You can just imagine the photographer saying "quick! everyone! do science!".
They look to me like they are in a lab and its generally a really good idea to stick to safety rules in materials labs.
...I like high tech stuff, but not in my food. if it's gonna make me live longer or cure cancer than I can balance risk/benefits ...but my not so short foray into medical research thought me to be very very very worried (actually freakin scared to the point that I have to ignore much of what I've learned just to keep on living as a normal person eating "normal" food and taking "safe" otc drugs) about what we think we know about chemicals safety and how "safety" is define
...just my 2 cents for people "less in the know": don't approach innovation regarding food, health or anything biomedical the same way you approach it in software engineering or other field of engineering ...it's a whole different ball game and there's a reason why it take 1 billion USD to brink a drug to market (besides bureaucracy and buggy "peopleware" that probably makes up 50% if the cost) ...anyway, the point is that it's this kind of thing you need to approach with the "we're building a nuclear reactor" type of mentality, not the "let's hack together a cool robot and show off" type
Now, there are a lot of things we don't know about LiquiGlide. Maybe it's just a carbon-polymer matrix that keeps the ketchup flowing by mechanical action, and not by chemical action? Whatever it is, I would imagine that anyone designing such a substance would realize that ketchup is fairly acidic; therefore, LiquiGlide would need to be chemically inert when positioned next to an acid. I am not an organic chemist, but I imagine these guys had one, or consulted with one, or at any rate, know a lot more about the subject than I do. So if this stuff's occurring to me, no doubt it occurred to them.
To be fair, that doesn't mean the substance is safe. In fact, I'd probably share your skepticism about consuming ketchup from a bottle made with any nonstick coating, as the history of nonstick coatings is riddled with unsafe chemicals. That being said, I consider these kids and their work to be innocent until proven guilty.
Finally, if you don't want artificial ingredients in your food, then don't eat Heinz ketchup in the first place. :) Complaining about chemical additives to what is basically a sauce of chemical additives is a little like saying that you want your deep fried ice cream to be low-fat. Very little of what's in a bottle of Heinz ketchup even came from a tomato in the first place.
there are a lot of sauce bottles. even an unimportant saving will, totalled over all of them, add up to an impressive sounding number. but unless the fractional amount of each bottle is important, it's really not significant: saving a million tons of food in an industry that produces thousands of millions of tons of food is neither here nor there.
this is the same problem as residual current in phone chargers. if everyone unplugged their phone chargers when not in use we could save some impressive sounding amount of energy. except that, compared to total annual energy consumption, it's not impressive at all - it makes no practical difference to the very real issues related to energy consumption (because your phone charger's residual current is absolute peanuts compared to that vacation you took by plane).
it's a small point, but it bugs me. sorry.
personally, i would tend to prefer a glass container (glass seems like a nice stable chemical that i have evolved in the presence of (think rocks)). and if the world really needs to save ketchup maybe i could just eat a little more healthily and skip a serving once a month?
see, for example, http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c19/page_11... - Don’t be distracted by the myth that “every little helps.” If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little. We must do a lot. What’s required are big changes in demand and in supply.
and, of course, we may be talking at cross purposes - there is some middle ground where a large-ish number of small-ish things can help. i am not arguing against maths, but i am saying that our natural assessment of what is significant without actually doing the maths is often misled by absolute values, as here.
anyway, if you haven't read that book, i recommend it.
BPA was happily used for years by industry.
Ironically, with BPA, the only container you know does not have traces of it is a glass container.
Not even that might be safe anymore. No wonder kids reach puberty earlier and earlier.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/C2CP40581D [subscription required]
and the Masters thesis from the PhD student mentioned in the article:
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/69783 [open access]
I believe they're the most relevant publications, but please correct me if I'm wrong (this isn't my area of expertise). I'm sure this specific technology is still a trade secret, but it at least shows the direction that group took to lead to the discovery. As always, these things aren't developed in a vacuum, and it's always interesting to see how they come about.
But if somehow everyone opted out together they would be better off for it (sometimes even consumers, though arguably not in this case). It's commonly referred to as "smart for one, dumb for all."
I'm curious as to whether anyone knows what's in the patents that means the coating is patented but still secret?
From https://www.google.co.uk/search?tbm=pts&hl=en&q=EP19...
Surface 12 (Figure 1) comprises at least one material selected from the group consisting of a ceramic, an intermetallic, and a polymer. Suitable ceramic materials include inorganic oxides, carbides, nitrides, borides, and combinations thereof. Non-limiting examples of such ceramic materials include aluminum nitride, boron nitride, chromium nitride, silicon carbide, tin oxide, titania, titanium carbonitride, titanium nitride, titanium oxynitride, stibinite (SbS2), zirconia, hafnia, and combinations thereof. In certain embodiments, the surface comprises an intermetallic. Examples of suitable intermetallic materials include, but are not limited to, nickel aluminide, titanium aluminide, and combinations thereof. Polymer materials that may be used in surface 12 include, but are not limited to polytetrafluoroethylene, fluoroacrylate, fluoroeurathane, fluorosilicone, modified carbonate, silicones and combinations thereof. The material is selected based on the desired contact angle, the fabrication technique used, and the end-use application of the article.
My solution is a lot simpler: I cut ketchup out of my diet.
