Making Salad

For dinner, my mom asked me to assist her with making her famous chicken salad. First I prepared the meat, cutting it into edible slices. Then I had to fry the won ton strips. After a while, though, my won tons failed to be crispy enough and my mom took over. Next, I opened the can of mandarin oranges and bag of thinly sliced almonds. Finally, I would make the salad. After I washed the salad, it was a wet. No one wants to eat wet salad (I would hope), especially when the salad becomes soggy from the water. So then I grabbed the salad spinner. Here I witnessed the physics of the salad spinner. The salad spinner is in the shape of a circle. There is a clear basket on the outside and in the inside there is a bowl with horizontal slits. There is a cover that has a pump, which I would pump for the bowl to spin. After I spun the bowl a few times with the pump, the salad became dry and ready to eat. But before I mixed the salad with the other ingredients, I noticed how all the salad condensed together and all the water went to the clear bowl. The salad remained in the inside bowl due to the centripetal force. The centripetal force was the walls of the bowl, keeping the salad moving in a circular path. The centripetal force always points to the center of the circle. The water, however, had NO force acting upon it, allowing the water to come off. There was not enough force to keep the water moving in a circle. When there is no force, the object will fly off tangent to the circle. It makes so much sense now that I learned and witnessed the salad spinner. The salad spinner is a neat and effective invention that clearly demonstrates physics. 

My salad spinner with the pump. I would show a picture of the chicken salad, but my family and I ate it all!