Making chicken transparent using Dorito dust | Hacker News Reader

Making chicken transparent using Dorito dust

chillphysicsenjoyer.substack.com

353 pointscrescit_eundo87 comments

I'm trying to imagine the origin story for this science, and I feel like the most fun one is that somebody wanted to make Doritos flavored chicken and accidentally discovered that the marinade turned the chicken breast transparent.

Some exotic fish and frog species are completely transparent. So one might wonder what makes meat opaque. Then wonder how to get the opaque out of other meat. I don't know where doritos comes in.

They use tartrazine that is a common dye for food, not crushed Doritos. They need a lot of dye to change the internal refraction index and make the meat transparent. So they choose it. From the research article https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11931656/

> It is a hygroscopic compound with a high solubility in water and minimal reactivity. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has concluded that this molecule exhibits no adverse effects or systemic toxicity at doses up to 2 g per kilogram of body weight (14). As a result, it is widely used as an artificial food dye in products such as flavored chips (for example, Doritos).

Vertebrate blood is one thing that is opaque due to hemoglobin, and it cannot be made transparent. The same is true for the pigmented retina of the eyes. So transparent frogs and fishes still have opaque eyes and blood vessels.

Where pigments like the heme of the blood or the melanin of the skin or the visual pigments of the retina are absent, the opacity is due only to the variable refractive index, which causes light scattering, and in this case the tissue can be made transparent with methods like that described in the article which make the refractive index uniform (i.e. exactly like snow that transitions from opaque to transparent when melting).

Hey, why do I have an empty pan? Who took my chicken?

I'm not proud of how much of a chuckle this gave me

The origin story has been well documented actually: https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf

Relevant Parking Lot is Full

https://imgur.com/gallery/parking-lot-is-full-Hlrdb

Please tell me someone actually submitted this as part of their dissertation.

I don't know about that, but he did give the talk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk

As the author seems to be around: have you considered surface roughness of the sample as problem to transparency?

Add some water between the grid pattern and the chicken and also some on top of it - or even conduct the experiment under water and the results should be better. You might also freeze the meat before cutting to achieve much smoother surfaces in the first place?

Author notes the difficulty of cutting thin slices of raw chicken. If you lightly freeze it (or freeze it and let it nearly defrost) it's much easier.

You can get a used vibratome for <$100 on ebay.

https://www.ebay.com/shop/vibratome?_nkw=vibratome

These cuts can get quite small.

How about a sous vide bath? Could go as long as 72 hours before it turns into complete mush.

author here - this is a great idea thanks

Fun fact: Doritos don’t contain tartrazine in Europe (including the UK). It’s not banned, but food products containing it must be labelled with “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children” in the EU.

I think that E102, E104, E110, E122, E124, and E129 are in fact banned in Europe. I even bothered to remember the numbers, so I'd know what to avoid locally. Here in Israel we use the same names for these food colourings as in Europe, but they are allowed.

Notably, only one local chain sources M&Ms from Europe, so we buy from them. All other stores source M&Ms from the US and have these colours. You can see the difference in the candies.

No, E102 (tartrazine) is not banned. It used to be banned in some countries before EU harmonization. But food producers probably avoid it due to the required labeling.

I see, thanks. Looking at my Anki card, my information was from 2014.

Seems E124 (ponceau 4R) is not banned? This study[0] has "a total of 227 products were labelled with ponceau 4R" although they do estimate daily intake is below safe levels.

0: https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2903/j.efsa.2026...

I understand how the kosher rules around food probably originated - basically avoiding what in those times would have been dangerous options. Do the kosher rules get updated for the modern era with respect to things like additives etc? We’ve learned that many modern additives (can) have negative health impacts. Do things like this get considered?

No because the laws were specific not general. But obviously people can follow the inspiration of avoiding "unclean" food.

It's a myth that kosher rules were about health. Even at the time, those foods were no more dangerous than the things they were allowed to eat.

The kosher rules have more to do with cultural identity: "we are the people who eat/don't eat X". We have similar rules today. We revile people who eat foods we consider dirty (insects, dogs, horse, etc), but they suffer no ill effects.

They do reconsider the kosher rules in modern lights. Insect derived dyes are banned, for example. But they don't need scripture to tell you what's healthy. They use science for that.

Translucent is a great word. Let's use it more!

I'll give you a another: diaphanous.

Evanescent, even.

pellucid is a perennial favorite

You made that one up.

I can see right through you.

I don't see why.

What else do you call something that's neither opaque nor transparent?

Is it sort of how oil makes paper transparent? Impregnates air gaps to suppress index mismatch scattering? I'm just offering this casually, someone please correct me if I'm off.

No, it's by changing the refractive index of the water in the chicken.

If you scroll down a lot, the post goes into details.

I have to admit, it's a bit hard to follow the exact details as a non-physicist on a lazy sunday morning... but you change the refractive index by uhh... something related to the polarization and Maxwell's equations

Yes in fact. From the blog "To make something transparent...Alternatively (and this is the approach we'll cover in this post), we could try to change the refractive index of the water inside to match the embedded media. "

It's a kind of impedance matching. The (almost) same happens with sound in our ears (and the 3 tiny bones). Making the audio machinery "transparent to sound" (by impedance matching).

This is a lighthearted topic and a well-written article.

But what it reveals about our relationship with food is a little unsettling. The intensely chemical nature of Doritos and the whole notion of turning flesh into something alien - it’s all very far removed from food as a source of nourishment and of natural origin.

author here - i have no view on the toxicity of tartrazine other than its declared food safe.

its important to note though that there is no mystery or chemical nastiness behind the transparency effect - it's just changing the refractive index of water!

It’s a great article and I hope you don’t think I’m trying to assign any kind of agenda to it (on your part or mine). For some reason while reading it, it evoked a sense of queasiness in me - entirely my issue. Perhaps the contrast with the healthy vegetables I’d just eaten and an appreciation for the animal that contributed to my meal put me in an unusual state of mind.

I feel queasy thinking about how much invisible meat has presumably been all over the place this whole time.

Changing the optical window on biological tissues is useful

Naturalism as an argument is a fallacy. Do you hunt down and beat wild pigs alive with your bare hands before carving them out? Oh, no? Well it seems like you're not "natural" enough. Do you drink milk from the udders of animals? Or do you treat it processes to clean it of pathogens, such as sterilization?

Is the Rhode Island Red chicken which constitutes most of the worlds breeds, that has been bred for 100 years to exclusively stand in a single spot, peck and eat as much as possible and show as little interest in its surroundings to be easier to handle, natural?

Is the tomato, banana or potato you buy at the farmers market, to which Bayer owns the genetical rights, that is 10x the size of the "natural" version, natural?

If you think a little bit about the origins of most sources of nourishment we have day-to-day you can find yourself in a very difficult space to draw naturalist lines

It's only a fallacy in the same way that the slippery slope is a fallacy, ie when used as a logical basis in and of itself. There's nothing wrong with either one when used appropriately in context.

I mean, of course, there's a spectrum when it comes to eating food that is "natural". On one extreme side, you have beating wild pigs and drinking from udders. On the other extreme, you have... whatever the fuck is in Doritos and soda pop. Part of figuring out your own dietary practices is finding the right spot along that spectrum, to at least attempt to draw that line yourself.

Yes, a lot of people who simply complain about vague "chemicals" in food are nutters, but I don't think that means that I'd be OK with eating every mass-produced-food-like-product offered for sale.

You're right, this comment is a bit of a projection. I have had friends and my parents friend groups soured because of people who went off the long edge because they could not formulate or explain their reasoning and opinions beyond natural = good, artificial = bad. I have a wish that people will be able to go beyond this.

> On one extreme side, you have beating wild pigs and drinking from udders. On the other extreme, you have... whatever the fuck is in Doritos and soda pop.

Well, this just means we haven't found any plant or animal to produce these things in sufficient quantities for our ancestors to notice and use them throughout the ages.

It doesn't mean it's bad for you, in particular. Treating "natural" vs "artificial" as spectrum, or even categories, is itself borderline nutty.

> but I don't think that means that I'd be OK with eating every mass-produced-food-like-product offered for sale.

Nobody is forcing you to. However, note that we also don't eat every "natural" thing we can find. Most things growing around the natural environment are hazardous or lethal to humans. So even our selection of what is "natural" food is, itself, highly... artificial.

Yes, and since so many apparently edible things are quite harmful, it seems reasonable to be cautious about new ones.

> Do you drink milk from the udders of animals?

Ironically, drinking milk is a "modern" development in the human race, and we're still evolving the ability to digest lactose as adults to compensate for this "unnatural" behaviour!

> Ironically, drinking milk is a "modern" development in the human race

For context for those following along, 4,000-5,000 yr ago for those from Northern Europe.

> the Rhode Island Red chicken which constitutes most of the worlds breeds, that has been bred for 100 years to exclusively stand in a single spot, peck and eat as much as possible and show as little interest in its surroundings to be easier to handle, natural?

I thought you were describing the typical doom scrolling, Zuckbook dopamine-slave, for a second.-

There's tens of thousands of different "chemicals" in the chicken breasts that we have no idea how it works. Not only that, they're living things, cells, that replicate, can become cancerous, and are known to contain human pathogens (Salmonella, bird flu).

In fact, Salmonella kills 420 people per year in the US alone and infects 1.35 million people [1]. That is a whole lot scarier than tartrazine. Of course, it's 100% natural and organic!

[1] https://www.fsis.usda.gov/inspection/inspection-programs/ins...

> The intensely chemical nature of Doritos

I was on a shoot for a series of videos promoting new flavors of chips. One of the lines stood out to me about "our scientists went to work". Not our chefs went to work. Scientists.

And that was specifically about flavor, not any other attribute? I'd also understand if they were talking about using science to adapt already-existing flavors to the right form.

I can't find the ad to answer that myself.

I took it to mean they came up with chemicals to make the flavor rather than actually using spices and food ingredients but I'm a cynical bastard. I absolutely could have been taking it out of context. I don't even remember what brand, assuming Lays. It wasn't an ad in the :30 or :60 sense. It was promotional video that was shot in VR, so probably not something widely seen.

They're being honest. Cooking is play. It's what you do when you don't care about quality or consistency of the process. The professional version of cooking is called chemical process engineering.

Similarly, a chef who does proper, principled discovery in this space, would be also called a scientist. Conversely, not being principled is basically playing around, or at best, doing art (with no negative implications intended here; art is important and needed).

I once found a Cheeto-shaped thing in a Cheetos bag that was nothing but Cheeto-coating. It was wonderful. Can't imagine what it did to my insides.

Imagine the damage you could've wrought to your friends' xbox/playstation controllers.

Does this colouring apply to and persist in live tissue?

Persist, no, but its been tested before on live tissue: https://www.nsf.gov/news/window-into-body-invisible-skin

Chester could Oops! All Coating for you

Probably turned you transparent?

This is how Kevin Bacon prepared for the Hollow Man role

They used to say Yellow 5 was really bad for males... and it used to specifically say "Yellow 5" in the ingredients. First time I heard it called "Tartrazine!"

I'm sure this research has some higher motivations behind, but I can't help foreseeing an ignobel coming soon!

Making very tiny thin slices of chicken very slightly transparent using *the dye most commonly found in dorito dust

I mean this is fun, but let’s be honest, they didn’t exactly crush up a bunch of Doritos, shake chicken breast in the dust, and create some sort of clear chicken meat

The article was both fun and honest.

a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2H31RzTPoU