Rising costs mean food companies are making snacks, sodas taste worse
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The new ingredients are typically abysmal for your health by comparison. Good luck finding a chip not fried in safflower or sunflower oil in 2023. Seriously, go try right now. I am not a seed oil guy, but the statistical prevalence of these oils might have some impact on public health and the fact that no alternatives appear to exist (outside of boutique settings) does kill off some of my bullshit canaries.
Food companies can't screw with the raw ingredients too much. It's a challenge to find certain things like actual chicken broth and sometimes I wonder if the onions are getting weaker, but you can more or less maintain the same quality you'd expect if you cook your own food.
If you are time-sensitive, then cook more at a once to amortize your time investment. Your freezer isn't just for holding the crap that comes frozen at the grocery store. You can accumulate weeks worth of high-quality DIY rations with proper discipline. Think about how big a pot you could actually put on your stove. How many cubic feet is your oven? Do you have the ability to run a propane burner outside? You can make a month's worth of lunch in 3 hours. Think about the economics of that at scale. Sure, you would spend a solid week cooking, but then you would have several amazing meal options to choose from for an entire financial quarter.
Every now and then I'll sample a bit of trash like Oreos or Cheezits at someone else's house, but every time I decide I never want to buy these products again. If I really get a strong hankering for some cheezits, I'll bake my own. That's also how I keep myself in check on fitness - If I don't want to cook it, then I am not going to eat it.
Thanks for being greed-driven entities of shit, Corps! My waistline and partner thank you!
For example, your comments make no effort to distinguish saturated fat from unsaturated fat. Unsaturated fats are fine. Saturated fats have a mountain of evidence converging on their negative health impact.
When I see someone saying that butter is somehow better, I like to see what evidence they've used to reach the inference despite all the evidence against that position.
Unfortunately the position usually just cashes out into "but I like butter".
This is a project that isn't quite ready for prime time, but it is turning up some options: https://labelferret.com/?search=chip+-%22sunflower%22+%2Bpot...
But your point still stands - the impossibility of finding food with ingredients I wanted to eat led to me creating Label Ferret.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/body-armor-blocked-ports-...
Do you, or others, have any advice or references for this? I cook at home, and I generally enjoy it, but I'm not very good with the meal planning part and knowing what will save, for how long, and how to store it, so I'm mostly making meals a day or two at a time and at the grocery every week.
I may not be able to get away from that entirely, but I'd love to scale the daily food prep back and limit the weekly shopping to only the stuff I need fresh.
Meal prep doesn't necessarily mean 100% completed ahead of time either. For me, I have a perpetual frozen store of taco meat (1 frozen portion per meal), but I still have to toast up the shells fresh each time and occasionally cycle in a new bowl of beans, which lasts 2-3 days per in the fridge. Frozen portions you can bet on for ~90 days minimum in a typical consumer side-by-side before freezer burn and defrost cycle starts to take hold. If you have a proper deep freeze arrangement, many things will last indefinitely.
Now I'm fantasizing about taco starter that works just like sourdough starter. Take out a couple scoops for dinner, add back a few oz of your meat choice and a shake of seasoning, repeat.
... Wait, when were commercial chips _not_ fried in one of these (or possibly rapeseed or peanut oil)? Also, what's wrong with sunflower oil?
> the fact that no alternatives appear to exist
What were you expecting? Olive oil and lard would both have smoke points too low to be practical, I would think. Like, what do you think they should be using?
Potato chips and french fries predate industrial seed oils.
Low quality and high price is the exact "perfect storm" that's needed to turn back the tide on fast food and the health problems that come with it.
> It's a challenge to find certain things like actual chicken broth
It's also hard to find chicken and pigs that haven't been fed soybean, safflower, or sunflower oils. They eat it, they store it in their fat, then you eat it.
Not that it is any better. Reminds me how we have pork fed with rapeseed here... As something positive, I wonder is that really better or not...
The upshot, I feel great and eliminating corn syrup and whatever else those foods and drinks had has reduced my cravings for sweets by something like 99.5%.
There is absolutely nothing unhealthy about seed oils.
They ruined Cadbury Eggs years ago for me, and now "fun size" snickers too!
That's just one way these products became flavorless, waxy, and generally unpleasant. Of course to combat this more sugar is often added, just to keep people coming back. More broadly though highly processed food is just too salty, too sweet, and often has a background of off-flavors... but it takes time away from them to start noticing it.
Source: eating my kids' leftover Halloween candy
Perhaps the degree to which people's tastebuds are trained on real foods, determines how much skimping on ingredients (in pre-packaged and/or junkfoods) is tolerated there?
Would be nice to see some research on that.
Maybe one day I'll get used to Coke with HFCS instead of cane sugar.
We mostly eat home-cooked meals, but have kids and they want junk from time to time.
And the snacks at Trader Joe's, Sprouts and Costco taste amazing.
Junk is junk, but you can find chips that are less salty, and chocolates that are not overly sweet.
I don't want to give them toooo much credit here but also I have to assume whatever industrial food giant owns all these brands has spent a lot of money on the question of how far they can cut costs on each individual thing without completely destroying the brand.
Not to mention all the processing, packaging, retail & marketing costs.
Buy ingredients rather than ready-to-eat prepackaged foods, and you cut out the bulk of those non-essential costs.
Hazelnut spread was originally invented in response to a shortage of cocoa.
Interesting.
My personal pet peeve is carrageenan in everything. It makes ice cream and cream cheese have an unnaturally smooth texture that's quite off-putting.
It also makes it's price absolute bullshit, since palm oil isn't exactly expensive.
I'd rather eat a jar of palm oil to be honest
People frequently lose their "sweet tooth" as they get older. It's a normal thing for snacks you had as a kid to taste too sweet for you in adulthood.
Any making home made gianduia paste is quite easy - you need a good coverture chocolate, butter, hazelnut nut butter and a dash of vanilla. And it tasted better than everything that Nutella has.
Why not you?
Were they more salty before that?
I suspect Fig Newtons are on this list. Our grocery chain puts out generic versions that taste much better!
Definitely could be my own anecdotal issues though
Other products (Diet Dr. Pepper) are unaffected; I don't know if they share bottlers.
OP should def complain to corporate, something in their process is FUBAR if 1/3rd of the product is damaged. Though being who I am, I'd assume that has more to do with the handling of the produce by/at Walmart.
All cans (and it's always cans, not bottles) are visibly intact. Sometimes the can itself is "squishy" due to lack of gas. Other times they barely foam when poured. It's usually potable but wildly inconsistent in taste.
Most are fine, but it's gotten too expensive to keep overlooking duds.
I've noticed this in a lot of fields. Like small things stop being good. Like opening bags of spaghetti is impossible on many brands without scissors or having pasta everywhere after it bursts. When pulling the string on the foil around a cookie "foil cylinder" the string is misaligned with the cutout, so it doesn't work. Etc.
I think the underlying issue is attrition. Workers have no time to get competent. Or the toxic management style of "not caring" is taking its toll and the senior engineers got fed up and quit instead of fighting management to make things good.
That would be ~all of them, I would think. The whole point of having loads of bottlers is to avoid having to haul the stuff very long distances; I think they'll normally just supply from whichever is closest.