Additionally since nitrous oxide is widely abused for recreational use, in what way is nitrous the preferred method for whipped cream instead of gasses like CO2 or O2.
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O2 is a bad, bad idea for a lot of reasons. It’s incredibly volatile (oxygen is literally why stuff burns), it can cause a bunch of adverse effects if you breathe pure oxygen, and it’ll also cause a bunch of undesirable reactions with the dairy parts. Not good.
What about CO2? Well, CO2+H2O=H2CO3 – carbonic acid. There’s a lot of H2O in milk, and in just about all dairy, so this makes the cream acidic. Importantly, we can’t do this with N2O. N2O is a really weird molecule and, importantly, doesn’t react with H2O to form an acid.
Importantly as well, it’s relatively easy to make from already-industrialised, commodity chemicals. Careful heating of Ammonium Nitrate (produced in large quantities as a fertiliser) produces N2O and H2O. The two are easy to separate, making the whole process fairly easy. This makes N2O easy to produce as a product, and fairly cheap – so other options requiring more effort have a disadvantage.
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