Thursday, August 30, 2007

Whaaaaaaaat?



What the fuck is xanthan gum? It is seriously in everything. It's also hilarious. Just say it out loud and it'll fill you with joy.

XANTHAN GUM!

2 comments:

Charles D. Leibrand said...

Xanthan gum is a polysaccharide used as a food additive and rheology modifier. It is produced by a process involving fermentation of glucose or sucrose by the Xanthomonas campestris bacterium.
Rheology is the study of the deformation and flow of matter under the influence of an applied stress. The term was coined by Eugene Bingham, a professor at Lehigh University, in 1920, from a suggestion by a colleague, Markus Reiner. The term was inspired by Heraclitus's famous expression panta rei, "everything flows".
In practice, rheology is principally concerned with extending the "classical" disciplines of elasticity and (Newtonian) fluid mechanics to materials whose mechanical behaviour cannot be described with the classical theories. It is also concerned with establishing predictions for mechanical behaviour (on the continuum mechanical scale) based on the micro- or nanostructure of the material, e.g. the molecular size and architecture of polymers in solution or the particle size distribution in a solid suspension.

MLA said...

Somehow it's not as funny once you know what it is...

XANTHAN GUM!!