Separation Anxiety: The Splitting of the…OREO?The lack of direction and oversight for scientists and engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is on full display again. If you read my exposé of the researchers at MIT who were talking to spiders (and are still expecting a reply), you know what I’m talking about. Or maybe you saw the Singing Mummy of Leeds in concert. The researcher from that study was not from MIT, but from another similarly afflicted research university in London. And in all fairness, there may have been a language barrier.
How do they get papers like this published? Where is the Board of Standards?
I have a disdain for junk science, and I tend to lash out with derision and mockery. Junk science comes in several species, but this breed can be particularly dangerous because it is generally accepted within the scientific community. It is not typically deceitful, but it is always worthless, and it goes something like this: choose a subject that simply tickles your fancy; make sure it is something that does not need to be studied for any reason; ignore the Scientific Method.
There are two more important steps. Number one: it’s okay to reinvent the wheel, so under no circumstances should you do any preliminary research to discover what is already known about the subject. Number two: when you have failed to develop any meaningful conclusions, do not be embarrassed to publish your paper anyway. It is almost certainly not the stupidest one ever published!
MIT presents, The Manhattan Oreo Project…from Massachusetts…the splitting of the Oreo Cookie.
Oreos are the most popular cookie in the world. They were once made exclusively at the plant in Hershey, Pennsylvania, located right across the road from Hersheypark, Pennsylvania’s largest amusement park. Oreo Cookies are now manufactured in factories all over the world. Oreos came to be in 1912 as a knockoff of Hydrox cookies, which debuted in 1908, and are still being made. Though not nearly as popular, Hydrox is a vastly superior cookie.
The author of this paper, a bored researcher at MIT, had been snacking on Oreo Cookies one evening. As she harkened back to her childhood, she fondly recalled eating Oreos, and how they readily separated into two halves, each with an equal layer of crème filling.Lamenting that the filling no longer seems to separate evenly for her as she twisted the wafers apart, she decided to get to the bottom of it, and use university time and funding to solve the mystery of the disparate split.
It seems odd that resources would be wasted like that in an age where global climate change threatens to physically destroy the planet, social and political divides are ripping society apart, and millions of people live without water, food or shelter. There is a multitude of research opportunities that can make a difference. Maybe this researcher is an assistant, or apprentice, or for some other reason was still eating at the kids’ science table. How does a real scientist, with a straight face, present this proposal to her supervisors? How in the world is authorization justified?
The problem at hand involves the attempt to divide an Oreo Cookie into its two constituent halves while consistently leaving the crème filling evenly distributed between the two halves.
Seemingly on a whim, our researcher determined that it was a physics problem, and it must be a function of applying the proper amount of twisting force to separate the wafers. That suggests that her first step would be to measure that force. How will she go about that?
A 3-D printer of course.
These days, 3-D technology—printing, imaging, virtual reality— is the first tool put into service in any investigation. It is the modern solution to everything. It’s the duct tape of the 21st century.
3-D technology was the primary component in the singing mummy and talking spider investigations, and the results derived from the use of that 3-D tech were useless in those studies. To the researchers, it seems, it’s little more than a toy. In fact, in those projects, the process was upside down: They had access to the technology, so they went looking for an application. “I have this hammer, where can I find a nail to bend?”
This time, our researcher used the 3-D printer to create what she called an Oreometer, which she would use to measure the force—the torque—required to twist apart the cookie’s halves. Any measurements she got would have been useless, because she did not experiment with the amount of torque applied to the cookie. She simply measured it.
Her research ended in failure. If the filling split at all, it was uneven. Most often, it remained intact, firmly adhered to one wafer. She had no other ideas. The 3-D printed Oreometer was her first and last hope, and the amount of force was the only aspect she considered.
If she had done the proper preliminary research, she would have known that the way those cookies are made makes it almost inevitable that the filling stays mostly, or totally, on one side. As it happens in so many projects like this, the researcher failed in the very fundamental stage: preliminary research.
Researchers fail when they fail to research. It is a universal constant. (Okay, I made that up. But it sounds like a real thing, doesn’t it?)
That avenue was destined to fail at the outset. The force required has nothing to do with how much filling remains on each wafer. Once the required force is reached, the cookie’s wafers separate. It is impossible to use more force, and applying less force is useless because it will not separate the cookie. The separation will occur at the weakest bond once the required torque is applied, and it makes no difference what the measurement is. So, unless there is a weakness or imperfection within a wafer, or the filling itself, the cookie will separate at the weakest of the two filling-to-wafer bonds.
No other avenues of investigation were even considered. But we need to acknowledge that other factors may be at play. What about the condition of the cookie? Was it fresh, right out of a just-opened new bag? Or had it been allowed to become too moist or too dry by not properly resealing the bag? She could have 3-D-printed a hygrometer. What about temperature? Are we assuming a room temperature of 70 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit? Too cold and the wafers themselves may be brittle and snap. Too warm and the filling will be a sloppy, gooey mess. She could have 3-D-printed a thermometer.
The physical properties of that little white blob will change when the temperature changes. That’s the first thing I would have investigated. It’s also probably the easiest to test. At 95 degrees that filling would be mushy. Minimal force would be required to part the wafers, and the filling would likely be pulled apart leaving some on each wafer. Perhaps even close to 50-50.
There are many more variables we could easily test. A real scientist identifies as many as possible and isolates or controls their influence when setting up the conditions for experimentation.
An Oreo Cookie’s genesis is not a complicated process, but there are several important steps, and this is exactly where a bit of preliminary research would have been very informative. Its creation does not result from forcing a crème filling between two chocolate wafers.
To get a first-hand look at how these tasty treats are made, we must now travel to an Oreo Cookie manufacturing facility in the steamy tropical climate of Salinas, Mexico. During our very quick tour (I had to get back to work), we discover that in one part of that factory, the chocolate wafers are created. In another area, the crème filling is prepared.
Somewhere along their way to the package, those fully prepared constituents come together on the assembly line.
The crème is deposited as a small blob onto one wafer as it travels along the line. The crème is fresh, warm and gooey, and it immediately begins to seep into the wafer’s pores and form a bond. The portion that is left exposed to the air, even momentarily, starts to dry. By the time the second wafer is added, the still-exposed crème has dried just enough to lose a bit of its adhesive quality. When the three components get mashed together in a subsequent step, the crème gets further adhered to the first wafer, and the second wafer, sitting on a dried film of crème, just will not stick quite as well.
When the cookie is eventually separated by the consumer, the filling will normally tend to pull away cleanly from one wafer and stick to the other. That is the way they were engineered. That is the way they have always split. Her childhood memories were faulty. Oreo’s have always split unevenly, or more often, with all filling on one side.
Not unexpectedly, the researcher failed with her quest. It was doomed from the start because she concerned herself with only one variable, and it just happened to be the one that would have no effect on the outcome. If she got any measurements at all regarding force, they were meaningless.
The following is a direct quote from the researcher, summing up her paper. Yes. She published a scientific paper, describing a dead-end conclusion to a project worthy of a grammar school science fair. (At the science fair, with no access to a 3-D printer, they used Legos.) I am withholding the researcher’s name to spare her from further embarrassment for publishing such a silly paper.
"I hope people can use this information to improve their cookie eating when they twist open an Oreo, or when they dunk it in milk," she said. "I hope people can also take inspiration to investigate other puzzles in the kitchen in scientific ways.”
She didn’t improve anyone’s ‘cookie eating.’ Her research demonstrated nothing, changed nothing and offered no insight. And as for inspiring me to research in scientific ways, nothing about this was scientific or inspiring. If she performed a dunk-it-in-milk test, she must be saving that for her next paper.
What other puzzles in the kitchen is she referring to? I can only imagine what might puzzle her. Does the light go out when you close the refrigerator door? Perhaps she can print a small 3-D assistant to sit inside and report to her. Or she could use a ready-made Lego character, although there could be a language barrier. Legos speak Danish.
In her post-publication interviews with the tabloids, after she described her failure, she instructed readers to get 3-D printers and to do their own rubbish research into other, similarly inane subjects.
Inevitably, the essential preliminary research will be skipped, and the 3-D printer will be the first stop in their quests too, so I have prepared a step-by-step guide to make that 3-D printer a useful tool.
1. Print a 3-D version of the “Master List Of Things That Really Need To Be Studied.“
2. Read it.
3. Pick anything from the list and do some meaningful, grown-up science.
4. Remember, they split the atom without a 3-D printer.Let’s return to the issue that started this. There apparently is a portion of the Oreo-eating population who prefer to split their cookies in half. And they like exactly half of the crème to remain on each half.
But why? If you eat the cookie just as it comes out of the bag, you get the same proportion of cookie to filling with each bite as you would with a ‘perfectly’ split cookie. That’s what you are after anyway. It’s easy. And there’s no frustration. That’s why they make them ready to eat.
So just eat it, enjoy it, and be done with it. Don’t let some self-proclaimed cookie engineers tell you how to improve your ‘cookie eating.’
I don’t have a sweet tooth. Although, I do like the occasional Oreo cookie, I much prefer the bare wafers over the too-sweet filling. This is where the factory’s careful cookie construction comes into play.
The researcher tested only a twisting motion for separation. She totally ignored several other methods (more variables), which may or may not have made a difference. We’ll never know.
When I eat Oreos, I too separate the two halves. But I coax them apart with a gentle shearing rather than twisting motion. The filling sticks to one wafer. I use the crème-free wafer to scrape the filling from the contaminated one. The filling is too sweet for me, but the dogs love it. That leaves me with two perfectly clean, pure cookie wafers to enjoy. That’s what the cookie engineers at Oreo intended.
If you must split the Oreo, try this: Grab one, and split it in two. Twist, shear or pry. If the crème is not divided equally, eat it anyway and try another one. Keep splitting and eating until one finally splits into two gloriously even halves, each with an equal spread of crème filling. At this point, pause. Take in the full splendor of your achievement. Then eat it slowly, savoring every bite, and revel in your success. Carefully close the package to retain freshness until the next time. You’ve reached your goal.
And you accomplished it without a 3-D printer. Or Legos. Do not write a scientific paper about it.
Scott Wright © 2023
