Is There Science Behind Oreo’s Cookies?
Everyone has a particular method for eating tasty Oreo cookies: twisting the two halves apart to eat the cream filling first, perhaps before dipping the chocolate wafers in a glass of milk. However, you may have noticed that the cream mostly, almost every time adheres to only one chocolate wafer. In a research published in the journal Physics of Fluids, MIT scientists attempted to explain why this is the typical case. The writers invented the phrase “oreology” (“oreo” after the classic Nabisco biscuit, “logy” from the Greek for “stream investigate,” rheo logia) to describe a brand new scientific area.
“I had in my mind that if you twist the Oreos perfectly, you should split the creme perfectly in the middle,” Owens, one of the researchers, stated. “But what actually happens is the creme almost always comes off of one side.” And moreover, the rotation rate, the amount of creme filling, and the flavor actually have no effect on the creme distribution as to Owen’s conclusions.
When you twist an Oreo cookie open to get to the creamy middle, you’re simulating a basic rheology test, which examines how non-Newtonian materials flow when twisted, pressed, or otherwise strained, and hence the Oreo cookie is then put through extensive materials testing by MIT engineers.
To that goal, the researchers created a 3D-printable “Oreometer” — a simple gadget that firmly grasps an Oreo cookie and controls the twisting force that gradually twists the cookie open using pennies and rubber bands.
The researchers attached an Oreo to both the top and bottom plates of a rheometer and applied variable degrees of torque and angular rotation, noting the values that effectively twisted each biscuit apart in an experiment that they would repeat for several cookies of various fillings and flavors. The viscoelasticity, or flowability, of the cream, was calculated by plugging the observations into formulae. They also recorded the cream’s “post-mortem distribution,” or where it ended up after being twisted open, for each trial.
The team had practiced on approximately 20 boxes of Oreos, including ordinary, Double Stuf, and Mega Stuf filling levels, as well as regular, dark chocolate, and “golden” wafer varieties. And remarkably, they discovered that the cream almost always split onto one wafer, regardless of the amount of cream filling or flavor.
After an attentive process of researching with the oreometer, surprisingly, they discovered that the cream tended to stay on the inward-facing wafer when they mapped each cookie’s result to its original position in the box: The cream ended up on the right wafer in the cookies on the left side of the box, whereas the cream mainly ended up on the left wafer in the cookies on the right side. They believe that post-manufacturing environmental factors, such as heating or shaking, may cause the cream to peel slightly away from the outside wafers, even before twisting, resulting in this box distribution. The knowledge obtained from studying the characteristics of Oreo cream could be used to improve the design of other complex fluid materials.
After all, even if this is a quiet daily explanation from science, every little, daily, day-to-day routine we have scientific discipline sneaking silently under them.
Works Cited:
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/949803
