I Love This Comment
Even though it's half BS—or maybe because—this comment by reader "Semiotix," in response to the "Crisp vs. Crunch" discussion, is fantastic:
Crispy things are compressible and striated. Air or some other interstitial medium is essential for crispiness.Crunchy things are solid and may cleave in any number of planes. In a rigid food, crunchiness is the absence of crispiness.
These elements give rise to the epiphenomena other food-ontologists have already noted (higher pitch from the sound of something crispy being chewed, as a function of its lower mass per unit volume; greater resistance in crunchy foods, as a consequence of the covalent bonds that characterize them, versus the van der Waals forces at work between layers of crisped foods).
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Excuse me, waiter, but there are covalent bonds in my chocolate milk...
I'll bet the author of such hilarity is either a) college professor (the snooty kind), b) a wine taster or c) a reviewer for an audiophile magazine.
Well, he IS using the most correct and precise words to describe what's going on. Maybe he's a food scientist.
Or it's the fact that I'm a PhD chemical engineer that makes his post perfectly reasonable, and even informative. It makes sense to me.
What you interpret as hilarity may just be the fact that there are actually food scientists out there who focus on this kind of stuff, and when they apply their technical jargon you think "well, it's just food."
Then again, epiphenomenon and food-ontologist are kind of goofy words to use in an internet post.
I don't see the BS--what part of the statement isn't true?
The only BS here is your calling it BS--plus, it's simply ungracious. Semiotix put forth time and effort to share interesting and substantial knowledge. And obviously,you found it thought-provoking enough to call our attention to it.
Boing Boing noticed me! This is without question the high point of my year. Yeah, I know.
To clarify:
* I am a "snooty college professor." Well, as of next August, anyway. At the moment it'd be more accurate to call me an "insufferable teaching assistant." (But audiophile... man, that's low!)
* I'm not in food sciences or any other science.
* I'm absolutely full of BS.
* I stand by my definition.
Its all BS to me..
-Natasha
www.myafricansafaris.com
philosophy.
you're one of those ontology police, aren't you?
I think we have a call of recapitulation of phylogeny out there on the field...
...officials are heading onto the field now, and we're waiting for a call...
It's hard for me to read that without John Cleese's voice in my head...
Cliches, Icky.
The "Van der Waals" vs. "covalent" bit in Semiotix' ("Semiotix's"? ..ugh, no) post is the obvious BS. Covalent vs. van der Waals forces are too small-scale to do much work here. As I am VERY well aware this week, how hard it is to chew any baked good depends on the size and frequency of air pockets. A CRUNCHy food will have few air pockets, so it holds together well, and takes some bitin' for you to break it; a CRISPY one will have lots of little bubbles of starch for your teeth to pop with little effort at all. Thus we get Rice Krispies, which are crispy but totally non-crunchy, and granola, which is the opposite.
I suspect that a food that was both crispy and crunchy would be inedible. You'd end up with something like gravel on saltines.
-mjfgates
It seems like a perfectly cromulent explanation to me. Seriously, though, in the context of the original post this seems to point out the lie in Nestles' marketing: A Crunch bar is not crunchy, it's crispy. So what does that mean for this new "crispy" Crunch bar? Bats the hell outta me.