Nerd Night, Part III
Apr. 7th, 2010 07:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebThe third lecture of Nerd Night was "You gonna eat that?" by Claire Sweet (perfect name for a a person doing a presentation like that!).
This talk was about how there are incomprehensible additives in our food. I didn't learn much. My favorite part was where she would list all the ingredients of some product and have us guess what that product was.
Mostly it was my favorite part because of how hard most of the things were to guess and how many different guesses seemed reasonable for each list of ingredients.
For example, someone guessed hot dogs for the Slim Jim ingredients. Someone guessed cola for the fake maple syrup ingredients. Guesses for Hawaiian punch included Gatorade, jello, and Skittles. That really tells you a little something about the world of "food" we live in.
I also liked it because I won a Twix bar making the correct guess for this set of ingredients:
* water
* corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup
* hydrogenated coconut and palm kernel oil
* sodium caseinate
* natural and artificial flavor
* xanthan and guar gums
* polysorbate 60
* sorbitan monostearate
* beta carotene
I guessed it right away, so I can't tell you what the competing guesses were. You'll have to tell me that. Then you can read what's really made out of this in the first comment.
[Note: although I do still eat this, I do not buy it and I do not collect recipes that include it because I am familiar with the ingredients. And I made this decision even before I stopped buying hydrogenated oils.]
Another thing I liked about the presentation was this subtitle: "From Farm to Lab (From Pig to Spam)."
Another fun thing she did was compare ingredient lists from store-bought items with ingredients in recipes for the same thing. For example, a recipe for bagels contains flour, water, yeast, honey and/or sugar, and salt. A recipe for cornflakes contains cornmeal, sugar, honey, and sea salt. (I've never even thought of making my own corn flakes.) (I'm still not really thinking about it.) (Except how would you make the little flake shapes? That's got to be annoying.)
The speaker recommended the Oxford Dictionary of Food and Nutrition for those who want to learn about various ingredients.
This talk was about how there are incomprehensible additives in our food. I didn't learn much. My favorite part was where she would list all the ingredients of some product and have us guess what that product was.
Mostly it was my favorite part because of how hard most of the things were to guess and how many different guesses seemed reasonable for each list of ingredients.
For example, someone guessed hot dogs for the Slim Jim ingredients. Someone guessed cola for the fake maple syrup ingredients. Guesses for Hawaiian punch included Gatorade, jello, and Skittles. That really tells you a little something about the world of "food" we live in.
I also liked it because I won a Twix bar making the correct guess for this set of ingredients:
* water
* corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup
* hydrogenated coconut and palm kernel oil
* sodium caseinate
* natural and artificial flavor
* xanthan and guar gums
* polysorbate 60
* sorbitan monostearate
* beta carotene
I guessed it right away, so I can't tell you what the competing guesses were. You'll have to tell me that. Then you can read what's really made out of this in the first comment.
[Note: although I do still eat this, I do not buy it and I do not collect recipes that include it because I am familiar with the ingredients. And I made this decision even before I stopped buying hydrogenated oils.]
Another thing I liked about the presentation was this subtitle: "From Farm to Lab (From Pig to Spam)."
Another fun thing she did was compare ingredient lists from store-bought items with ingredients in recipes for the same thing. For example, a recipe for bagels contains flour, water, yeast, honey and/or sugar, and salt. A recipe for cornflakes contains cornmeal, sugar, honey, and sea salt. (I've never even thought of making my own corn flakes.) (I'm still not really thinking about it.) (Except how would you make the little flake shapes? That's got to be annoying.)
The speaker recommended the Oxford Dictionary of Food and Nutrition for those who want to learn about various ingredients.
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The Answer
on 2010-04-08 12:52 am (UTC)Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Whip#Ingredients), my main source for looking up the ingredients, says "Cool Whip may be deemed nondairy, but in Jewish dietary traditions, Cool Whip is considered dairy and not parve (neither meat nor dairy) because of the sodium caseinate (which is derived from milk)."
Re: The Answer
on 2010-04-08 04:04 am (UTC)Re: The Answer
on 2010-04-08 04:15 am (UTC)Re: The Answer
on 2010-04-08 07:59 pm (UTC)The fact that she was handing out Twix bars for correct guesses is amusing and wrong.
-sally