A conundrum and a related honorable mention

My dear friend Holly always indulges my four-year-old-like, pseudo-scientific inquiries on how the world works (i.e. can you pump a keg on the moon, is there really a Big Foot). Together with Katrina and Josh, we ponder the world around us and often times use our lunch hour to Google its mysteries. A few months ago, Holly and I decided to email Kraft food company to fully understand how amateur bakers can suspend chunks of assorted fruit in JELL-O at varying levels in mold-formed desserts. Anybody who knows anything about science (Tanya, you can stop reading here) knows that matter will float (or not) in a liquid at a certain level depending on its density, like ice floating at the top of a glass of water. However, many homemade JELL-O delicacies have bits of pineapple, mandarin orange, cherry, what have you, suspended through out with no rhyme or reason as to their placement. Following is the email that Holly and I sent to Kraft...

To Whom It May Concern: I am interested in knowing how the same type of fruit can be suspended at different heights in JELL-O. I am curious because approaching my question with an understanding of density does not fully explain how variable the fruit's position within the JELL-O can be. It would seem to me that the fruit should all be suspended at the same level. The Class of 2009 at the University of Michigan Dental School has been plagued by this anomaly for the past year. We would deeply appreciate any explanation you can give us. Or if you are not able to answer this, could you please forward this to someone who can explain? Thank you for your time.

...to which we received this reply:

Hi Holly,

Thank you for visiting http://www.kraftfoods.com/.

Gelatin must be chilled until thickened before adding additional
ingredients, to hold added ingredients in suspension.

If you haven't done so already, please add our site to your favorites and
visit us again soon!

I must admit to being very unsatisfied with Kraft's canned response. Anybody have any better guesses? It seems like it should be a simple answer so I'm hoping that someone out there in cyberspace is thinking of something I'm not. Perhaps my conundrum solver Emily will once again come to the rescue....we'll see.

The reason I bring all of this up now is because two Fridays ago a group of us were sitting around the lunch table when Katrina removed from her lunch bag a perfect, tiny Tupperware bowl containing the perfect, tiny amount of JELL-O. It wasn't as though she had scooped the JELL-O into the Tupperware, either; Katrina had the brilliant idea of letting her homemade JELL-O set in individual, lunch-sized portions. I thought that was so clever that I told her I had to write about it in my weblog. A week later, Katrina pointed out to me that she was still waiting patiently for her cyber-honorable mention so here it is: Kudos to you, Katrina! You are one clever gal! Now if we could only be that creative with our Spring Break planning! :)

xoxox