{"id":8782,"date":"2011-05-25T03:00:58","date_gmt":"2011-05-25T08:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=8782"},"modified":"2011-05-25T03:00:58","modified_gmt":"2011-05-25T08:00:58","slug":"putting-it-in-your-mouth-does-not-make-it-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/8782","title":{"rendered":"Putting it in Your Mouth Does Not Make it Food"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chad’s been doing a series on non-adademic careers for scientists, and the first in this year’s batch: PNAS: Amy Young, Saponifier<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s a noble effort , reminding people that there are many options outside of the professor-begetting-another-professor path, which is not sustainable, but the reason I really took notice was that this brought another topic onto some sharper focus, namely my position that everyday cooking\/baking \u2014\u00a0when one simply follows the recipe in the cookbook<\/a> \u2014 is not science. A lot of cooking, I think, doesn’t get past the level of I cooked too long and it’s burned\/dried out<\/em>, which is barely dipping your toe into the souffl\u00e9 of science. (And Jennifer seemingly disagreed<\/a> with this position, but it turns out it was mostly semantics \u2014 that cooking, done properly, is not about blindly following recipes<\/em> is something with which I agree<\/a>. The issue is blindly following recipes.)<\/p>\n

Here’s the relevant part of Amy’s soap cooking approach that isn’t always followed in food preparation<\/p>\n

If I hadn’t had the importance of keeping a proper lab notebook drilled into my head in my formative years, I would never in a hundred years be able to keep up with all the product lines I’ve got now. (Which colorant did I put in this one, again? And how much? Wait, wasn’t this the fragrance that made the soap seize up on me last time? I should probably try a lower temperature. And so on.) It may be six months or more between making batches of a given kind of soap, so keeping track is vital. Not to mention the product development phase, in which the thing just doesn’t work right, and I have fifteen different things to try varying; I’ve talked with colleagues who run similar businesses, and they seem to operate in a “just change stuff until it works” mode, rather than changing one element at a time (even if I run a dozen or more iterations simultaneously) so as to know which thing or combination of things created the desired effect. It’s invaluable in crafting the more complex items.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This really shows the systematic approach; it’s important to know what cause leads to which effect, and to quantify what you’ve done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chad’s been doing a series on non-adademic careers for scientists, and the first in this year’s batch: PNAS: Amy Young, Saponifier It’s a noble effort , reminding people that there are many options outside of the professor-begetting-another-professor path, which is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-science-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8782\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}