WriLoLo: The Butter vs. Marjarine debate

I mentioned on the first part of my posts on the butter vs. marjarine debate that I would love to take the time to do little experiments and test out the claims of all those annoying dodgy spam emails that I get ever so often. I also mentioned another part of the dodgy butter vs. marjarine email that really bugged me, which is this little sentence here:

"YOU can try this yourself, purchase a tub of margarine and leave it in your garage or shaded area, within a couple of days you will note a couple of things, no flies, not even those pesky fruit flies will go near it,( that should tell you something) it does not rot, smell differently...Because it has no nutritional value, nothing will grow on it, even those teeny weeny microorganisms will not a find a home to grow...Why? because it is nearly plastic. Would you melt your tupperware and spread that on your toast?"

Ok, so since this sounded like a relatively cheap, simple and not-time-consuming experiment, I decided to take up this guy's challenge and buy a tub of marjarine. Actually, it wasn't so much for this experiment but more coz' I wanted some to go on my Hainanese bread toast and kaya, and obviously I didn't give a hoot about the claims in this email, even before I could verify anything with my experiment. Heh.

Anyhow, as any respectable scientist would know, it is always good to have controls in your experiment, or a similar item, subjected to the same conditions of your experiments, to compare with your test subject to see if changes are significant (or something along those lines. My science geekiness is a little rusty). In this case, I decided to compare marjarine to the butter, obviously, and also mill. Since both marjarine and butter are made of milk, I thought it would be interesting to compare what happened to all three kinds of stuff if I left them out for a few days.

So I took a little bit of butter...

... and threw into a tub.

And took a bit of marjarine...

And threw that into a tub.

And then I mixed a bit of milk powder with water, and threw that into a tub...

So I had the following:

3 lovely samples for my experiment! And for the next few days, I left the 3 tubs somewhere in my room, just lying around, and every day I checked each tub to see the changes.

I also took photos of each sample on each day to document any changes. However, since the changes on a day-to-day basis weren't all that significant, I'm gonna be a lazy scientist and not post all the photos.

In summary, what happened to the milk was exactly what I expected to happen. After a couple of days, it started to curdle and was becoming rather stinky. Something I didn't quite expect is that ants started coming after the milk. And some of the dumb little fellas drowned in it, of course, so at the end of 4 days, the milk looked like this:

Good ol' curdled milky goodness with ants thrown in for extra protein. Yuck. By the end of 4 days, the stink was becoming a bit to much for me to tolerate in my room, so I chucked the stinky milk away.

As for the butter and marjarine, however, at the end of 5 days (I kept these both a little longer than the milk), I noticed no change in smell in either of them, and very little change in appearance (they looked more melted. Understandable in Malaysian weather). I didn't notice any strange specks or other signs of strange life that may be growing on the marjarine... OR the butter. Which suggests that nothing was growing on either one.

The butter, however, seemed to 'break down' over those few days, and stuff that seemed to be oil was collecting at the bottom of the butter tub. And ants were also attracted to this stuff, and getting all stuck in the oily stuff. So in the end, my tub of butter looked like this:

Note the little black ants stuck on the tub walls and some floating around the clear liquid stuff. I guess those ants died a pretty happy death.

As for the marjarine, it didn't ooze out any oily stuff, but appear pretty much the same as it originally did throughout the experiment. Some ants were also attracted to it, but I found fewer dead ants at the marjarine compared to the butter and milk. I suspect that number of ants that visited the butter and marjarine tubs would have been about the same, however, the fewer dead ants observed in the marjarine tub may have been because there wasn't any liquid in the marjarine tub to trap and kill the ants.

So the end of 5 days, my summary of findings are:
1) Milk looked markedly different, and smelled different too. Butter and marjarine did not smell differently, and appearance-wise, only butter was oozing some oil. Marjerine appeared the same.

2) No sign of fungi or other microbes growing on either butter or marjarine.

2) Milk attracted a lot of ants, and butter seemed to attract quite a bit too, but fewer ants were found at the marjerine tub.

Based on these results, I am tempted to rebuke the spam email writer's claim that nothing goes after marjarine, coz' ants did go after it a bit too. However, since my 3 tubs were placed close to each other, I think there is a possibility that the dead ants in the marjarine tub may have just happened to wander there while being attracted to the milk or butter. Also, the fact that nothing else seemed to be growing on the marjarine seems to support the email writer's claim....

BUT! Butbutbutbutbut.... there was also no obvious sign of microbial growth on the butter as well. And the butter's smell ALSO didn't change. Which implies that while marjarine may be lacking in nutritional value and all the other stuff that attracts bugs and little microorganisms to grow on it, butter appears to be not much better... except for the evidence of the ants.... but these may have 'accidently' gotten stuck in the butter oil substance on the way to visit the milk too.

So basically, what I'm getting at is that marjarine may have no nutrional value, but according to the writer's assumption that 'healthy' food will rot, stick and attract pests, butter doesn't seem to be much better than marjarine. So really, if you wanna boycott marjarine, might as well boycott butter too. :P

Of course, any good scientist would know that this experiment is lacking an important element of a proper experiment, which is replication (repeating the experiment to see if results are the same) and probably could be improved in a lot of ways. But since I'm the lazy scientist, I just can't be bothered to do it again just to be doubly sure. I'm still happily eating my marjarine with toast and so far I haven't gotten any heart attacks yet or keeled over, so I think I'm good with the marjarine.

My next aim is to the test another chain email that states that our local favourite unhealthy snack, 'pisang goreng' (fried banana fritters) is cooked with melted plastic in oil to make its crispiness last longer. I'm reeeeeaaaallly curious on whether this is true. Just hope I ever find the time to try this experiment out. Heh!