My extensive but not blinded at all testing suggests that cheapest brands of supermarket food usually taste far worse than more expensive brands, and quite a number of times fell below my edibility threshold.
My theory is this: it’s cheaper to produce bad-tasting food than well-tasting food—and then you can use market segmentation—poor people who cannot afford more expensive food will buy this, while majority of people will buy better tasting and more expensive food. Two price points earn you more money, and as better tasting food is more expensive to make competition cannot undercut you.
One thing I cannot explain is that this difference applies only to some kinds of food—cheap meat is really vile, but for example cheap eggs taste the same as expensive organic eggs, tea price has little to do with its taste, not to mention things like salt and sugar which simply have to taste the same by laws of chemistry.
You can buy fancy salts (mined from different places—there’s a lot of pink Tibetan salt around) these days. I’m not interested enough in salt to explore them, so I have no opinion about the taste.
I’ve found that the cheap eggs ($1/dozen) leave me feeling a little off if I eat them a couple of days in a row, but organic free range ($3.50 or more/dozen) don’t.
My extensive but not blinded at all testing suggests that cheapest brands of supermarket food usually taste far worse than more expensive brands, and quite a number of times fell below my edibility threshold.
My theory is this: it’s cheaper to produce bad-tasting food than well-tasting food—and then you can use market segmentation—poor people who cannot afford more expensive food will buy this, while majority of people will buy better tasting and more expensive food. Two price points earn you more money, and as better tasting food is more expensive to make competition cannot undercut you.
One thing I cannot explain is that this difference applies only to some kinds of food—cheap meat is really vile, but for example cheap eggs taste the same as expensive organic eggs, tea price has little to do with its taste, not to mention things like salt and sugar which simply have to taste the same by laws of chemistry.
You can buy fancy salts (mined from different places—there’s a lot of pink Tibetan salt around) these days. I’m not interested enough in salt to explore them, so I have no opinion about the taste.
I’ve found that the cheap eggs ($1/dozen) leave me feeling a little off if I eat them a couple of days in a row, but organic free range ($3.50 or more/dozen) don’t.