Its almost Halloween and I have always wondered why when you have an assortment of candies in a bowl together they taste like they have absorbed the nearby candys flavor.
For example I just ate a kit kat sitting in a bowl with twizzlers. I can taste the cherry flavoring of the twizzler in the chocolate of the kit kat.
How is this possible? I thought it had something to do with smell, but when i smell the kit kat wrapper it just smells like chocolate. How can flavors fuse through 2 layers of packaging it makes no sense to me.
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If you can smell something, it’s because that thing is putting some of its smelly molecules out into the air (where they can get into your nose and activate your smell receptors). Food manufacturers *want* their food to be smelly because smell is a huge part of the experience of eating (try pinching your nose when you eat a Twizzler – it’s just not the same). So a *lot* of work is put into making sure those molecules will fly off the candy bar, even adding volatile compounds for that purpose alone.
Candy wrappers are made from a variety of different plastics, and occasionally aluminum and paper, but most of these plastics are very permeable, meaning they allow molecules to go through them. They might block light, and look solid, but really they’re more similar to a sponge or coffee filter than to solid metal.
Polypropylene, for example, is very common in candy wrappers and very permeable by organic molecules and ketones, which are responsible for smells and tastes. Given enough time, they’ll mingle and you’ll get flavor absorption.
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