What Big Food Did to Ice Cream | Hacker News Reader

What Big Food Did to Ice Cream

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50 pointsspeckx68 comments

> Perfect for feeding 20 hungry four-year-olds who wouldn’t know the difference. But few adults were fooled

Setting aside the fact this was written by an LLM, I think this line of thought (which wasn't invented by the LLM, I mean it's something people actually think) is the very origin of this problem.

The 4 year olds don't know better, but it's because they are learning what ice cream (and everything) is. And if you're feeding them shit, that will set their base level for ice cream for the rest of their life.

IMO young kids should be given quality products as much as possible exactly because they don't know the difference. Unless you want them to grow into adults that still don't know the difference.

because they are learning what ice cream (and everything) is

If you feed a 4-year-old "frozen dairy dessert" and call it "ice cream", then you're technically also legally wrong.

Far be it from me to defend Big Food, but let's play devil's advocate for a moment, just facts with no LLM slop.

Hyperbole aside they created a new product category which has less milk fat, and adds more air and gum/gelatin.

It tastes similar to ice cream at half the calories, not so insignificant in a world where obesity is the #1 public health crisis.

Their labeling is technically compliant with regulations but converting classic ice cream brands into these "ice milk desserts" was unpleasantly sneaky of them.

Are we 100% sure all the consumers eating these desserts have been fooled? We're sure no one's choosing them because they're lower calorie, lower fat, lower price, tastes good enough etc.?

If it tasted good, a dessert that's 99% air and ice would be a public health win would it not? That's pretty much what bingsu is, I don't care for it, but many people love it.

Haagen-Dazs is still there on the shelves and still good ice cream.

I don't know, I think the outrage is a little overblown. "Tastes better but is twice the calories" is a very significant consumer choice. I bet many will say they want the "real" stuff, but when it comes to purchasing decisions, buy the "fake" stuff more often.

There may be better windmills to tilt at than lecturing people on which type of milk dessert is the right choice. The brand shenanigans aside maybe we are in a better position having both options on the shelves.

>> at half the calories, not so insignificant in a world where obesity is the #1 public health crisis

It's not so simple. The problem is that fat calories and whole milk/cream make you feel fuller, leading to decrease in eating, leading to decrease in calories

While air with sugar – especially corn syrup – doesn't make you feel full as much, leading to overeating later. High blood sugar isn't good, so your body is mostly working to turn it into stored fat as fast as possible. After it's done converting, you will feel hungry again.

Fat inside your stomach on the other side is metabolizing slowly, and it's products are mostly spend on whatever you do.

People that count their calories could make an informed choice about their calories intake and just deal with additional hunger. People that rely on hunger and individual understanding of their bodies could misjudge easily when fat is switched to gum and syrup.

Problem isn’t with “tastes better and at half the calories”, no, it is actually for providing filler when the initial sell was using genuine simple ingredients.

The software analog is like a certain Italian company that buys SaaS companies and waters down the initial product, firing then very ingredients that made the product good in the first place in an effort to:

- extract maximum profit

- ride the coattails of trust a brand has garnered.

I won’t speak to the odd coincidence of their name and its relation to ice cream.

Some people aren’t buying icecream to lose weight. That’s not their purpose. It’s to indulge and enjoy artisanal foods where the purpose was high quality not high margins.

Of course I don’t buy that icecream much anymore - I just buy Andies custard by the quart.

> Problem isn’t with “tastes better and at half the calories”, no, it is actually for providing filler when the initial sell was using genuine simple ingredients.

So "ice cream desserts" use fake gelatin?

I don't think that's sufficient. You need to be there and tell them why the other one is shit. I love pistachio gelato (artisanal), and it's my easy way to spot if the gelato being served is good or sucks.

I give it to my daughter, so she tried many different pistachios (good and bad), but she still can't properly distinguish between the two (sometimes the difference is very big).

Me and a bunch of my friends have a clear memory, around the first year of high school, where we switched to "kids eating" to "adult eating", so I thought maybe the senses are not refined enough to use all that extra flavor details

I do that with my daughter and my wife says I'm teaching her to hate everything, emanating bad energy. It is tough to have higher standards than people around you. They're happy, you're the downer.

> You need to be there and tell them why the other one is shit.

Why? Are you sure that the kind that you're eating is not shit?

Because I ate a lot of pistachio gelato and the one she told me "I think it's good" tasted like coffee (reported by multiple family members), so I had to explain her what good pistachio is.

I can totally make mistakes in which one is the best, but identifying which ones are egregiously bad is way easier

You might be surprised, but a lot of people actually like "bad" versions more.

I don't like regular ice-cream it's just too rich for me. I experimented with making aerated (well, nitrogenated) ice-cream myself 20 years ago when I had access to a lab.

Why was this written by a LLM?

It's a general feeling more than a precise diagnosis, and I guess it could also be a human that has internalised LLM style, or a human-written draft that was reworded by an LLM. But it just really feels like LLM writing.

But you wrote that it's a fact? That's not just a "general feeling"?

I wrote that because I wanted to avoid a sterile discussion on whether or not my comment was valid because the article was not written by a human.

As I said, the actual remark I made is independent on whether this article was written by an LLM or not.

It's still pretty obvious to me that it was, but I'm not sure what kind of "proof" you are looking for, you know as well as I do that it can't be proven one way or the other, so who cares?

I do care. Of course I know it can't be proven. But you could know the author,bwhat do I know. I just don't understand why people claim factual knowledge when they don't. It rubs me the wrong way and rightly so.

I dunno. That's a "When did you stop beating your wife" question.

Unless you can show me some sort of "proof" this is LLM writing, it doesn't read that way to me. And I read a lot of obviously LLM-generated content. I'm 100% sure it was cleaned up by an LLM, because I don't see any glaring mistakes (grammar, spelling, article mistmatch, etc.). But it doesn't have that "prompt-> article" AI-slop feel to me. And some of the lines, like the ice cream frog being boiled, are things you'd never have an LLM suggest.

IF you can "prove" otehrwise, I'm all ears (eyes).

That's the smoking gun -- he was absolutely right. It's not ice cream, it's slop!

We have a milk cow. We prep our ice cream from scratch in about 5 minutes: two cups of raw milk, 1/4 cup maple syrup, 1t-1T vanilla, 1/4t salt, and 6-8 raw egg yolks. Blend everything in a quart jar with an immersion blender and pour into a Cuisinart ice cream maker. AFAIK, you literally cannot buy anything close to this good.

As a small farmer, I have nothing good to say about the USDA or FDA. I would rant further, but I’ve kinda given up at this point. I’m selling my farm next year.

> I have nothing good to say about the USDA or FDA.

At least in the context of the article, the requirements for labeling ice cream as such forces some brands to change to "frozen dessert" when they skimp too much on ingredients. It's a small win, but a win nonetheless.

This kind of recipe is wildly irresponsible to actually sell. Raw unpasteurized milk _will_ cause health issues when used in large quantities. Ditto for raw egg yolks.

I lived on a farm during summers as a child, but I will not touch raw milk ever again after getting hospitalized with a bacterial infection from it. And the milk was from our cow, btw.

Egg yolks are safer, especially if you take care to extract them properly. Still not safe enough for mass production.

We test every batch of milk for coliform and aerobic bacteria. I would never consume milk raw otherwise, and I would never recommend others do so either.

And we would never even think about selling it, despite knowing that our milk and eggs are demonstrably safe. My recipe makes one quart, so not sure why you inferred and implied that I am selling it.

You don't... heat it? Egg yolks change their role in ice cream when heated, increasing their emulsifying power and creating a richer ice cream.

An immersion blender like the Vitamix heats as it blends because of high friction, on high settings. I make soup with mine.

https://www.vitamix.com/us/en_us/what-you-can-make/hot-soups

A Vitamix is not an immersion blender; an immersion blender is one you "immerse" in the thing you're blending, i.e., a stick or wand blender.

https://www.seriouseats.com/best-immersion-blenders

Wand blender don't make things hot enough to cook, so OP is indeed using raw eggs in their ice cream. Which is probably fine, it just means their ice cream isn't using a cooked custard base.

OP didn't say they blended until it was cooked to custard. It's a non-trivial step you added.

The institutions are to keep humans alive, not support the egos of farmers

Milk, not cream?

Raw Jersey milk is 25-30% cream. You only need to add cream (back) to store bought milk.

> I’m selling my farm next year.

What will you do for ice cream then?

> I have nothing good to say about the USDA or FDA.

They have saved thousands or millions of US lives. But hey, they've inconvenienced your profit lines, so boo on them.

Why sell the farm? Somebody needs to keep up the fight against Big Agriculture.

3000 words which can be distilled down to 10:

"Cream and egg yolk are expensive; industry tightens its belt."

"industry worked out a way to sell you air at the price of cream and eggs" would be a more accurate distillation. They haven't reduced the quality of the product because the ingredients got expensive; they've reduced the quality because they worked how to sell you less for the same money, which results in more profit.

If the law banned 'frozen dairy dessert' they'd go back to selling the higher quality product, probably at a similar price to the worse product (price elasticity being a thing and all.) The only reason they sell the worse product is because they can, and they can because they hide the fact they're selling half a tub of air.

Or we could break up Unilever, which only requires anti trust enforcement.

But you'll miss out on such priceless gems as "This is the story of the dairy frog, boiled by ever poorer ice creams."

Ignoring the obvious flaws in the writing and the prose, I find it interesting because it’s one of the more obvious examples of enshittification that plagues American culture - often in ways that are so subtle that one might be considered paranoid for trying to recognize them. It lays bare, in a way that any American can understand (most Americans eat and enjoy ice cream) the consequences of the never ending treadmill of corporate greed

We found the prompt, guys!

I think that's extremely ungenerous and misses the point of the article.

The article is specific in the mechanisms by which the industry has changed formulae -- adding air, gums, and stabilizers. It also includes information about who the offending companies are (Unilever). It includes information about how many calories per cup indicate a high quality ice cream, as well as the legally required labeling you can use to recognize not-quite-ice cream.

It also specifically addresses the "cream is expensive" concern, and discusses dairy prices which have fluctuated but not spiked.

No, this is greed and "the customer is a fool who won't notice". The products of capitalism run to a point where there's basically no recourse (short of, I suppose, manufacturing the ice cream yourself) because everything's become one giant megacorp who knows you don't really have much of a choice in brands.

There's a frozen custard shop in my town. They sometimes do silly things like including raw sliced strawberries that just turn into ice shards, but their vanilla and chocolate absolutely beat the pants off anything I can find in the grocery.

how much of this is just trying to optimize the nutrition facts to come across as less unhealthy? the "full of air" version is half the fat and has less sugar. consumers are generally trending in the direction of avoiding these two line items so guess it's a win win for breyers if it's also cheaper to make.

edit: also if i'm looking at the website correctly, it looks like both the "ice cream" version and the "frozen dairy desert" version are the same price ($6.99):

- https://www.fairwaymarket.com/sm/planning/rsid/4000/product/...

I’ve been making ice cream at home for the last few years and I’ll never go back. Store bought is all trash now. If you haven’t had the chance to taste ice cream from a Ninja Creami, you’re missing out!

Just a heads up.

Only Haagen-Dazs Chocolate, Vanilla, Strawberry, and Coffee are no-gums and basic ingredients (i.e. you can understand), their other flavors have all the same crap highlighted in the article.

Aldi's Premium Ice Cream is good less expensive alternative.

We should more liberally flag these LLM generated posts regardless of the topic

As an immigrant I thought for a while now that all ice cream in USA taste like shit, despite my wife saying I'm imagining things... Now I know why.

There's still a few brands, you'll just end up paying through the nose for them.

the brand the author of the article points at as "good" makes me want to vomit, my wife receives a large quantity of it every year from a service provider she works with as a christmas gift and it's my job do melt it and dump it down the drain since nobody in the family can stand it.

I'm open to suggestions!

You can name the brand... Häagen‑Dazs? Graeters?

In any case, why would you melt and drain it? That makes zero sense. You don't have friends who would take it? Or a food bank? Or a local Food Not Bombs?

It's totally fine to not like a brand, zero objections there, but like, why waste it?

I grew up on Breyers, it was the only ice cream my parents bought. I read an article over a decade ago and pointed this out to my parents that the carton said dairy desert after reading a similar article.

We were able to get a refund from the grocery store and Breyers was a completely dead brand in our family when it originally was the only brand they had bought even before I was born.

What happened to them happens often -- quality food brands are bought and the contents changed. You as a consumer have to stay on your toes.

Not getting a LLM vibe from this article, other than I don't see a lot of mistakes. Almost surely cleaned up with AI, but who doen't anymore?

The narrative has enough spikes/detours that it sounds like human thinking to me, not an LLM, which proposes a thesis and then just funnels down to the predictable reiteration of a conclusion.

This reminds me of the similar fight over the term "milk": https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/almond-milk-can-keep...

They ruined it. It used to be Milk, cream, sugar and maybe fruit for flavor, that's it. Now it's garbage.

On the European side of the pond, single packaged industrial ice cream is also gone to shit.

A Magnum or Cornetto used to be a well sized very tasty snack. In Italy the "cucciolone" (an ice cream sandwich) was literally marketed as being "10 bites".

All of those are now tiny bland things that nobody should buy.

The Magnum Company (neé Algida/Walls/etc) is a fucking disaster and everybody should stop buying their products, but other single packaged ice cream snack makers have been following suit and it's basically a meme that every one of those ice creams now looks like a mignon version of the original.

Alas, small kids still like them and have no frame of reference.

At the same time I can get store brand ice cream for €1.50 per box of 6 that has two or three ingredients and tastes delicious. That’s in Portugal.

And their prices have gone through the roof too!

No more LLM-written articles in HN!

Prose that reads as artificial as the 'dairy dessert' it describes.

glad I wasn't the only one. every other sentence had antithesis, it was exhausting to read even if accurate

The content was pretty good though IMO. It’s something that I think a lot of people in the USA have long believed and experienced, but seeing a technical takedown demonstrating it hits harder for some reason.

The prose and filler did make me skip a huge chunk of it though. It could have been probably a quarter of the length and had similar impact

I could skim the article.

Wasn't too distracted or annoyed by the obvious AI voice.

Learned a bit about ice cream and American (Western?) enshitification at work...

...but these endless, superior, contentless, dogmatic, boring streams of comment threads about how AI it all is.

*Rolls eyes*

I almost actively _long_ for the days when commenters simply didn't read the article/post/treatise/repo and went straight to the comments, or complained about the paywall or the fact that it is on Twitter.

Please be interesting.

what's the value of these AI generated posts?

it takes more value than it gives you as you need to verify everything and hold everything under scrutiny

I'd rather just not read at all

they're monetized

Good read, aside from all the LLM-isms in the writing.

The USA is poor now. The problem is not that companies are enshittifying ice-cream. The problem is that people are so poor that enshttified ice-cream is all they can afford.

Hot take, but enshittified food is just another expression of inflation.

Literally true. The basket of goods for US inflation metric used to include steak. Then it was changed to ground beef. You used to buy ice-cream, now you buy “frozen dairy deserts”.

enshittification is apparently what corporations do - they have no soul, only shareholders.

There is no direction of travel for them other than the nirvana of selling you nothing for something.

Competition obviously seems not to have fixed that. Food standards seemingly don't quite do it yet.

I wonder what we could do to them to take the pressure off somehow?

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