As a Matter of Fat ? MindTribe Blog

As a Matter of Fat
January 11th, 2008 byLori Hobson
Design, Materials, Process, and Greater Values in the “Thick” of the New Year
It must be January. Everyone in America is doing one of three things: writingIDEA entries, attending CES/MacWorld, or getting in shape. Since our product development community is busied with the first two, maybe we should take a break and consider the issue on the minds of most other people this month.
Outside of our industry, massive numbers of Americans make a resolution to lose weight every January. Apparently these are non-binding resolutions since about 1/3 of this population remains not just overweight, but obese. (Centers for Disease Control)

About 33% of Americans are obese according to CDC
By contrast, the ID/PD community appears under-represented in the fat part of the bell curve. Maybe an obsession with form keeps the vast majority of our ilk svelte. Or maybe it’s that the design and engineering schools we go to tend to consume all available financial resources, producing graduates who have a propensity to survive on little more than grocery-aisle samples and Bombay Sapphire. Maybe it’s the long hours or the overseas travels that limit the ability to ingest or, at least, digest too much.
My gut feeling is that while the community isn’t all Agota Jonas in body type (Agota is the model-thin person who teachesAlias to Bay Area designers), it is difficult to think of many of our caste with much more than the occasional paunch. In fact, if asked to name a “bulky” designer, the first that pops to mind isLeap Design Group’s Joe Molinari and his thunder thighs, which are entirely bulked muscle mass from bike racing, the opposite of blubber.
Does this isolate us from the issues of fat? While dieting may not weigh in on our personal scale, our favorite ID/PD causes relate to fat in a big way. We care about health and well-being, consideration for the environment, and understanding the user experience – presumably even if the user happens to weigh 100+ pounds more than anyone on the design team. And fat has a lot more to do with the world outside of ID/PD than we seem to acknowledge. I haven’t seen 33% of design persona profiles depicting “Rotund Ross” or “Biggie Bette” during the ID process.
A modicum of research on one facet of fat – solid shortening – reveals that the issues can be broader than you might imagine. The story is laden with interesting benefits, pitfalls, process, supply chain, and political ramifications. Just like a good award entry!
Not Your Mother’s Crisco
“But isn’t solid vegetable shortening by definition hydrogenated?” my colleague Tom speculated.
This simple question spurred enough curiosity to look into the mundane purchase of solid shortening and uncover divergent production processes and far-reaching impacts in the global supply chain.
If you ever made or ate a pie, had any concerns about fat in your diet, or cared to protect endangered forests, orangutans, or law-abiding jobs for Colombians, but you don’t want to read a whole blog, then here’s the short of it:
Solid shortening is used in crispy and creamy things such as crackers and peanut butter. Traditional solid shortening like Crisco is made through hydrogenating oil that is otherwise liquid at room temperature. This process creates “trans fat.” There are now trans-fat free solid shortenings based on an expeller-pressing process applied to palm fruit oil. Food makers are rapidly adopting the new shortening to make their products healthier. But if you care about how your choices impact the planet and about greater values than just a crispy crunch, you’ll want to make sure your tasty eats are made with shortening created from palm fruit oil sourced out of South America (like that supplied by Hain-Celestial/Spectrum Foods), not palm oil sourced out of South East Asia.
The Old School Crisco Method of Hydrogenation
Food makers use solid shortening because of its baking properties, the creamy consistency it achieves in your mouth, and prolonged shelf life. Shortening in any form is not a health food. However, hydrogenated oil like Crisco is about as healthy as a barroom ashtray the morning after and as “all natural” asGwen Stefani’s latest hair color. This is not a healthy product. (Assuming you are ingesting it, anyway, and not using it for some other purpose.)
Vegetable oils like soybean and cottonseed are naturally liquid at room temperature, so they must be hydrogenated to create a solid fat. The hydrogenation process raises the melting point of oil and extends shelf life by retarding rancidity. Room-temperature solid shortening helpsSkippy Peanut Butter avoid separating into a layer of liquid oil the way the au naturale kinds of peanut butter do. It also helps flour avoid absorbing the fat while cooking long enough for flakes to form in crackers or pie crust.
The hydrogenation process utilizes high heat, a metal catalyst (e.g., nickel, zinc, copper, or other reactive metals), and hydrogen gas. The process involves bubbling the hydrogen gas up through a mixture of the oil and metals. The metals react with the hydrogen gas by catalyzing the hydrogen and carbon atoms. This apparently converts the fatty acids by flipping one of the attached hydrogen molecules and rotating it half the diameter of the carbon chain.

Polyunsaturated fat molecule

Naturally hydrogenated molecule
Not trans fat but lacks the desired properties

Trans fat with inverted hydrogen molecule
Solid or semi-solid at room temperature
Man-made processes for hydrogenation effectively create a new molecular structure, resulting in a stiffer or more rigid material. This causes the oil to change from a liquid to a semi-solid or solid. That is, the new molecular shape makes the oil behave more like a saturated fat. When converted, the new shape chemically alters to a “trans configuration” and that’s where the name “trans fat” originated.
Originally, scientists thought this man-made fat was healthier because it provided the material properties of saturated fat but with the chemical composition of polyunsaturated fat. Remember when nutritionists said margarine was healthier than butter? We’ve since learned that trans fats are actually worse for us than saturated fats. Trans fat interferes with metabolic absorption and clogs your arteries. It increasesbad cholesterol and decreasesgood cholesterol. It doesn’t provide any nutritional benefits – not even much energy – and it is difficult to eliminate from the body. While fat, in general, is not healthy in volume, trans fat is particularly bad even in small quantities.
Expeller Pressing Palm Fruit Oil
If you’re a health-conscious cook, the first time you see a grocery label that says “100% Organic Trans Fat-Free Shortening” it is enough to make you stop in yourFuse-designed Birkenstock tracks.

Spectrum Organic Trans Fat Free Shortening
In 2000, in response to growing health concerns about trans fats, Petaluma, California-basedSpectrum Organic Products applied an expeller-pressing process to palm fruit to create solid shortening without the need for hydrogenation. (The key ingredient is the palm fruit and not the palm kernel because oil from the palm kernel contains a lot more saturated fat.) Palm fruit oil separates into a naturally solid state at room temperature. The product was an overwhelming success, and Spectrum has since been acquired byHain-Celestial foods, the kind people who provided me with some information on palm oil for this blog.

Palm fruit oil versus palm kernel oil means less saturated fat
The expeller process used for palm fruit is basically the same as the process used to produce virgin olive oil. An expeller press is a screw type machine that presses the fruit through a caged barrel-like cavity. It is a chemical-free mechanical process to extract the fruit oil. The machine uses friction and continuous pressure from the screw drives to move and compress the fruit. The oil seeps through small openings through which the fruit fiber cannot pass.

Expeller Press Machine
(Kind of looks like an injection molding machine!)
There is no external heat applied during the expeller pressing. The temperature reached during pressing depends on the hardness of the ingredient material. The harder the fruit, nut or seed, the more pressure required to extract the oil, which in turn creates more friction and higher heat. Palm fruit is not particularly hard, so it seems this is essentially a cold-pressed process.
What Does Fat Have to Do with Tropical Forests and Endangered Orangutans?
The demand for palm oil in places like China and India is growing faster than the waist line of a Cowboy fan during half time. The primary sources for palm oil in Asia are Indonesia and Malaysia. In these countries’ tropical forests, orangutans are in competition for fruit and living space with enterprising, slash-and-burn human palm harvesters. The humans have weapons. (See“The Vanishing Man of the Forest” and“Fat Fight Becomes a Rumble in the Jungle: Paul Newman, Trans Fats & Orangutans,” The New York Times)
When I learned about the displacement, and even murder, of orangutans by palm harvesters, I re-contacted Hain-Celestial Foods. The company supplies both consumers and some commercial food makers (e.g., Newman’s Own) with its shortening. With all the shelf space that it and its customers command at Whole Foods, I had to assume there was some explanation other than accepting the demise of a great creature.
Hain-Celestial’s staff was all over the issue. They source their palm fruit exclusively from South America. Colombian farmers grow their palm fruit instead of farming coca for the drug trade. In other words, Hain-Celestial is producing a valuable product while helping to solve a social problem. It is a solution that would merit an answer to the old Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) Question #14-”What are the social benefits of this design?” Company reps were very forthcoming, directing me to information about the plight of the orangutan and their way of ensuring their business does not contribute to the problem. (One contact helpfully offered, “I want to be sure you know there are no orangutans in South America.”) Instead, Hain-Celestial aids Colombian farmers and the rest of us by providing demand for a crop other than coca.
A simple review of a food process turned out to be another lesson in the importance of understanding a supply chain.
IDEA Entries and the Overweight, Underserved, or Unimagined
Even a substance as dull as vegetable shortening turns out to be significant to the greater values we product people espouse. It’s a little reminder about how important it is for us to take the time and consider the impacts of our design, manufacturing processes, and even some of the lackluster materials we use. As a matter of fact, that is precisely what awards programs like IDEA make us do every year.
MindTribe does product engineering, so I am not asked to fret over IDEA anymore. I used to pride myself on getting in the designer’s frame of mind to answer questions like that old Question 14. (If you haven’t done it, it’s trickier than you think. Try having to address not only the social benefits of a boombox but also the social benefits of the boombox’s retail packaging. Memorex Biomorph. It won in 2004.)
Related to fat, I once wrote an award entry for a product that seemed a hands-down winner. It was a medical imaging system based on magnetic resonance (MRI) that could image morbidly obese people. Talk about addressing a horrible user experience. Until then, these people were imaged with a less-accurate, open system typically used for livestock, which hoisted the patient in a sling as it would a steer. The design required significant innovation to make the larger aperture MRI “donut” work – scientifically, aesthetically and for the patient, operator, assembly tech, etc.
Despite a terrific design and tremendous business success, the MRI achieved not a single design win in America. I still wonder what the juries were thinking. Was it: “So what, they made the opening bigger”? Or was it that our cadre of trim professionals is so sheltered from this user that empathy was elusive?
CDC reports that in its latest study the number of obese Americans is no longer increasing. Andthe IDEA form also appears to have skinnied down to only 10 questions this year. Entries no longer have to explicitly break out the social, environmental, business, user, and aesthetic benefits of their designs. These were the questions that made us reflect every year on how our clients kept painting their plastic, using disposable batteries, ignoring underserved populations, or engaging in some such a violation to the great values. Clients didn’t know it, but every January we had to defend these design choices to our peers.
But I’d bet that the 2008 winners of IDEA/BusinessWeek will still address each one of these dimensions with honesty about what was done right, what was compromised and why. And, as I learned the hard way, I bet they also find a way to immerse the jury quickly in the user’s perspective especially if that user’s challenges are unimaginable or even repulsive to designers!
If you want more hints about what makes a winning entry than that, you’ll have to contact me directly. Happy New Year!
Thanks toLionel Jingles,Jerry Ryle, andPhil Hobson for developing the artwork.
Tags:deforestation,design awards,fat,Hain-Celestial,IDEA,new year's resolution,obesity,orangutan,product design awards,solid shortening,Spectrum,trans fat free shortening
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4 Responses to “As a Matter of Fat”
Richard Zimmerman says:
January 22, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Hi– I just wanted to commend you on such an informative post. Palm oil is one of those invisible killers– directly linked to massive deforestation and the demise of entire species. It is literally transforming our planet, yet most people don’t even know what it is!
Thanks for touching upon the effect palm oil is having on orangutans. I invite you and your readers to learn more at the Orangutan Outreach website:http://redapes.org
Keep up the great work! Rich
Richard Zimmerman
Director, Orangutan Outreach
http://redapes.org
Reach out and save the orangutans!
Lori says:
January 23, 2008 at 10:05 am
Hi Richard:
This was an eye-opening blog to research. I didn’t start out knowing about orangutans, just pie crust.
This generation of product designers is taking a more active role than ever before in helping our clients understand and mitigate the negative repercussions of the products we create. At some point I’ll have to address the complexity of bio-fuels, I guess. That is a little closer than food ingredients to the products my readers work on.
In the meantime, I did visit one additional page on your site:
http://redapes.org/how/donate/
You’ll be getting a check.
Regards,
Lori H.
Agota Jonas says:
February 26, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Hello Lori,
Just came back to your blog to see if you have posted anything new since “As a Matter of Fat”? I will keep checking back!
Thank you for the good reads (and geez, you even paid me a compliment- thank you for that!
Hope all is well.
-agota.
ps: I can’t believe that MRI machine didn’t win!
Lori says:
February 26, 2008 at 6:01 pm
Hey Agota:
The compliment is well deserved!
As for the new blog, I just read about a new prototyping technology that sounds pretty awesome. Maybe the muse will hit me on that one!
Best to you, Paul, and your little one-
Lori H.
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