Making chicken transparent using Dorito dust
chillphysicsenjoyer.substack.com229 points by crescit_eundo 8 hours ago
229 points by crescit_eundo 8 hours ago
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.
The origin story has been well documented actually: https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf
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.
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).
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).
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.
Translucent is a great word. Let's use it more!
I'll give you a another: diaphanous.
Evanescent, even.
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.
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?
How about a sous vide bath? Could go as long as 72 hours before it turns into complete mush.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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 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.
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
Imagine the damage you could've wrought to your friends' xbox/playstation controllers.
Can I eat it? And is it tasty?
I did not see answers to these important questions when reading the article.
59 comments and nobody has even mentioned "Fringe"?
I mean, I know this is more of a serious forum, but any thread that has "transparent chicken" and "dorito dust" in the title has be a one of them lighter ones...
This headline could literally be a NileRed video.
What does it do to people? Do I get a transparent anus if I eat a family size bag of Doritos?
Gemini, links to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10759... that says that bacteria split the tartrazine in your guts, so I guess no.
Also as the main article explain, to get the effect the concentration must be quite high, like a 5% solution for 12 hours. That's like 50x the concentration of tartrazine in fake orange juice, that is probably dangerous to drink or take a bath.
I wonder what the altered chicken would look like after being cooked vs normal chicken.
I wonder if this could be applied to living tissue.
That's not a joke. Not only a cool party trick, but could help in diagnosing some medical conditions.
That was indeed the initial research target: https://www.nsf.gov/news/window-into-body-invisible-skin
This is why we must fund the sciences. How else would we get transparent Dorito tendies?
Too much Math for not much of a result.
I had this dream once where we invented a type of tattoo that would make your skin transparent so you could see muscle and veins underneath. I think it could still happen.
See also:
I made transparent chicken - MrGreenGuy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2H31RzTPoU
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!"
so making a sucrose solution should also have the same effect?
I tried to take a look. They have to match a refraction index of lipids of 1.43-1.53. A sugar solution from 0% to 80% has an index of 1.33 to 1.44 so it's too low. And 80% solution of sugar is a lot, they are using a 5% solution of tartrazine (that is also a lot, but a smaller lot).
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
enjoyed the article. this was both fascinating from a technical perspective, and repulsive from a food perspective
seeing the essentially un-cleanable calipers touching raw chicken irks me to hell, even if it is a cheapy pair.
I’ve got those same calipers (they look like the generic calipers from outstanding companies on Amazon such as CEDEXS) that I found along side the road on a run. I would venture to say they’d survive a good dousing in alcohol, but not an autoclave. They’re worth about what I’d paid for them, but yeah, I’d hate to ruin even found tools with salmonella vectors.
As the zoomers say these days "Unstoppable scroll vs unskippable title"