Don't Coat Your Innards With Space Oil To Conserve Ketchup

You know how there's always a little bit of ketchup that you never quite get out of the bottle? It coats the inside; even if you do the thing where you stand the bottle on its head for 24 hours to let it all ooze down close to the nozzle, some of it never comes out, and goes in the trash.

Now think of all the ketchup bottles you have discarded in your life. All the honey bears, squeeze-bottles of sweet pickle relish, tubes of toothpaste, and so on. All the precious high-viscosity goo they carried with them, one inextricable internal coating at a time, to their final destination at the landfill. Such waste. Such damnable loss. Probably whole cups worth! Truly, this intolerable frittering of our various food-goos is enough to drive any decent person to madness.

What if I told you that an MIT professor and a graduate student had teamed up to devise a technological solution to this frustration? For lo, Dr. Kripa Varanasi and J. David Smith have given us LiquiGlide, " a coating that makes the inside of the bottle permanently wet and slippery," so that you may observe a wad of mayonnaise tumbling, whole and intact as though coated in oil, toward the open end of a squeeze bottle, and think to yourself, holy shit, no way, death first, and deposit the bottle in the nearest garbage receptacle with the same haste and visible discomfort with which you would discard a sweat sock full of crushed spiders.

The New York Times, and video. Horrible, horrible video:

Horror. Nightmare. What are the odds some microscopic quantity of this mystery science substance isn't making the transit from your ketchup bottle to your french fries? Imagine the look on your face the day the bottle suddenly isn't slippery on the inside anymore. Oh Christ, I ate all of it. I ate all of it and now my intestines are lubricated. Pretty cool how my alimentary canal is basically a bitchin' waterslide for chewed-up food, now. A couple of months of eating sandwiches with LiquiGlided mustard on them and your asshole makes a sound like the pneumatic tubes at a drive-thru bank teller: three seconds after you swallow a bite, it's just, whoooooosh ... ffffffooom.

"Listen, I'd love to stay and chat, but I really need to take my meals on the toilet, now. I've exceeded my pants budget a hundred times over in the last 48 hours."

Better to load all the high-viscosity goo-foodstuffs onto a barge and sink it into the briny deep than to invite this demonic coating into squeeze bottles whose contents we intend to consume. All that wasted honey and mayo and toothpaste and ketchup doesn't bother you so much now, does it? Think of it as a payment—a ransom. You offered the dregs of your honey bear to the Gods, and in return they gave you a life free from LiquiGlide.

[ NYT]

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