The Magic that Hides in Plain Sight

Non dairy creamer

If you’re under the mistaken belief that this word is lacking in magic, look no further than your office’s coffee station.  Hidden casually, in plain sight, is all anyone ever needs to prove the existence of magic in this world.

Powdered Non-Dairy Creamer.

All I can hope is that we don’t owe the existence of this magical substance to a dark ritual involving sacrifice of puppies or the burning of 15 million acres of rain forest or wearing polyester.  Please don’t tell me that it is harvested off of the wings of imprisoned fairies or unicorn dandruff, because we’re all better off not knowing.

I’ll grant you that the label says the first ingredient is “corn syrup solids.” That’s Muggle for “something magical we can’t explain, and you’re better off not knowing.” If you ask someone, they’ll probably just tell you it’s just sugar. That is just Death Eater talk, so, you shouldn’t listen to them.

Let’s look into the magical properties of this wondrous substance, shall we?

First, there’s not a bit of dairy in it, but, it makes coffee taste like it’s been given a touch of something that came out of the acceptable part of a female cow.  It’s even mostly white.

Then, there is its peculiar molecular structure, which mutates it into a liquid when exposed to a hot liquid, but gets harder and lumpier in cold liquid.  Even in hot liquid, it still somehow forms a protective barrier over granulated sugar, keeping it from dissolving.  I think that there should be some serious grants awarded to scientists to figure out how to harness these properties. It probably requires someone who knows everything there ever was to know about sedimentology and fluid dynamics. Can we get someone on this? There’s got to be some under-employed master of fluid dynamics in a temp job somewhere that is spending way too much time studying this. Like, what ratios of sugar to creamer result in which absorption rates? Does it matter if the sugar is added first, or if a part of the sugar is exposed to the liquid under the creamer? What happens if you homogenize the two?

You could say I’ve done some experiments. You could also say that no one should spend that much time thinking about coffee creamer.  You might even suggest that I have no idea what use could possibly be derived from a better understanding of non-dairy creamer. You would probably be right. The bad news is that I know next to nothing about fluid dynamics. But I do know that this stuff does some really weird (and that’s a technical term) stuff in liquid.

I probably shouldn’t mention this, as it’s not exactly in keeping with the product’s labeling, and while it’s not a secret, it’s certainly not something we want in front of those who would use the information for evil.  Non-dairy creamer is highly flammable. It can be used as an accelerant for improvised torches and fire-related naughtiness.  This is probably why fairies burst into flames if they get too close to a hot light source. Or maybe that’s just moths. I really hope that it’s not made of the wing scales of moths.  I just couldn’t take it.

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