Week 6 March 2 - Lang Lab Part II

For the second trip to the Lang Lab, our focus was on water and water based substances. I chose to study Haagen-Dazs mango sorbet, which comes from the Latin sorbere or “drink up”, as my water-based substance. The ingredients are as follows: Water, Sugar, Mango Puree, Lemon Juice Concentrate, Pumpkin Juice Concentrate (for color), Carrot Juice Concentrate (for color), Natural Flavor, Pectin. Here is a video on how to make mango sorbet by Marc Fosh, a famous chef.

 

Overall, I felt this list did not indicate that there were any extremely artificial ingredients and that the majority of the food was composed of natural ingredients. I was surprised to see pumpkin juice, because having eaten this flavor of sorbet many times, but never reading the full ingredients, I haven’t tasted a hint of pumpkin before.

Upon inspecting the sorbet under the microscope under 10X I discovered many tiny hair like particles throughout the sample. These seemed to be parts of the mango, and I also noticed a blue hue. At 40X it got more interesting, because I could see actual orange cells that appeared to have a nucleus. There was also the effect of the green surrounding “hair-like” particles at this focus. Perhaps this is because they puree the mango to an extent where all the cells were not broken down?

I took some time to look at other people’s specimens and found Juan’s blood to be the most interesting. You could clearly see thousands of small red cells clustered together and flowing in groups in the slide, which was really amazing to see in person. Below is a video showing blood cells at 40x, 400x, and 1000x.


mango sorbet sample


sorbet on slide


sorbet at 40x


sample of Juan's blood