Inside My Mind

I went to have lunch today at Burgerville. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's like a Culver's with a smaller menu. Anyway, they had their Yukon Gold fries. They looked tasty and were cut in a net like fashion. This got me thinking about surface area. Does cutting them this way rather than in the normal shoots increase the surface, thereby increasing the about of canola oil that is being fried into the fry? My suspicion is that it increases. This lead me on a number of questions about cutting and surface area. Can you cut an object in one way such that it has a smaller surface area than another way of cutting? Can you cut (no bends or curves, all planar cuts) an object twice such that it creates a smaller surface area than with 1 cut? The final question I landed on was much more specific yet still broad. In what way can should you make a straight cut in a cylinder to maximize surface area? I'm most certain that the cut will go through the point that is in the center of the circle and at half the height. If that is true then the cut must also be cut through or right next to both bases. But not cutting the diameter of the base. I also began to question if the ratio of the height to the diameter made a difference on the angle of the cut. I made a few sketches and a number of formulas. I even looked for resources in a table of integrals. That is one ugly integral. I know think I need to make some more intermediate goals on this problem to see if I can reduce the amount of variable I've given myself. All that from an order of fries.