Margarine, Cheez Whiz and Plastic - Turning Gold Into Lead

Well, doesn't that sound appetizing. It almost doesn't matter if the claim is true or not because, as soon as a product can be linked to imagery so unappealing as plastic than the damage is already done. This is the rare kind of reverse branding of a product, where something is linked to an idea that is unappealing, food to non-food. This of course is opposed to the normal branding where beer (or any other product) is linked to a lifestyle of being around beautiful women, which as many beer swilling basement dwellers tell me, doesn't require a lot of skepticism to disprove.

Yet, before I deal with the actual question, is margarine and Cheez Whiz really chemically close to plastic? It would be better to examine the questions premise in the first place, that being chemically close to plastic would make something less palatable or unhealthy.

The notion seems to make logical sense, because plastic isn't a regular food item and doesn't seem similar to food in anyway. It comes from a pretty good rule of thumb, when you don't know what something is then think about what the thing is like and treat it as you would objects of that class. If you went to the park and happened to see an object that looks like this odd contraption on the right, you'd probably look at it for a minute before wondering what kind of piece of modern art it was and you wouldn't be wrong for looking at it as such, although it happens to be a fork styled chair.

The treat the unknown like what it seems to be a category of works really well for larger objects, which is what the human mind exclusively had to deal with for almost the entirety of its existence, but it doesn't work so well with the world of the very small.

Scientists, and alchemists, before them spent hours and years attempting to change lead into gold because of the differences in value between the two soft metals. Lead and Gold are separated only by a few protons in the nucleus and with modern means of knocking protons out by speeding up small particles and slamming them through a target material, lead can be turned into gold, but despite their similarities the reactions they have to the human body are completely different.


Which brings the topic back to where it started, even if Margarine and Cheez Whiz were chemically similar to plastic it wouldn't really be a problem, outside of perceived repulsion, which in the case of a food product would seem to still be a problem. So are they similar?


Well the history of margarine is far more interesting then I thought it would be, and is linked to, of all figures, Napoleon. In 1869 Napoleon offered a prize for anyone who could come up with a cheap butter substitute for the army and the poor. The french chemist Hippolyte Mege-Mouries then patented a mixture of beef tallow and skimmed milk which was good enough to claim the prize from the French government. Eventually the beef fat was switched to vegetable oils. It didn't turn up in some science experiment trying to create a new polymer, or as snopes tells me, a turkey fattener.

While Cheez Whiz is a mysterious mixture, I mean it's already unsure of itself as a cheese and I have no idea what its good at. Besides that, finding out the ins and outs of how it was made is rather difficult, and the best information I could find came from an extended obituary for Edwin Traisman, who turns out to be the inventor of the spread.  He was a Kraft researcher who, "Led the team that combined cheese, emulsifiers and other ingredients into the bright yellow sauce called Cheez Whiz, a topping for corn chips, cheese steaks and hot dogs. It was introduced in 1953."

Now, Emulsion is the process of combining two liquids that normally wouldn't combine at all, think oil and water, and an emulsifier is something that stabilizes an emulsion...well that doesn't make Cheez Whiz sound any more appetizing.

Emulsion is used in the production of a wide verity of things, including creating things like paint, so it doesn't really help the case of Cheese Whiz, but this is purely guilt by association. Nothing about the processes makes something a non-food and recently cooks have been embracing the chemical side of cooking. I remember a set of cooks on Iron Chief using all sorts of contraptions and chemistry, so maybe Edwin was just ahead of his time.

Either way, the safety of eating cheese whiz or margarine has never really been in doubt, and in the world of the very small things that are similar still have very different reactions. A bear may be a bear whether it's a Grizzly in BC or a Asian Black Bear in China, but lead and gold will never be the same.

Thanks for reading,
-The Moral Skeptic

The Case of Plastic in the Microwave

It's been a busy and strange last couple months where I've been doing a lot more reading than posting, but this topic didn't arise from anything I've read. It instead was brought up when I was working in a youths with disabilities program and it was lunch time.

Now, as one would expect, younger-ish males don't make up the majority of the workplace demographic where I work, so I felt a little out of place with the four 50ish ladies but they are friendly enough. It was around lunch time and because the program was away from the residence, our lunches were in microwavable containers, which caused a bit of an unanticipated stir, as I was told that, 'Warming up food in the microwave in plastic containers causes toxins to come out of the plastic and into the food causing the food to be really bad for you.' Now I'm sure that they were just trying to pass on some helpful and healthy advice that they had gotten in the past, but there was a problem.

Unfortunately, this put me in a slightly awkward position, as often happens when someone has a little knowledge, but not nearly enough knowledge. I knew that I had heard or looked at the issue of microwaving plastics in the past, and was 99% sure what they were telling me was a myth, but I couldn't remember any of the specifics.

That said, I thought about passively nodding, but I was confident enough that I didn't think that, that was a good option. I instead told them that I was pretty sure that microwaving microwavable plastics being harmful was a myth and despite their instance that it was, I stated that I was still pretty sure it was a myth.

As is often the case both of us were partly correct, but I was a little more on the correct side.  It took all of about 20 seconds to look up the information on the claim that microwave plastics are unsafe to microwave, and there were numerous good sources of information.

For instance the Harvard Medical School explained that, the people that were giving me the warming were right about a potentially dangerous chemical being leached into food, especially fatty foods. Diethylhexyl adipate can come out of the plastic and into food from the process of microwaving.

So if a dangerous chemical can be put into the food through microwave use, then why is it a myth? Well it's a myth because of the level of Diethylhexyl adipate that is leached into the food, as a life time of microwaving food would result in 100-1000 times less per pound of body weight than the amount shown to do harm to labiratory animals.

The article also points out the FDA knows about the problem of chemical leaching and all products intended for microwave use have to be tested and approved. Does the same process happen in Canada? The Canadian Cancer Society points out that it does, noting that, "The Consumer Product Safety Bureau of Health will investigate any concerns about the safety of this type of product and will ask manufacturers to remove any substances that pose a health risk." While it doesn't have the pre-sale testing, there is a mechanism for testing and removing anything that would be dangerous, like if the myth was true.

Yet, that doesn't stop sites like this, or people from spreading the meme that they have heard.

By the way I love the disclaimer that that site has, "Disclaimer: The information on this site should not be taken as medical advice. Opinions expressed are those of individual authors, unless otherwise stated."

Ohhh...your article on never using any plastic in the microwave wasn't medical advice, it was just someone talking about Bisphenol A, which has already been banned in Canada and has nothing to do with specifically with microwave containers which were the whole premise of the discussion in the first place.

Anyway, this just goes to further the understanding that if you hear something that seems like important news, like microwaving plastic is bad for your health, yet your hearing it first from someone you work with or something you got from an email it would probably be better to look it up and make sure their right.

I found out this the hard way after taking Vimax, Sinrex, Extenze, Vigrxplus and Prosolution because their emails looked so professionally done.

Thanks for reading,
-themoralskeptic

An Admission of False Beliefs: The Start of an Examined Life

Many people have heard Socrates famous assertion that the unexamined life isn't worth living, and while I believe that to come close to the truth, it is produced in a vague fashion. What does it mean to examine life? It doesn't mean to simply know who you are, this would be a good first step, but it would only be superficial as an actual examination. As for what it truly means no one was able to put it in better or more eloquent terms than Friedrich Nietzsche did in The Gay Science.

In the lead up to the quotes that follow there is a question of why someone would think that an action would be correct, and a response is given that it is that the 'never immoral conscious' that tells a person what is right and it alone determines what is moral. To this answer Nietzsche responds,

"But why do you listen to the voice of your conscience? And what gives you the right to consider such a judgment true and infallible? For this faith--is there no conscience for that? Have you never heard of an intellectual conscience? A conscience behind your 'conscience'? Your judgment 'this is right' has a pre-history in your instincts, likes, dislikes, experiences, and lack of experiences. 'How did it originate there?' you must ask, and then also: 'What is it that impels me to listen to it?' You can listen to its commands like a good soldier who hears his officer's command. Or like a woman who loves the man who commands. Or like a flatterer and coward afraid of the commander: Or like a dunderhead who obeys because no objection occurs to him. In short, there are a hundred ways in which you can listen to you conscience. But that you take this or that judgment for the voice of conscience--in other words, that you feel something to be right--may be due to the fact that you have never thought much about yourself and simply have accepted blindly that what you had been told ever since your childhood was right; or it may be due to the fact that what you call your duty has up to this point brought you sustenance and honors--and you consider it 'right' because it appears to you as your own 'condition of existence' (and that you have a right to existence seems irrefutable to you)."

And this is only half of the explanation and right after Nietzsche goes on to say,

"For all that, the firmness of your moral judgment could be evidence of your personal abjectness, or impersonality; your 'moral strength' might have its source in your stubbornness--or in your inability to envisage new ideals. And, briefly, if you had though more subtly, observed better; and learned more, you certainly would not go on calling this 'duty' of yours and this 'conscience' of yours duty and conscious. Your understanding of the manner in which moral judgments have originated would spoil these grand words for you, like 'sin', and 'salvation of the soul' and 'redemption' have been spoiled for you...Let us therefore limit ourselves to the purification of our opinions and valuations and to the creation of our own new tables of what is good, and let us stop brooding about the 'moral value of our actions'! We, however, want to become those we are--human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves."

Through those to quotes Nietzsche has explained the essence of the examined life. Yet this is to monumental of a task to happen all at once, and also a task that requires constant maintenance. Although it might be fair to then criticize the 'examined life' as being unobtainable, a standard of perfection to great to reach, it wouldn't displace any of its meaning. It would still be a great standard to strive for even if it was always out of reach.

So what can be done to examine values and beliefs. The answer is a healthy skepticism inwards and outwards. To have everything you know to only be contingent on new evidence that may or may not be forthcoming and to examine core values so that you are the one making your values instead of being a reaction to them. Which brings up the question, why is there a picture of a spider at the top of the blog?

Well, while I know it isn't like admitting that a core value I had was wrong, I am now aware of a few beliefs about spiders that I held before were false and admitting that simple things you know were mistaken is a great way to build up to questioning bigger, more firmly held beliefs.

So here it is, I used to be one of those people who sleep covering there mouth for fear that the one of the average of six to eight spiders a year were going to crawl into my mouth that night. My greatest fret was that of the deadly daddy long legs, which I could only hope I wouldn't wander and wade into my mouth (It was known to me than that the daddy long legs was extremely poisonous, but that it couldn't open its mouth enough to bite people). I know how silly this sounds now ( I really didn't try to cover my mouth when I slept), but those were beliefs floating around around and I didn't question them, just believed them. I still hear them repeated from time to time now as pure fact, which they aren't as Snopes points out for both (Myth1 & Myth2)

I found away to change some of those obviously flawed beliefs thought. The answer was a system to work on those beliefs. It involved my roommate and I making small bets on opinions we differed on and then doing the research to find out which one of us was correct (The spider bet was one I obviously lost). We were both honest enough to accept credible information about the subjects we bet on and losing the bet was fine with me because it was better than carrying around a thought that was demonstrably wrong. It was a beginning to openly questioning many of the beliefs I've held, and while it may not be feasible for it to work with core values, it still remains a viable starting line to work out facts leading to being able to be honest about different beliefs; the start of an examined life.

Thanks for reading,
-the moral skeptic