PV = nRT

Is any random reader of my blog a chemist and can explain this phenomenon? The last time I made it out to my condo to pick up mail, I noticed the bottle of olive oil I had bought from The Milk Pail Market had squished like a shampoo bottle after being on an airplane. No one had been living there and the bottle hadn't been opened for half a year. I loosened the cap and indeed air sucked in and the bottle popped back into shape.

I thought, well, the air pressure outside hasn't changed, and the temperature hasn't fallen that much, so it seems that some chemical reaction is sucking some of the gas molecules. You normally don't notice this because olive oil or cooking oil isn't normally stored in flimsy plastic bottles left alone for half a year. What's the chemical equation for oil going rancid? Yeah, so this is what I think about during my twenty minutes of functional time per day.

By the way, The Milk Pail has very good olive oil. And very good asparagus, especially asparagus tips, in asparagus season, which is coming up in April. I can't comment on much else since I only went there a few times, but it's very convenient to do your shopping there right before DL rehearsal. It's a good place to get inexpensive gourmet produce and cheese.