[nnq]

...somehow the fact that it's only made out of FDA approved ingredients doesn't make me feel save at all. it's a lot of dangerous stuff that is approved for food and drug use in certain quantities... but it's always about the quantity and nobody can even begin to test the effects of the combinations. and it clearly spells out the fact that some non-negligible amount of it ends up being ingested, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered to use only FDA approved stuff. patent it or whatever but until they publish the exact formula and expected daily intake from foods packaged using it so I can search the safety studies for the substances in it I'm doing my best to stay the hell away from food packaged using it ...hell, even canned soda freaks me out a bit because I know it has a layer of "coating" sprayed on the inside to keep the juice from corroding the can

...I like high tech stuff, but not in my food. if it's gonna make me live longer or cure cancer than I can balance risk/benefits ...but my not so short foray into medical research thought me to be very very very worried (actually freakin scared to the point that I have to ignore much of what I've learned just to keep on living as a normal person eating "normal" food and taking "safe" otc drugs) about what we think we know about chemicals safety and how "safety" is define

...just my 2 cents for people "less in the know": don't approach innovation regarding food, health or anything biomedical the same way you approach it in software engineering or other field of engineering ...it's a whole different ball game and there's a reason why it take 1 billion USD to brink a drug to market (besides bureaucracy and buggy "peopleware" that probably makes up 50% if the cost) ...anyway, the point is that it's this kind of thing you need to approach with the "we're building a nuclear reactor" type of mentality, not the "let's hack together a cool robot and show off" type

[veemjeem]

Sounds like you should stay at home and grow your food on your own farm. Lots of cooking tools use hi-tech research, from non-stick pans to heat resistant spatulas. I understand your concern, but there's no need to freak out over technology applied to food. There are more opportunities for less visible man-made technology to become dangerous in non-culinary situations, such as your home's insulation, or materials used in microchip packaging. There's less regulation there and higher chances of "science" having ill effects on you. If you don't live in California, there's a higher chance that you could be buying non-RoHS compliant manufactured goods that can be more hazardous to you than any culinary equipment.

[jonnathanson]

You're making a lot of assumptions here. Perhaps they're founded, and perhaps they're not -- but either way, you seem to be using these folks' work as an effigy for a broader complaint with the food industry, or with the FDA. The industry may be shady, and the government does allow a lot of frightening substances into our food without adequate testing. But let's not burn some enterprising young kids for those mistakes.

Now, there are a lot of things we don't know about LiquiGlide. Maybe it's just a carbon-polymer matrix that keeps the ketchup flowing by mechanical action, and not by chemical action? Whatever it is, I would imagine that anyone designing such a substance would realize that ketchup is fairly acidic; therefore, LiquiGlide would need to be chemically inert when positioned next to an acid. I am not an organic chemist, but I imagine these guys had one, or consulted with one, or at any rate, know a lot more about the subject than I do. So if this stuff's occurring to me, no doubt it occurred to them.

To be fair, that doesn't mean the substance is safe. In fact, I'd probably share your skepticism about consuming ketchup from a bottle made with any nonstick coating, as the history of nonstick coatings is riddled with unsafe chemicals. That being said, I consider these kids and their work to be innocent until proven guilty.

Finally, if you don't want artificial ingredients in your food, then don't eat Heinz ketchup in the first place. :) Complaining about chemical additives to what is basically a sauce of chemical additives is a little like saying that you want your deep fried ice cream to be low-fat. Very little of what's in a bottle of Heinz ketchup even came from a tomato in the first place.

[ubercore]

You're _also_ making assumptions though. The ingredients in Heinz ketchup are pretty banal. The most "chemically" thing I see is high fructose corn syrup.

[pm90]

Take a close look at the "preservatives" and "coloring" section of most processed foods. They consist of industrial chemicals invented for that very purpose only in the last century or so. We're already consuming an inordinate amount of this stuff (More so in developing countries actually, where regulation is slightly....lax)