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Comment by adrianco | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the other Boars Head plants also have issues. Avoid the entire brand? What brands have better hygiene?

I always thought Boars Head _was_ the premium brand.

There's a German proverb that goes like "a butcher will only eat sausage he has made himself". Now you know the background.

Pretty scary how many people get fooled by "premium" branding. Think about what made you think that Boars Head was "premium". Was there any evidence that their meats were higher than average quality, that didn't ultimately come from the company itself? Or was it all their product positioning, price, what stores they were found in and so on (in other words, Marketing).

Compared to other brands available in the supermarket, my family finds that Boar's Head deli meats consistently taste better. There is something "cheap" that I find hard to quantify in the taste of generic grocery branded deli meats.

I'm not educated enough to know what the difference is here, but I don't think the fact that Boar's Head costs more is entirely a marketing device.

To my unsophisticated palate, Boar's Head tastes like it has less filler. Will never purchase their product ever again. The findings were so egregious, it makes my blood boil.

> There is something "cheap" that I find hard to quantify in the taste of generic grocery branded deli meats.

They tend to be watery and under seasoned. I can only assume it’s to make them as inoffensive as possible to accommodate the widest possible audience - but there’s no character to cheap deli meat, no striking taste.

Watery, yes, that's definitely a component of it!

Not to discount your experience, but taste is so context sensitive and subjective that just believing that you're consuming a higher quality product is often enough to make it "taste better". There's a great Penn & Teller's Bullshit episode that illustrates this phenomenon for fancy water[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2qydjVbLJk

Yup, that's completely true. But as somebody who typically prefers to buy "cheap" brands, and is usually completely satisfied by them, the fact that I experience such a wide gulf between Boar's Head and other brands makes me think it's not a marketing mind trick.

Ryan - You aren't wrong, but I'd note that in my local grocery stores, it's generic brands and your Smithfield / Oscar Mayer / Hormel in the cold case. You find Boar's Head at the in-store deli, sliced to order, and priced higher. So the illusion of premium here extends beyond marketing dress.

I honestly thought Boars Head tasted better and offered more variety than other brands, but then again I never did a blind taste test. It could have all been affected by their marketing. They do a LOT to separate their products from other deli meat - even down to having separate displays and even cooler units.

Did you ever try the previous brands available at your grocer before Boars Head cornered the market? For my local grocers it was an immediate reduction in variety, increase in price and equal-to-worse quality. Nothing about that move was better for the customer.

Where I live, both of the two major supermarket chains (Publix x 3, Kroger x 3) with stores within an epsilon of my house feature Boar's Head next to their house brands. Other than the odd Food Depot there are no other grocery corp brands within probably 25 miles.

I have historically frequently bought Boar's Head meats from the deli counter because I can get them sliced prosciutto thin and they have the texture to support that. And the overall flavor experience when buried in a creatively built sandwich is "not terrible". Absolutely revolting when compared directly against handmade pastrami, ham, corned beef etc., but not bad in a sandwich.

However: in the last year I have noticed Boarshead moving more of their cured charcuterie meats into "nitrate free", which is a lie, they use celery instead, but of course that degrades the texture and flavor a bit.

So now I just buy the house brand meats when I'm slumming, and make my own pastrami, ham, and corned beef from time to time. For two olds a 5lb batch of cured meat is a lot. Like 6-12 months. But homemade charcuterie is so astoundingly good.

So no, I don't consider Boar's Head a premium brand. At least, not anymore. I smell enshittification at work.

Also, everybody should have the chance to try out real charcuterie.

Any tips on how to get started?

It is expensive to go blind in on buying artisanal charcuterie without knowing how to optimize for what you want. Kinda like California cheese. Good, but... $30/lb for cheddar?

I have eaten at restaurants that have "charcuterie boards" but if they're reasonable in price... you get what you pay for. An easy out is to put "prosciutto" on the board as the prize. Quotes because there's orders of magnitudes difference in price and flavor quality across "prosciutto" analogues.

My recommendation is, if you are at all adventurous in the kitchen, is to buy a copy of Michael Ruhlman & Brian Polcyn's "Charcuterie", and just start making stuff that you think looks interesting. I have had quite few dinners where I contributed stuff out of that book and people raved. Nothing special about me, I just followed the recipes. It's an extraordinary cookbook. The vegetarian rilletes are great but I've had people swoon over the duck rilletes that started with me and a dusty farm and a couple of ducks (still quacking). (The book assumes you have duck parts, not live ducks.)

In the olden tymes I would say drop me a line if you needed help/more advice but in this weird world that doesn't seems to work anymore.

Thank you for the info. I’ll definitely check out the book especially since I only have duck parts and not live ducks.

From this, and linked articles on New York Times, the suggestion is laxed food safety standards are endemic across the entire processed food industry.

It requires engagement from the employees...a culture. On this, everyone is failing. Our leaders have contorted and conflicting allegiances. Their minds are filled with numbers swelling and cash multiplying. The focus is not on delivering value for all stakeholders.

And how many of the employees feel comfortable blowing the whistle? A chunk of them are bound to be undocumented/illegally in the US, and it seems like those folks are being taken advantage of already because they have so much to lose. Blowing the whistle on some weird looking green slime or leaks or whatever can mean getting deported. Not saying the worker is a bad person for looking the other way, but I am saying that we are doing this to ourselves and these are some really obvious consequences of awful policy.

From 2009: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/health/04meat.html

Slaughterhouses not testing their products for E coli, because it's too expensive. Slaughterhouses blacklisting customers who do their own testing. USDA has no effective regulatory powers to change that.

Single-page archive: <https://archive.is/OKqta>

Goes way before that: https://www.history.com/news/upton-sinclair-the-jungle-us-fo...

If I remember my US History USDA was a direct response to The Jungle. Society at the time was appalled, and demanded govt action.

Similar to the response to Silent Spring and the standing up of EPA.

I’ll admit, if arguments about nitrates being carcinogenic aren’t a convincing reason to avoid processed meat, this might just be one.

I avoid pork entirely. The business is outrageously cruel and dirty even by industrial farming standards.

What does pork specifically have to do with this? BH supplies all sorts of deli meat, not just pork

Dietz & Watson?

I have no idea if they are cleaner or not, but I like their name. :)

You can always just go to a butcher.

In order to do so, one has to have a local butcher who is still in operation.

For many, any such local butchers were driven out of business years ago by the lower cost options in the supermarkets produced by the bulk producers, so the option to "just go to a butcher" is no longer available, at any cost.

I’ve never lived in a city or suburb that doesn’t have one locally. Is it a small town thing?

It's available. Just be prepared for Boars Head price shock. Hell, the butcher probably carries Boars Head.

Butchers are found throughout much of the US, in at least in urban/suburban areas. If your only local food option is WalMart or Dollar Store, you might have a long trip before you, though with a chest freezer, and an icebox and dry ice for the trip itself, meat tends to freeze and preserve well.

I recently ate hot dogs from a local butcher.

Oh my God -- so much better.

Definitely go to a local butcher. You have no idea how much better it is. Comparatively, even the seemingly high quality supermarket Hot dogs taste like water plastic with salt, compared to the delicious meaty spongy texture sausage sticks that are local butcher hot dogs. It's seriously a whole lot better.

18 months ago when I moved cross country to the Atlanta area I was delighted and excited to find out that my house was 10 min from a real butcher! OMG, what I always wanted. Then I talked to the counter man (no butcher on site), bought the meats, and then asked some questions about the curing process, and discovered that the reason the meats tasted like Boar's Head is that butcher shop chain (3 stores) explicitly taste competed against Boar's Head. To the point of being "nitrate-free", oops celery is in the label.

No point paying the premium (I would have paid double for authentic charcuterie), and then I tried to buy a goose during the Holidays and nope, can't do that. Haven't been back.

Keep looking around. In my small town in the middle of nowhere, we have two legit butchers that draw from regional small farms. In any large city I have to assume there are options available. That stated - if there is any way you can participate in a CSA / connect directly with the rancher, I find that the meat is not only superior quality but the prices often are as well. Case in point - my partner recently bought ground beef at Walmart that was $3/pound higher than what I buy from a long-time family friend who raises his beef in an absolutely splendid grass-covered mountain paradise.

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