Hollow Inside: Starbucks Foam and the Rise of Ambiguous Materials:
"The patron saint of aeration is Margaret Thatcher. In the 1950s, way before she entered politics, Thatcher was part of a team of chemists working for Lyons investigating methods for preserving the foamy quality of ice-cream. They experimented with injecting air into ice-cream until the point of collapse and found that substituting vegetable oil for the animal fat naturally occurring within the dairy cream improved the emulsifying quality of the mix. The improved ice-cream could hold more air, and long enough for it to freeze. This swirled up, foamy, frozen mixture of fat and sugar squirted out of machines as a premium product made with less material - an ingenious sleight of hand.
"It is sorely tempting to draw parallels between Thatchers chemical and political legacies. And if one were to, perhaps one would be making comparisons with the atomisation of society, or perhaps one might speculate that Mr Whippy ice cream represented a proto- privatisation where air is transformed into commodity. " -Sam Jacob
