Jack D Capehart's blog

I Want the Crunch Back!

Margarine

(Oleomargarine)

Bread is chewy and moist because it has a fairly high water content. Sometimes this chewiness and moisture content are enjoyable, especially when the bread is freshly baked and served with midday or evening meals. However, we want it to be toasted and crunchy with our breakfast. Toasting removes much of the water and makes it crunchy. But then we want it to be greasier and saltier, so we put butter on it. Now, butter also contains some water, but only a small percentage. Toasting the bread after it is buttered in an oven or toaster oven usually eliminates this additional water content. Now butter is very high in saturated fat (cholesterol), which has been found to increase risk of heart and circulation problems, so someone came up with the idea of using vegetable oil and salt as a substitute. This vegetable oil and salt combination only became popular after it was discovered that vegetable oil could be "partially hydrogenated" (turned into partially saturated fat), thus lowering its melting temperature to a point where it could be applied with a knife and had the same consistency as butter at the same temperature. Also, a discovery had been made that ultrasonic sound could be used on milk to keep the cream from separating and rising to the top (homogenization). Then someone got the bright idea that this new technique could also be used to make margarine even more like butter if a small amount of water were homogenized with the partially hydrogenated vegetable oil and salt. This was wonderful! We now had an almost perfect substitute for butter that was cheaper and better for you. I liked it!

So, you say, where’s the problem. Well, soon after this, corporate greed made its appearance. One of the guys that worked for one of the margarine companies must have proposed to his marketing people a scheme for making much more money with very little effort. Just use less vegetable oil and more water, sell it in little tubs, and call it vegetable oil spread! People will see vegetable oil in its name and assume it contains no saturated fats (false) and it will spread really easy and we get more money for less oil and a little bit of water.

Am I the only one that notices how it makes the toast not crunchy anymore!! If you spread it on first and toast it in a toaster oven until it almost turns black you can still make it almost crunchy, but only if you can find a margarine that doesn’t list water as the first or second ingredient (really – check it out).

If you think that’s the end of the story, you’re wrong. Someone (probably in marketing) suggested using even less vegetable oil and a lot more water and calling it "Lite Spread – Fewer Calories" and selling it for even more money. That person probably got an award for the suggestion and we got soggy toast. You really can’t call it toast anymore. It’s more like library paste on top of limp bread! I hate it!

Listen, you marketing guys, here’s a real moneymaking idea. Make a margarine with very low water content and just enough hydrogenation to make it easy to spread. Then label it "Less Water More Vegetable Oil" and "PUT THE CRUNCH BACK IN YOUR TOAST". I’ll pay even more for it and everyone else will too!

What Should be Taught in Public Schools

          In the United States of America we have separation of Church and State and public schools are “State”, since they are supported by government taxes.  It then stands to reason that public schools should be prohibited from teaching anything that must be accepted on faith.  In other words, everything taught in public schools should have the quality of being provable or disprovable by either experiment or logic.  I don’t mean by this that we should not teach “theories” in public schools.  All knowledge amassed by humankind throughout the ages is made up of theories.  The word “theory” really only means “capable of being disproved”.  Science doesn’t try to “prove” anything.  Science constructs theories that can be used to describe and predict what we observe and then tries to improve or disprove them.  Einstein did not disprove  Newton's theories of gravitation and motion.  Einstein’s theories of relativity improved Newton's theories with theories that applied in situations not foreseen in Newton ’s time.

      Faith based beliefs on the other hand, can never be disproved because they aren’t theories.  They are “dogma” and stated as being absolutely true.

          Many people confuse morals and ethics with religious faith.  Morals and ethics are a big part of religion, but they don’t require faith for their acceptance.  They were arrived at by experiment and logic and could well be (and should be) taught in public schools.

          Not only must we restrict what we teach in public schools to that which is provable or disprovable by experiment or logic, but we must select those theories which are most likely to be true.  If there are several theories about a particular topic, we must select the theory which is best supported by experiment and logic.  If instead we try to teach all of them equally well, then it will either take too long to teach or we must cut back on the amount of information we are trying to get across for each theory.

          Let’s teach our children those things that are best supported by experiment and logic.  Teach “theory” not “dogma”.  Teaching anything that requires faith for its substantiation is only proper in churches or religious institutions.