this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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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.