Food and Energy

Food is fuel.

This is supposed the be the mantra of people who had bariatric surgery. Food is fuel, not my friend.

Or was that from Finding Nemo?

At any rate, people usually think of a separation between food being fuel and food being...food. As if somehow it's special when in fact food, like people, are complex chemical reactions. Calories (technically, kilocalories) in food are a measurement of stored energy, and this energy is unlocked by reactions within our bodies for use in things like moving and breathing and keeping us warm. Even gasoline can have an estimated calorie count to measure the energy it stores (a gallon of gas has about 31,000,000 calories, by the way).

One quick way to show energy is to light a material on fire and watch the energy be released as heat, and under the right conditions an amazing amount of energy can be released when fat ignites. This is the theory behind spontaneous human combustion...that the fat in the body is lit up and burns at such an amazingly high temperature that literally all that's left are the person's shoes. There have been experiments done on pig carcasses that demonstrate that this amount of heat can indeed be produced (pigs are very similar in composition to humans for the purposes of simulating bodies; they're used in forensics research quite a bit because of this).

What am I getting at?

Just the coolest use of bacon ever.

A journalist at Popsci.com managed to use bacon, regarded by many to be the meat of the gods, as a thermal lance. Yes. He used bacon to cut iron.

I thought this was cool as all heck, but it was also a good demonstration of what can be done with the energy stored in food and how it demonstrates the chemical nature of what we're putting into our bodies to live. Unfortunately a lot of people with large sticks in their posteriors appear to be quick to nitpick the article...the author made a crack about prosciutto being Italian for "expensive bacon" and the comments seem to fill up with people correcting him. As if people reading the site will actually think there's an Italian word for that...smart people can be really dumb sometimes.

For a quick chemistry lesson and demonstration of something food can do that is really cool, check out the site. And if you want another demonstration of what stored energy can do when suddenly released from a body, try Googling "spontaneous human combustion" and "wick effect". And yes, I'm aware the wick effect (essentially the fat in your body acts like an inside-out candle) isn't an explanation for all spontaneous human combustion events, but work with me here...this was supposed to be an entry about bacon burning iron. That's pretty darn neat.