If you put spagetti sauce in a tupperware container, the tupperware is seemingly stained orange forever. What is actually happening to cause this? Does the plastic container absorb molecules from the spaghetti sauce which is forever trapped in the polymer chains?
In: Chemistry
This is caused by tomatoes and fat. Plastic is in the most basic sense just crystallized oil (hydrocarbon). So it’s susceptible to staining from oil-based foods.
Tomatoes are colored red through lycopene. This is a red/orange oil (hydrocarbon.) When you cook foods in plastic The pores of the plastic open up a bit and are more likely to take on elements of your food. Like atracks like so the lycopene attaches to the structure of the container It literally becomes part of the container That’s why you can’t get that stain out.
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