Here’s the link backstory to my article on Wired Science about the industrial processes used to manufacture traditional Thanksgiving foods. Aside from Jon Snyder’s tremendous photo (seen above), the best part about the story was digging through old food process patents to see how food makers think about their goals.
Energy efficiency and technical rationality are just not part of the equation. Creating potato buds, for example, requires multiple heatings and the introduction of lye, among other chemicals. And all of that extra process and energy merely to create “a process and apparatus for the production of uniform, high-quality dehydrated potato flakes which will reconstitute into a most palatable food which cannot be distinguished from the naturally occurring cooked potatoes.”
Engineers are tremendously good at optimizing for certain variables. The problem has been, though, that energy use hasn’t been one of them. When energy is cheap, it’s the input that gets maximized, not minimized.
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