Friday, June 08, 2007

Sadly, you can't put the cheese back in the can

Fucking entropy.

Food science pioneer Edwin Traisman died yesterday. When I wrote my food science post, I pulled two canonical examples of culinary engineering purely out of my ass. Little did I know that both Cheez-Whiz and the every-time-identical McDonald's french fry were brought forth into being by a single extraordinary mind. Traisman worked at Kraft (in the Cheese division, natch) and opened the first McDonald's franchise under Ray Kroc.

Despite this resume, he managed to not be evil. According to the Business Week article, he was a pioneer in hiring women. According to NPR, he pushed Kroc to include more nutritional products in the McDonald's menu. In the 1970s, he moved to the University of Wisconsin, researching E. Coli before it was even scary, and was regarded as brilliant by his academic peers, even though he only held a bachelor's degree in chemistry.

He lived to be 91. Was it preservatives or good intentions? You be the judge.

2 comments:

hipparchia said...

i saw that, and immediately thought of you, and your cheese-in-a-can post.

2 interpretations: all those preservatives really do work, or he coulda lived to 110 if he'd eaten better.

alternatively, he just invented the suff, but didn't eat any of it.

Keifus said...

Yeah, I heard it on the way home from work...I'd never heard of the dude before. NPR said he was concerned about the nutritional content of The Clown's fare. Fat lot of good it did.

K (I'm guessing he just didn't eat so damn much of it, myself)