obviously there’s also a lot of consumer demand, but I wonder how much of the trend towards food with less complicated ingredients being marketed with that as a major pro is because it’s more technically impressive to accomplish (my layman understanding is that the easy way to make viable commercial food is to just toss in a bunch of preservatives and emulsifiers and stabilizers and you have a lot of margin for error, and avoiding them requires a lot of creativity in leveraging the specific properties of the food you’re dealing with / modifying the packaging strategy to create a more elegant solution)
Not sure whether this is related, but I find many food recipes needlessly complicated. Like, I can sometimes remove 1⁄3 of the ingredients, and the result still tastes the same to me. Which of course makes me wonder, why were those ingredients included in the first place? Possible explanations:
my senses suck, those versions actually taste differently
my “sense memory” sucks and I can’t really compare the taste of one meal yesterday with the taste of another meal today, but I could if I had them side by side
the extra ingredients were there for reasons unrelated to taste (e.g. for easier digestion)
maybe some people prefer the version of meal with lots of X, and other people prefer the version of meal without X, but they didn’t have the courage to remove X completely, so they only left tiny amounts that have no impact on the result
Or maybe it’s some kind of signaling? Like “look how great cook I am, I can make a meal with 99 ingredients, even if a meal with 9 ingredients would taste exactly the same”?
Maybe the techniques of food preservation have improved, so that some preservatives are no longer needed. But no one bothered removing them from the recipe (they are probably cheap) until they realized they could make a marketing move out of it.
my guess is sth like 1; I think some people are a lot more sensitive to some flavors than others. also the extent to which you pay attention can affect flavor a lot. and fwiw I frequently notice that some restaurants make the same dish a lot better than other restaurants, and the major ingredients must be about the same (or at least the quality/quantity difference is small enough that it’s not the first thing I noticed), so it must be in the minor ingredients. but often my friends won’t notice a big difference and conversely I don’t notice a big difference in the foods they draw strong distinctions for
(there are some really subtle flavors that I like, that are very subtle and which most places get wrong in ways that I can’t put my finger on—e.g hainan chicken rice, gyu-don, edmonton style donair)
The boring hypothesis neither has to do with growing demand or signaling impressiveness, but with society generally getting better at food logistics over time, so being able to ship more fancy stuff for more reasonable prices.
Indeed, the price premium of organic foods has been shrinking. I tried to find price data for processed/non-processed foods, but couldn’t find any, so this is what we have for now.
obviously there’s also a lot of consumer demand, but I wonder how much of the trend towards food with less complicated ingredients being marketed with that as a major pro is because it’s more technically impressive to accomplish (my layman understanding is that the easy way to make viable commercial food is to just toss in a bunch of preservatives and emulsifiers and stabilizers and you have a lot of margin for error, and avoiding them requires a lot of creativity in leveraging the specific properties of the food you’re dealing with / modifying the packaging strategy to create a more elegant solution)
Not sure whether this is related, but I find many food recipes needlessly complicated. Like, I can sometimes remove 1⁄3 of the ingredients, and the result still tastes the same to me. Which of course makes me wonder, why were those ingredients included in the first place? Possible explanations:
my senses suck, those versions actually taste differently
my “sense memory” sucks and I can’t really compare the taste of one meal yesterday with the taste of another meal today, but I could if I had them side by side
the extra ingredients were there for reasons unrelated to taste (e.g. for easier digestion)
maybe some people prefer the version of meal with lots of X, and other people prefer the version of meal without X, but they didn’t have the courage to remove X completely, so they only left tiny amounts that have no impact on the result
Or maybe it’s some kind of signaling? Like “look how great cook I am, I can make a meal with 99 ingredients, even if a meal with 9 ingredients would taste exactly the same”?
Maybe the techniques of food preservation have improved, so that some preservatives are no longer needed. But no one bothered removing them from the recipe (they are probably cheap) until they realized they could make a marketing move out of it.
my guess is sth like 1; I think some people are a lot more sensitive to some flavors than others. also the extent to which you pay attention can affect flavor a lot. and fwiw I frequently notice that some restaurants make the same dish a lot better than other restaurants, and the major ingredients must be about the same (or at least the quality/quantity difference is small enough that it’s not the first thing I noticed), so it must be in the minor ingredients. but often my friends won’t notice a big difference and conversely I don’t notice a big difference in the foods they draw strong distinctions for
(there are some really subtle flavors that I like, that are very subtle and which most places get wrong in ways that I can’t put my finger on—e.g hainan chicken rice, gyu-don, edmonton style donair)
The boring hypothesis neither has to do with growing demand or signaling impressiveness, but with society generally getting better at food logistics over time, so being able to ship more fancy stuff for more reasonable prices.
Indeed, the price premium of organic foods has been shrinking. I tried to find price data for processed/non-processed foods, but couldn’t find any, so this is what we have for now.