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  • It's Monday night, and you just got home.

  • You're too exhausted to actually cook a decent meal, so you reach into the freezer and pull out a frozen dinner from the back.

  • Your stomach rumbles.

  • You open the box and pull out your lasagna and. Noooo!

  • Freezer burn.

  • Everything's covered in a thick layer of stale-smelling ice crystals, and you know your dinner is ruined.

  • It's a common thing. Any food you leave in the freezer too long is eventually going to end up about as appealing as a dead Tauntaun.

  • Why, you ask?

  • Because it's drying up.

  • See, there are frozen water molecules in your steak, or ice cream, or bag of corn.

  • And over time, in the dry air of your freezer, some of those molecules tend to sublimate -- in other words, they go directly from solid ice to water vapor.

  • You may have noticed this happening to ice cubes, too -- it's why they slowly shrink in their trays when you could've sworn you filled them up all the way.

  • The molecules will often then re-freeze somewhere else, like on the package or as part of the gigantic frost wall that's threatening to slowly take over your entire freezer.

  • But either way, your food isn't getting its moisture back -- it ends up dehydrated and discolored, not to mention puckered and gray and generally unappetizing.

  • You can help delay freezer burn by double-wrapping foods and sealing them in air-tight containers to reduce their exposure to air,

  • but if you leave your food in the freezer long enough, eventually sublimation is going to ruin your dinner plans.

  • The good news -- if you can call it that -- is that frozen foods don't decay, so while freezer-burned food might look and smell terrible, it's probably still safe to eat, technically.

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It's Monday night, and you just got home.

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