The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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8:52am on Tuesday, 21st November, 2023:
Anecdote
While conducting a purge of the contents of our kitchen cupboards over the weekend, my wife retrieved the box of microwave popcorn that's been sitting around patiently waiting for its day to come. As for how long it's been sitting there, well the "best before" date was 2011, so probably quite a while.
Does microwave popcorn really go off, though? It's just popcorn kernels in a bag, which is itself protected from the outside world by a second bag made of plastic. What are the chances that the kernels have fallen victim to a bacterial or fungal infection? Pretty low. Kernels can survive in the wild for decades, probably.
We decided to deploy the microwave and make ourselves some popcorn.
To be fair, we did make some popcorn. It looked just like regular popcorn. The kernels had not been affected by their twelve-year hibernation in our cupboard one iota.
The bag, on the other hand, was not at all happy to have been brought back from death. It turns out that there's not just popcorn in those bags, there's cooking oil. Give it a dozen years and it's absorbed into the paper. Microwave it and all kinds of chemicals new to science are released in huge clouds of foul-smelling vapour that can flood a kitchen in seconds and a house in minutes. It took a day for the house to clear, two days for the kitchen to clear and the microwave itself still smells of the stuff.
The perfectly-popped popcorn went into the food recycling bin.
My wife decided not to risk the decade-old cocoa that she had to attack with a fork to turn from concrete into forked concrete.
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