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

Rebbeca Watson, Richard Dawkins, and The Mountain of Molehills

This is a topic that came up in the skeptical community between to people I respect, and after listening to the latest SGU felt compelled to write about.

There really was two incidents. The first was a video Rebbecca Watson made where she made what was really a off the cuff remark about one night when she was doing an event and talked about sexism in the skeptical movement, which can be a problem, and then went out for drinks afterwords. Which led to her being proposition in an elevator at 4 am or incident one. The second incident is the reaction that has come from some of the big hitters in the skeptical movement, PT Myers, Phil Plait and Richard Dawkins.

Now the problem is that I agree with both Rebecca and Richard while disagreeing with them as well, which will probably lead me to be a misogynist to some and a panderer to others....not exactly the prettiest fence to find yourself on, but it's where I'm currently perched.

The initial point - Well this was simply the remark that Rebecca Watson made, that it wasn't a good idea to proposition a girl in an elevator at 4 in the morning, she said 'don't do that.' which is pretty hard to argue against as it isn't the classicist move in the players handbook. Yet, this simple, almost superficial, remark was the starting point of a debate, where mud would fly.

The scene of slinging would really start when PT Myers would blog about Rebecca's experience. PT Myers had to say that, propositioning a women like that shows that, "Women are lower status persons, and we men, as superior beings, get to ask things of them." and  that "Maybe we [men] should recognize that when we interact with equals there are different, expected patterns of behavior that many men casually disregard when meeting with women, and it is those subtle signs that let them know what you think of them that really righteously pisses feminist women off." and he finishes up by talking about Phil Plaits Don't be a Dick speech.

Richard Dawkins ended up writing a response to the blog post saying,

"Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard"

That's when the shit really hit the fan and the over-reactions started to pour in on either side, but lets step back for a second. Rebecca said, that it wasn't a good idea, fair enough. PT than is more general, and goes down the road of sexual objectification by those kind of actions, which I'm not sure qualifies at 4 in the morning after a night of drinking. Dawkins then says, whats the big deal? Which is a fair question because the drama over such a slight incident was making the molehill larger, but it would later become a full mountain when Phil 'Potential Sexual Assault' Plate would blog about the issue.  

Phil states that, "The real problem here is that Dawkins (and several others who left comments) didn’t see this as a potential assault scenario." and he goes further to say,

"You [A women] may not be able to just press a button and walk away — perhaps he has a knife, or a gun, or will simply overpower you. When there’s no way to know, you err on the side of safety. And what makes this worse is that most men don’t understand this, so women are constantly put into situations ranging from uncomfortable to downright scary."

Where did the knife and gun come from, how did the original question turn into a attempted rape? If that is the case than define what is a potential sexual assault scenario then. Is it anytime a women is alone with a man they don't know well? Who knows the man might have a gun or a knife in their sleeves.

The start was reasonable, it's a bad idea to hit on a girl in an elevator at 4 am and a little creepy, I might add, but calling it a potential sexual assault or saying that it was morally wrong is jumping into an over-reaction.

This wasn't a funeral for her mother, or someone who crashed into her car on purpose to proposition her, it was someone who asked a girl back to his room after a night of drinking, if it is morally wrong or a potential sexual assault in this case then it is a short step to being wrong to ever proposition a girl, which doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

Don't be a dick, but don't put a knife in a persons words,
-the moral skeptic