Comment by didericis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by didericis | Hacker News Reader

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But if ordering on Amazon, as a paying customer, I would at least want to know up front if I'm buying something that came out of the trash, and make my own decision on if I wanted to buy it or not.

I agree, but let me play Devil's advocate a moment.

I went to a gin distillery on vacation a couple months ago. It was well known, well respected, sold internationally, etc. I'm not really into gin, but I thought what they gave us tasted pretty great. It was well packaged, their physical location was in a nice spot and had a well decorated, cool little area where they went over the history, their employees all seemed well educated and happy to be there, etc.

When we got to look at the distillation process, we went into a very small, narrow looking hallway with all the equipment and got to see the gin coming out into a big, pretty unceremonious looking plastic bucket.

Their distillation equipment was expensive, everything was very clean, and it seemed like this was just their process. I didn't really see anything wrong with it.

But, if at the point of sale, someone had a picture of the gin going into that plastic bucket and let everyone know that this was a part of their process, I think fewer people would buy it. And for no good reason. The gin was great, everything was clean, and I'm sure cleaning and maintaining that setup would be easier to deal with than some sort of automatic bottling machinery.

Although most people think knowing where a product came from is good information (and it is if you have a good understanding of the context/what to compare it to), people have a tendency to be irrationally averted by things that don't really have any bearing on the product. I'd argue a product being "new" vs "warehoused" vs "trashed" is one of them. If the product is in the same shape, it shouldn't really matter if it was on the front and center shelf, in the back of a warehouse, or in a dumpster. It's the same product. Emphasizing where it comes from can cause people to irrationally avoid it and have it go to waste when it's perfectly fine.

Those plastic buckets are ubiquitous in the food industry, but are rarely shown. One company showing the buckets would doubtlessly impact their sales, but what if all companies showed their buckets? Buckets would probably then be perceived by consumers in a more accurate light and probably would not suppress sales nearly as much.

And hence the overall education level, which is what all this is about, would go up. Which is always the answer to the problem. What we have here is a lack of education.

Tours of farms and food factories are great field trips for school kids, but unfortunately I think that possibility is probably regional.

Haha. You and I have a different view of education.

I'm not sure what regions you are thinking about. Most of the US population lives in a place where visits to either farms or food factories are quite tenable. Agricultural extension agencies like 4-H (https://4-h.org/) remain quite willing to take poor kids from inner city New York on field trips out to farms in Connecticut, New Jersey, and the like.

Great points. Related note: studies show (citation needed, sorry), people consistently perceive wine as better-tasting if they believe it's more expensive.

Wasn't there also a study that showed people perceived wine to taste better when it was poured by an Italian waiter compared to an Asian waiter?

I tried tasting really old, really expensive wine a little while ago. I can't say I find it very different from new and cheap wine (certainly not better-tasting)...

Many years ago I had a 1997 Lafite, which was an excellent year from an excellent vintner, one of the premier grand crus. It wasn't quite as trendy yet and I paid about $500 for the bottle at a restaurant. I reckon it tasted better than a $30 bottle, but certainly not >15 times better.

On the other hand, the Château d'Yquem sauterne I spent $750 on (for the little baby sauterne bottle) made me feel like I was getting my full money's worth. But that's not something I'd want to drink regularly.

And no I'm not a high roller who drinks these wines all the time, in fact I haven't in well over a decade. It was a fairly transparent, but successful, status play. Now I stick to highly rated $15-30 a bottle table wines because, in the USA, that's the sweet spot and I'm not interested in spending 10 times as much for a wine that's 20% better.

That's exactly it,gourmet foods in general hold a very nonlinear price premium for that small marginal taste increment. Those increments never match the dollar increments.

Aside: Contract consumable manufacturing is how most packaged food is made in the US. Essentially, things like packaged cookies, that new craft beer, or frozen enchiladas are all made in the exact same place with the exact same equipment, even brand name, just a different recipe. These places tend to be very tightly controlled in terms of sterility, tastes, particulate matter, mold, ingredient source, etc. Most of those boxes from those central shelves in your Safeway are all from the same handful of places.

They say about brewing beer it's 90% cleaning and 10% record keeping.

I'd wager it's even more extreme with a distillery, since, in addition to a bad tasting batch of gin, people may actually be killed if the output is a faulty product, containing too much methanol.

You would have to royally fuck up for that to happen. Even if you didn't cut the heads and tails, the amount of methanol produced by distilling is relatively low.

Plus it tastes horrible.

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