this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
59 points (79.2% liked)

No Stupid Questions

2174 readers
59 users here now

There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!

Don't be embarrassed of your curiosity; everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help.


Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca still apply!


Thanks for reading all of this, even if you didn't read all of this, and your eye started somewhere else, have a watermelon slice ๐Ÿ‰.


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

What purpose does American cheese serve? What problem does it solve?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The issue is that "plastic" has multiple meanings.

Cheese is plastic the property.

Cheese is not plastic the oil product.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yup, it does have multiple meanings. That's why I said "arguably".

When people say "it's plastic!", they're usually conveying that it's made from inedible stuff, I'm aware that they don't mean "it's made from a polymerised substance that has been moulded while it still had some plasticity".


It's a bit of off-topic but your comment made me realise that it's theoretically possible to create cheese out of petroleum, air, and salt. It would be expensive and awful-tasting, but probably edible?

I might do the synthesis route of that just for fun.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

It might no even taste awful. Petroleum has a lot of interesting compounds that you could probably convert into flavor molecules if you could isolate them. This isn't an endorsement of the practice, but chemistry is pretty cool.