On this site http://www.hormelnatural.com/about_truetaste.html they talk about making lunchmeat without preservatives.
“After slicing the meat, we put the product in a sealed package in a pressure chamber, where it is surrounded by water that exerts 87,000 pounds of pressure per square inch!”
Why wouldn’t that pressure flatten the lunchmeat like tracing paper?
What am I missing?
If you put a 87,000 pound weight on top of the lunchmeat it would probably be flattened, but that’s not what happens. The pressure of the pressure chamber is even all around the package, so if anything it should be squeezed to the size of a pea.
However lunchmeat is mostly water, which is not all that compressible, just enough, apparently, to damage bacteria sufficiently to kill them, without destroying “meat cells” enough to change the taste.
Hmm. I didn’t think water was compressable at all.
Seems like it would heat up rather than compress.
(87,000 pounds is equivalent to what depth in the ocean I wonder)
87,000 psi, with an atmosphere being 14.7 psi, is 5918 atm. Water pressure gets to 1 atm per 10 meters, so it should be about 59,180 meters or 194,160 feet. The deepest point in the oceans is about 35,700 feet so it’s a lot deeper than you can actually get.
Is the deepest part the Marianas Trench?
Of course it is! But I want to know if anyone’s ever been there.
Please. They could never spend more than a few minutes there. Twenty? Thirty?
What year was that in?
And did they find lunchmeat?
You’d think if they needed to sanitize lunchmeat, they could use some sort of ray…
Hormel gets their high pressure system from Avure technologies. Here are a couple videos on the process.
This thread’s a bunch of baloney!
I love the way they describe it as an “all natural process”. I mean let’s face it, the meat from animals is naturally exposed to 87,000 psi on a daily basis. WTF does “natural” mean, in an advertising copywriter’s mind, anyway? I’ve never been able to figure it out.
pretty much everything is compressible, it’s just that for most solids and liquids at normal engineering ranges of pressure, they’re compressible so little that ‘not at all’ is a fair working approximation.
But everything is compressible if you push hard enough.
I’ve always liked this train of thought. It’s quite interesting. Nature evolved humans to invent machines capable of exerting 87.000psi, so in that sense… Arrr fuggit, it’s too hard. I’m not even sure what ‘natural’ means anymore.
A common misconception. Liquids like water and hydraulic fluid are relatively incompressible, when compared to gasses like air. For low pressures, you can ignore the compressibility effects of water or oil and make calculations assuming constant volume; the error involved is reasonably small.
However, water actually is compressible. The “stiffness” of liquids is described using the term bulk modulus. The bulk modulus of water is a little over 300,000psi. That means that every 3000psi of pressure will reduce the fluid volume by 1%. (In reality, the bulk modulus is a function of pressure, so by the time we get all the way out to 87,000psi, I suspect the bulk modulus is considerably more. Nonetheless, you can see that the volume change at this very high pressure is substantial.)
Cites: Bulk modulus at engineering Toolbox and at Wikipedia.
Natural means “with no added chemicals that have names that wrap all the way around the package”. It means nothing, that is.
Dihydrogen monoxide for example.
Why are you trashing a valid GQ thread? Bored? Why not save your “jokes” for MPSIMS.
And you can take Caught@Work, Baffle, toadspittle, labtrash, and Capt B. Phart with you.
Why not save your indignant reactions till you’ve been here more than a month?
ETA: And for some actual content – Water can be compressed. Recent research shows that water behaves like molasses when compressed to the nano scale