I don’t eat much packaged food but can’t resist the esoteric and unknown. I’m the guy who stocks the cupboard with random condiments and unrecognisable dried crustaceans with the intention of learning how to cook them rather than having a pre-existing recipe in mind. I try cans of soft drinks covered in non-English languages, the ones flavoured with beans, mandarins or grass. Coupled with my absolute aversion to discarding food, it makes for some strange eating on a regular basis.

My compulsion to try strange packaged food is a bad habit but a relatively cheap and socially acceptable one to sustain. Even though I do go through phases of seeking out new mapo tofu sauce or dried squid (delicious when grilled then pounded), I haven’t really developed any packaged food vices ... bar one.

My one packaged food vice is jackfruit chips.

Jackfruit is a gigantic tropical fruit about the size of a sack full of watermelons. A large one can grow to 40kg; although more commonly they’re picked when they’re around the size of a single watermelon. The skin of the fruit is a yellowish green and is armoured with thousands of small conical spikes like a less-defensive durian. The unopened ripe fruit emits a musky, complex aroma that is sometimes likened to decaying onions. Within lies hundreds of pale yellow bulbs of edible fruit covering a large seed.

As a foodstuff they’re possibly the most versatile fruit on earth. The seeds can be boiled or baked, the 'bulbs' of yellow fruit eaten raw, cooked, dried or pickled. It turns up in curries where their texture stays meaty, blended into drinks, in salads, ice-cream and other desserts, battered and fried at roadside vendors. It’s eaten anywhere that has tropical weather. The flavour is caramel, banana and the rotting tropical smell that hits you as soon as you step off a plane anywhere equatorial.

The jackfruit chips are made by frying jackfruit or possibly frying them under pressure, which is the same method used to make Kentucky Fried Chicken. Do not try pressure frying at home; you will kill yourself or your loved ones in an explosive oil fire. Home pressure cookers are not suitable for this purpose. Deep frying the jackfruit turns the taxi-yellow edible part into a snack that is incomparably crunchy. There is no other textural equivalent to their unremitting crispness. The rotting notes are toned down and the chips take on a deep honey flavour.

I think part of my love for them is where you find them: at every single bus stop in South East Asia. Even when the roadside food is looking otherwise stale or flyblown, the chips will be as fresh as the day that they came from the factory. They're that beacon of laziness and absence of risk that defines a packaged food. In Australia, they're available at most South East Asian grocers.