Follow-ups: Pasta
Feb. 5th, 2008 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack* I did some more brief cooking experiments. Coating raw spaghetti in oil or pesto didn't seem to make any difference.
* Any spaghetti can be brought into the mouth with a lip-over-lip and tongue action. Cooked spaghetti can be brought into the mouth keeping the mouth, cheeks, tongue and lips entirely stationary but pursed, and sucking. (It's quite distinctive, it goes slitherslitherfast and then the end waves forlornly and then smack.)
* But even dipped in oil, cooked spaghetti didn't seem to be sucked in. However, this is far from conclusive -- there's nothing to say the coating is enough to make the friction of the raw and cooked spaghetti strands the same. Or, for instance, perhaps raw spaghetti has a rough surface you can't make a good seal on.
* If anyone wants to settle this, the open questions are still:
1. An air-pressure explanation of why sucking a floppy object would work. (Discussion still going on in the first post, Lisa had thoughts I've yet to respond to.)
2. Are we agreed you can suck cooked spaghetti solely by air pressure, without any pushing from the lips and tongue?
3. Is the matter of not sucking raw spaghetti its friction, or its compressibility or what? This ought to be obvious, I'm sure, but I don't feel concluded yet.
* Any spaghetti can be brought into the mouth with a lip-over-lip and tongue action. Cooked spaghetti can be brought into the mouth keeping the mouth, cheeks, tongue and lips entirely stationary but pursed, and sucking. (It's quite distinctive, it goes slitherslitherfast and then the end waves forlornly and then smack.)
* But even dipped in oil, cooked spaghetti didn't seem to be sucked in. However, this is far from conclusive -- there's nothing to say the coating is enough to make the friction of the raw and cooked spaghetti strands the same. Or, for instance, perhaps raw spaghetti has a rough surface you can't make a good seal on.
* If anyone wants to settle this, the open questions are still:
1. An air-pressure explanation of why sucking a floppy object would work. (Discussion still going on in the first post, Lisa had thoughts I've yet to respond to.)
2. Are we agreed you can suck cooked spaghetti solely by air pressure, without any pushing from the lips and tongue?
3. Is the matter of not sucking raw spaghetti its friction, or its compressibility or what? This ought to be obvious, I'm sure, but I don't feel concluded yet.
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Date: 2008-02-07 01:11 am (UTC)That's very lyrical :)
Anyway, that all sounds about right. Feel free to muse, or muse with maths, if you like. If you get a maths argument, I can hopefully validate it and maybe turn it into english -- I can do that some of the time, and would be grateful for any explanation if there's a chance it's right and I find it convincing :)