit has set and is approaching a good size, reduce the water to just enough to keep leaves from wilting. In the afternoon sun they may droop a bit, but don't worry. This stressing causes, as you say, a concentration of sugars, but is in effect reducing the amount of water stored in the fruit. I practiced this with my roma tomatoes and they were legendary goodness!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's not like food has been statically unchanged over the last several thousand years, or even several hundred years. We've been using selective breeding techniques ever since we started agriculture. Do you think that chicken you're eating is like the original un-domesticated version that came from the wild? Is the corn, wheat, tomatoes, etc the same as it was 2000 years ago, or even 200 years ago?
Rejecting GM, processed, or whatever food with broad strokes doesn't make any sense. We've been changing our food for a long long time, so you really shouldn't be eating anything that society (modern or non-modern) produces at all. If you want "purity before human intervention" you should go back to the hunter-gatherer society, just be carefull not to gather anything that's reproduced with human-interferred stuff.
That's not to say that you shouldn't be concerned with food additives, GM foods, etc. It's just a matter of making sure it's all safe rather than rejecting it all out of hand.
AccountKiller
And what happens when you digest some of those beads? They prevent your liver from breaking down the oil?
K, I have to de-bullshit this claim.
We went over this in class last week or so, my prof does extensive work in the food processing industry and did work on fryers.
Frying is done with oil. (fatty acids and long chain hydrocarbons)
Fryers go to hot temperatures.
The food they fry has water.
The food is organic. (hydrocarbons + esters + protiens + more fatty acids)
So! We end up with:
1. Thermal degredation! Can't stop this! It's a function of N*cycles of heating!
2. Water hydates the oils! Guess what, cannot stop this either! H2O+fatty acids = hydrogination at high temps.
3. Burning pieces of food enter the oil, plus anything oil soluble will enter the oil! The burning food discolours the oil (going from golden colours to brackish brown), it's just carbon though. The other solutes are the difficult problem, whatever was in your frying food is now in the oil!
4. Oxidation nothing anyone can do will stop this, because oxygen usually has free access to the surface of fryers, and therefore oil. Industry can replace O2 with N2 or another noble gas, but it costs money.
Overall the best these "nanoparticles" could be, (ps don't even listen words like nanoparticle or nanoanything in an obvious press release) is a small sphere, coated in a semipermeable membrane. There is going to be no pressure gradient, no electrical gradient, no difference of velocity/momentum, leaving only a chemical gradient, propelled by thermal energy, which means the efficiency of this additive/process is highly limited. In an industrial setting where pressure can be supplied it would work much better.
Now for the second half of my post.
HOW DOES something which is ISOLATED from the rest of the system affect it? These spheres do not directly affect the bonding of fatty acids as they ARE PACKED INTO an AREA and placed into the oil, unless they contain an enzyme, or some solvent...(zeolite can be altered to an enzyme/acid or just a simple ion exchange column).
I say isolated because these particles cannot be free floating in the oil, because it would then attach to the food, which would not be allowed. (and again if the particles are so small (50 nanometers, a membrane of smaller porosity would be needed to hold the beads back, further decreasing the efficiency of the filtration)
PS this new method is subject to all the same degredations as was mentioned by the original oil.
I wonder how much oil it saves in term of mass flux, or how much healthier it makes the oil in terms of foreign particles, and how often the process is required to be replaced.
Interesting... but the press release is pure garbage.
Also toothpaste and some tattoos. Am I supposed to be spooked by this?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca