What If You Ate Quark-Gluon Plasma, and Other Questions

Everyday food is standard and often uninteresting. Thus, it is worthwhile to investigate the gastronomical world with an open mind. I reached out to the Stuyvesant student body to hear about their scientific inquiries, and saw a common theme in their questions: what happens when you branch out to the extremes of eating? From extreme materials to extreme diets, I put pen to paper (and finger to calculator) and found out.

1: What if we unrolled all of the Fruit Roll-Ups and extended them across the world?

It is tricky to know exactly how many Fruit Roll-Ups exist right now, but it can be approximated. A 2020 survey showed that 1.4 million Americans had eaten five or more Roll-Ups in a month, 1.7 million had eaten three to four Roll-Ups, and 5.5 million had eaten one to two. This comes out to a total of 21.2 million Fruit Roll-Ups consumed in a month, or 212,000 boxes of 10 Fruit Roll-Ups. Judging by Hershey’s warnings of a Halloween candy shortage and the fact that over 10 percent of candy sales happen on Halloween, it seems there must not even be 10 percent of a year’s sales in Fruit Roll-Ups currently available. Thus, there are about 254,400 boxes of 10 Fruit Roll-Ups each. The task at hand is to unroll and extend 2.5 million Fruit Roll-Ups around the Earth.

Fruit Roll-Ups are roughly 4.75-inch-long squares. Our supply will extend 11.9 million inches, or 2,249 miles. The Earth has a circumference of 24,901 miles, so the candy won’t even make it halfway around. If the Roll-Ups were laid in a straight line starting in Manhattan, the path would end around Reno, Nevada. If they were instead laid along roads, the Roll-Ups would stretch from Stuyvesant to Salt Lake City, Utah.

It would take 332 million Fruit Roll-Ups to actually reach across the Earth. That’s $82 million worth of Fruit Roll-Ups at $2.48 a box! Something tells me there are better uses for $82 million than a Fruit Roll-Up chain, but to each their own.

2: What if you ate quark-gluon soup?

About 20 microseconds after the Big Bang, the universe was soup: quark-gluon soup. Protons and neutrons contain three quarks and gluons each. In essence, gluons are the carriers of the force which holds protons, neutrons, and atoms together through quarks. This force is also the basis for the nuclear force binding atomic nuclei together. After the 20 microsecond mark, the universe began to rapidly cool and decrease in density, and the quarks and gluons combined into particles.

When it comes to our relativistic meal, there are multiple considerations: we want a standard soup bowl full of plasma sitting on the dinner table, but how will the soup be obtained and how will we deal with the temperature, color, and cost?

Quark-gluon plasma (QGP) can actually be made in particle colliders by colliding nuclei like those of lead and gold at close to the speed of light. The collisions are at such high energy and speeds that the Hagedorn temperature (1.7×1012 K) is achieved. At this temperature, there are actual fireballs of new particles ejected from the heated matter. Furthermore, since the soup is hotter than the core of the sun, it would send annihilating shockwaves of radiation for hundreds of miles, assuming it lasted more than a trillionth of a second in the plasma state.

Even when pretending this does not happen, the density of the soup alone creates issues. Interestingly, while a high density suggests an extremely hard object, quark-gluon plasma is in fact extremely free-flowing. By definition, the substance is extremely close to being a perfect liquid and essentially frictionless—the soup would feel great going down, if you could feel it at all. Unfortunately, it would also be extremely heavy. A cubic centimeter of QGP would weigh 40 billion tons, so a whole bowl of it would create a gravitational force near 90,763 Newtons, which is significantly smaller than the pull between the Earth and the Moon, but enough to make eating our soup impossible.

Considering the cost of running experiments at high-energy colliders like the Large Hadron Collider, the soup would set us back at least $1 billion. That’s an expensive dinner, but don’t worry about the bill! You won’t live to tell the tale.

3: How many potatoes could you eat in a lifetime if you never stopped eating potatoes?

All health concerns aside, let’s say you are approaching your potato-eating as a simple meal replacement. If you were to eat 2,000 calories worth of Yukon Gold potatoes every day, you would be eating 20 potatoes a day. If the average life expectancy is 73.4 years (as of 2019, before the pandemic disrupted measures), you would eat slightly more than 5,000 potatoes in your lifetime. This would cost you only $1,000, based on Walmart’s current prices.

But what if you were eating those potatoes at a competitive eater’s pace? Joey Chestnut, winner of Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July hot dog eating contest, gobbled down 63 hot dogs in 10 minutes. If someone were to eat 63 potatoes every 10 minutes, by the end of the day, they would be dead due to a stomach rupture.

Returning now to the health concerns, how quickly would your potato diet be forced to an early end? You would last at least two months, because it has been done before with supplements. Following a pure potato diet, the vitamins A, B12 and E, and calcium and selenium deficiencies would eventually catch up to you. Your vitamin A deficiency would nearly blind you, and you would likely die within a year due to a decreased ability to fight infections. Suddenly, potatoes don’t sound so good after all!

There are a few takeaways from this odyssey into the world of Stuyvesant students’ questions. It is, sadly, not worth it to roll Fruit Roll-Ups around the world. Eating the building blocks of the universe for dinner isn’t the best plan, but eating the same thing all the time certainly isn’t either. It is time to exit the realm of the hypothetical… until next time.