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Comment by taxicabjesus | Hacker News Reader

> Most of the food comes from about 20% of the farms; the rest are marginal producers. Farming is doing fine; it just doesn't take many people.

Better food is more labor-intensive. The best-tasting eggs I've ever bought were from a grass-fed beef farmer. He'd rotate his cattle through the pastures, and move the chickens to where the cattle had been previously. The chickens would stomp through the cow waste, and eat all the bugs.

Industrial food is tasteless.

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Interestingly, this was probably due chiefly to observer bias. Serious Eats tested whether or not "better" eggs tasted better[1], and came to two conclusions: any perceived improvement in flavor is due exclusively to a darker yolk color and to the belief that the eggs come from a high-quality source.

They did a similar test with mexicoke[2] which produced a similar conclusion. People prefer coke in glass bottles, and they prefer coke that they believe was made with real sugar. When both of those variables are controlled for, they actually prefer HFCS coke.

That said, we never actually eat our food double-blind so even if any perceived difference in flavor is due only to observer bias, it's still important! After all, the whole point is to please the "observer".

This also isn't to discount the difference between low and high quality versions of other foods. Grocery store tomatoes (beefsteak mostly), for example, were bred almost exclusively for shelf life and transportability, with flavor suffering as a result.

[1] http://m.seriouseats.com/2010/08/what-are-the-best-eggs-cage... [2] http://m.drinks.seriouseats.com/2011/09/the-food-lab-drinks-...

My anecdote is actually from 15 years ago... And the eggs were only spectacular the first year I bought from that farmer. He'd expanded his flock of birds - I think the chickens got more grain, less bugs.

Foodies claim that, but in blind testing, McDonalds does quite well.[1]

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/10/23/358324106/don...

I'm not convinced that "study" says much of anything, since they almost certainly edited the video to show the responses they wanted, and besides, they didn't calibrate their scale properly. If you gave a bunch of random people at a food tasting event some pretty crappy food, a bunch of them would probably say that it tasted good just out of courtesy.

A better comparison would be to have a double-blind study with McDonalds and "Artisan" hamburgers, and ask participants which they prefer.

While the video is more of a joke, farther down in the article there is a discussion of using fMRI scanners on brains when the participants are told the wine is a $10 or a $90 bottle (it was the same wine in both cases). Not only did the participants agree the $90 bottle was better, but the brain scans showed increased activities in the pleasure centers. They actually did like the wine better that sounded more expensive.

Id love to see that study repeated a few times. It just seems so very very easy to mess it up as a participant.

Salt, sugar and msg help a lot.

There is a big issue with disclosure and marketing in food production. Big food producers have got wise to the desire of people for good tasting food and now package with the signifiers of craft production. For example a major supermarket in the UK packages it's food as "Rosie Farm" (similar brand) when in fact no such farm exists. The other thing is that industrial production really damages craft production. I had some pigs a few years ago and I had to get them "leasehold" from a producer with the licenses, there is a decent amount of paperwork and some strict rules about feeding and care which are aimed at preventing outbreaks of disease that might get into the industrial facilities (and cause millions of pounds of damage and much animal suffering). I'm all for this in the context of risking causing a cull of 10k animals, but it does mean that small scale producers bear costs to protect large scale producers.

Its great that you can enjoy the "best-tasting eggs" but not everyone can afford the labor intensive organic eggs and grass-fed beef. There are a lot of people struggling to put food on the table as it is.

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