If this helps Asia get off its addiction to wrapping absolutely everything in about 5 layers of plastic, there may be an upside here.
(For the uninitiated: if you buy a packet of biscuits in Europe, you’ll get a cardboard box, maybe one interior wrap of plastic, and the biscuits. The same packet of biscuits in China will see every two biscuits wrapped in its own sealed plastic bag. Each of those will have a small plastic bag of “oxygen remover” for God knows what reason. The bags will all then be carefully nestled into a thick plastic tray. The whole lot will then get another layer of plastic wrapped around it. Everything is like this there (and most of South East Asia in my experience) - it’s genuinely nuts.)
It’s the humidity in tropical regions. If it’s not sealed properly, your biscuits will absorb the moisture in the air and turn soft. They’re not oxygen removers, they’re water vapour removers and it’s there for a reason. It’s not because we hate the environment or we’re nuts. Hell, English as far as I know doesn’t even have a word in common usage for it. In Hokkien we have a word “lau hong” which literally means to lose air as in lose the crispness of the biscuit.
Hell, there’s also so many ants here that when I was in Finland, I was shocked that people leave biscuits as is without putting them into containers. If you do it in South East Asia, your biscuits would have become an ant colony in hours.
I’m not sure if that is accurate, as Brazil is also a high humidity tropical country, which does not have all those plastic layers in their products and their plastic is way slimmer than those I’ve seen used in Asia.
As far as I am aware, they also have one of the biggest and most diverse ant populations, yet their biscuits are as crispy as any without all the extra plastic
They’re labelled “oxygen removers”, so I rather assume that’s what they’re for. Dessicant is something else entirely.
I own a property & live part of the year in Thailand, and have worked in China for a decade - I don’t need grandma to teach me to suck ants. Amazingly, in all that time I’ve discovered that a single layer of plastic and a bag clip is, in fact, entirely adequate to keep both humidity and ants out of food.
If this helps Asia get off its addiction to wrapping absolutely everything in about 5 layers of plastic, there may be an upside here.
(For the uninitiated: if you buy a packet of biscuits in Europe, you’ll get a cardboard box, maybe one interior wrap of plastic, and the biscuits. The same packet of biscuits in China will see every two biscuits wrapped in its own sealed plastic bag. Each of those will have a small plastic bag of “oxygen remover” for God knows what reason. The bags will all then be carefully nestled into a thick plastic tray. The whole lot will then get another layer of plastic wrapped around it. Everything is like this there (and most of South East Asia in my experience) - it’s genuinely nuts.)
It’s the humidity in tropical regions. If it’s not sealed properly, your biscuits will absorb the moisture in the air and turn soft. They’re not oxygen removers, they’re water vapour removers and it’s there for a reason. It’s not because we hate the environment or we’re nuts. Hell, English as far as I know doesn’t even have a word in common usage for it. In Hokkien we have a word “lau hong” which literally means to lose air as in lose the crispness of the biscuit.
Hell, there’s also so many ants here that when I was in Finland, I was shocked that people leave biscuits as is without putting them into containers. If you do it in South East Asia, your biscuits would have become an ant colony in hours.
Staling. One L.
In reality, it’s “gone soggy from humidity”. The plastic layer ‘preserves crispness’.
I’m not sure if that is accurate, as Brazil is also a high humidity tropical country, which does not have all those plastic layers in their products and their plastic is way slimmer than those I’ve seen used in Asia.
As far as I am aware, they also have one of the biggest and most diverse ant populations, yet their biscuits are as crispy as any without all the extra plastic
They’re labelled “oxygen removers”, so I rather assume that’s what they’re for. Dessicant is something else entirely.
I own a property & live part of the year in Thailand, and have worked in China for a decade - I don’t need grandma to teach me to suck ants. Amazingly, in all that time I’ve discovered that a single layer of plastic and a bag clip is, in fact, entirely adequate to keep both humidity and ants out of food.