(A.K.A. Non-Original Rants)
–Co-opting good stuff from all over the ‘Net and maybe some original thoughts—ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒE
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At the grocery store the other day and B was buying some corn chips.
I asked the guy to be careful with the bag because we wanted the chips to be mainly intact.
He laughed and said, “I’ll be careful, but look on the bright side if something happens. At least you’ll have more chips.”
Ya know, he’s right and it’s all in how you look at things.
LOL. FWIW those of us that are / were “Packagin Men” know the story behind the seemingly EMPTY… or HALF FULL bags of chips.
It’s two-fold actually. Firstly, oils used to cook chips are prone to absorbing oxygen. A process that’s called “Rancidity”…. Mind, that is the OTHER definition of the word.
The result of that info is that most chip makers flush and INFLATE the bags with? NITROGEN. Our favorite, most common of the Noble Gasses.
The INFLATION (which is what makes the bags seem short-filled) is so that the BAGS will provide structural integrity around the product through shipping. Imagine if you didn’t have that fully inflated, cushiony bag around your chips and they were packed flat, stacked in a shipper, shippers stacked on pallets… and driven over the road a thousand miles?
Yeah…. Potato DUST is what you would have., OR… to the original point of the posting… a LOT of “Micro-Chips”!!!!
Gotta hand it to the guy… and accurate observation.
Nitrogen is indeed used to flush out oxygen, which when present is part of the chemical reaction that causes rancidity. And it’s an excellent cushion in a sealed bag.
What nitrogen is NOT, however, is a noble gas. The noble gases (so called because they are generally not reactive, and thus the other term for them: inert) are helium, neon, krypton, argon, xenon, etc. That lack of reactivity is not strictly observed: a sufficiently reactive element (eg fluorine) under sufficiently aggressive conditions do form compound with some nominally inert gasses.
Nitrogen, contrariwise, is quite reactive and amongst other things makes a variety of compounds with quite ordinary elements like oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon as well as many others.
@Doc… Senior moment,… I meant INERT gas. Thanks for pointing that out.
Though NEON chips might be kinda cool, no?
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