Manny's jackass primitives discuss food

[franksolich]

http://jackpineradicals.com/boards/topic/our-awful-tasting-poor-quality-food/

Oh my.

You know, I'd rather bring material over from Skins's island, but for reasons stated elsewhere, it's not worth the great deal of time and trouble.

breadandroses    (135 posts)    October 22, 2016 at 2:12 pm
 
Our awful tasting, poor quality food

Around twenty years ago I was working with an agency for people with developmental disabilities, and had brought my daughter to one of the group homes to have dinner with the residents. On the menu was scalloped potatoes, which both of us nearly gagged out when we took a forkful. Turns out it came out of box. I had seen them on the grocery shelf but never tried one. The staff who had prepared the meal were eating them with gusto.  I wondered then what was happening to our sense of what food is supposed to taste like.   And I think it’s gotten even worse.

Has anyone else noticed how awful ordinary (I mean non-organic) chicken tastes?   Particularly the dark meat.  This foul taste seems to me to have been coincident with the development of  “fryer” chickens with breasts half the size of a turkey breast, sumo-sized thighs & drumsticks,  and featuring huge gobs of fat that have to be pulled/cut off before cooking.   This was NOT how chickens looked or tasted when I was growing up.

Or take Campbell’s soup.  Now, growing up we had next to no prepared or convenience foods in our house, but we did have Campbell’s tomato and chicken noodle soup in the cabinet.    And while I’ve been a mostly natural and from-scratch cook all my life, I too have usually had a few cans of Campbell’s on hand for convenience.   They did not compare to my mother’s home-made chicken soup*  but it was OK, it did not taste horrible.  (*made with the backs and necks of those relatively scrawny regular chickens that used to taste good and make a good soup.)

At some point over the last years Campbell’s chicken noodle deteriorated – the broth has an odd color and worse taste, the “chicken’ is little gristly nodules that look foul, are totally tasteless, and have a nasty texture.  I couldn’t even stand a spoonful of the last can I tried (I was sick – exactly the sort of reason I’d always keep a few cans around).

None of us expect a grocery-store tomato to have much of any taste at all – even in the height of the season.  The hybrid or gmo varieties grown for supermarkets are bred to withstand transport and storage, not taste.   (If you grow a heritage variety you will notice it has none or next to none of that white pith that holds the supermarket tomato together inside.)  We know this and accept it and either buy or don’t buy those tomatoes, but we’re not surprised.

But how did we come to accept that so much of the food we routinely eat is such poor quality?   Even if you don’t mind the taste, no one could look at those nasty chicken scraps in the Campbell’s soup and say “that’s a quality ingredient.”

I think it started with Hamburger Helper.  And then came factory farms, animals fed antibiotics and arsenic to grow faster and fatter.  How they so increased the size of an ordinary frying chicken I don’t know – but it has been to the detriment of taste.

I’d like to hear the opinions of people here – if they have experienced this as well?  And if so, which foods?   I’d also be interested in the age of those who do the favor of answering, if they are willing to divulge.   The reason is I think my generation – Boomers – may have been the last to grow up when most food was not doused with corn syrup and cows & chickens were not routinely fed antibiotics. (At least to the best of my knowledge – if I’m wrong, hope someone will correct me.  I do know FOR SURE that the chickens I ate growing up were nothing like what is the market today.)

Just as an aside, though as I said I am a mostly from scratch and as natural as I can afford cook, I don’t think advice to “buy organic” or never buy processed food is helpful.  Too many people can’t afford it.   Too many workers are already far too stressed and stretched for time to prepare everything from scratch.  I think that we SHOULD be able to buy a decent can of soup off the shelf.   Nothing will ever make boxed potatoes taste good, but you should be able to go to an ordinary supermarket and buy a chicken that doesn’t look like it’s been taking steroids and lifting weights.

I think it happened because primitives were demanding cheap groceries, and the only way to do that is to lessen their quality. 

Most reminescinces about "how good" food "used to be" happened back when a larger percentage of the monthly budget was spent on groceries.  As difficult as it is to believe, groceries during most of our lifetimes once took damned near 40% of the monthly budget.  Now they take 4-5%.

One gets what one pays for, and if one wants cheap groceries, well, that's what one gets.

On the other hand, primitives never seem to complain about the high--and rising--cost of dope.

NV Wino     (1094 posts)  (Reply to original post)    October 22, 2016 at 2:37 pm
 
1. I think it started with TV dinners.

I’m older than dirt, and remember TV dinners well.

^^^and that would be about the time--the mid- and late-1950s that groceries began taking less and less of the family budget.

GZeusH     (467 posts)  (Reply to NV Wino - post #1)    October 22, 2016 at 2:53 pm
 
3. It started with Beldar Conehead

He was the first one to make it acceptable to consume mass quantities without regard to taste.  He would also eat fiberglass with his fried eggs and beer, so you know his taste buds did not survive the journey from Remulac.

If you want tasty food, grow your own, or go to a farmer’s market, or participate in a community sponsored agriculture, but don’t expect it to buy it in a factory packaged box at a supermarket.

breadandroses     (135 posts)  (Reply to GZeusH - post #3)    October 22, 2016 at 3:59 pm
 
6. Good suggestions – but impossible for millions

Impossible for people in food deserts, people without discretionary income to spare, people with too great a time crunch between jobs/family obligations.  People without transportation to get to the Farmer’s Market.

I actually do know how to access real, good food, but for reasons both financial and time-related I do most of my shopping at the local grocery stores.

And I maintain we should be able to produce a decent can of soup – even with mass production.

And … I don’t believe it’s a problem for individuals to solve.   If one has the resources, fine – but millions don’t.

GZeusH     (467 posts)  (Reply to breadandroses - post #6)    October 22, 2016 at 4:21 pm
 
9. Not impossible

You are forgetting that we got into this situation by taking the easy road of letting factory farming and mechanized agriculture feed us in the least expensive way.  Getting out of the situation is going to involve some difficulty and expenditures of time and/or money.

I’m well aware of food deserts, I live in one.  That’s why my back yard has many, many different edible plants.

And if you don’t have a lot of discretionary income, food that you grow yourself stretches that income.  I have perennial onions, and I haven’t bought onions in a grocery store for going on 5 years.  I can, pickle, and preserve what grows in my garden, and I rarely buy canned items at the grocery store.

What it does require is thinking and planning and knowledge.  But if you don’t (or can’t) learn, think, and plan, I guess you are left with being one of the millions of consumers that are caught by design.

breadandroses     (135 posts)  (Reply to NV Wino - post #1)    October 22, 2016 at 3:38 pm
 
4. Yes – I'd forgotten about them

They are even older than “Hamburger Helper” I think … we never had them.   Most cooked meat and poultry can be frozen after cooking without terrible loss of flavor/texture if done properly … but things like potatoes/noodles were never meant to be frozen.

Babel 17     (1028 posts)  (Reply to original post)    October 22, 2016 at 2:46 pm
 
2. Around twenty or so years ago, I noticed KFC chicken had changed

We’d gotten some nice tasting chicken dinners from them around thirty five years ago, and after years of not eating it, I noticed that the chicken didn’t seem to come from as healthy a bird. Definitely not the dark meat.

I joked that they didn’t slaughter the chickens, they just pick the dead ones off the floor. Nothing against the franchise locations, they look to be very popular, and quite well run.

One thing I’ve found that seems worth its steeper price, and that’s butter from grass fed cows. Oh, and I get my whey protein from a company that gets milk from grass fed cows. Also the cream for my coffee.

Grass fed cows, yay!

breadandroses     (135 posts)  (Reply to Babel 17 - post #2)    October 22, 2016 at 4:05 pm
 
7. Thanks for the addition – chicken again!

We’ve never gone to KFC but there is a local “chicken house” with its own famous fried chicken.  We’d go there once in a while – it was quite good.   But while their sides and especially biscuits are still quite good, the chicken does not taste right.

Around here hot chicken wings are a popular item.   Twenty or more years ago we’d order a dozen and the wings were small – just about anyone with a healthy appetite could polish off a dozen.  Now, you get wings that look like mini drumsticks.   Even the hot sauce and butter don’t mask that funky off taste nearly all the chicken has.

Bah humbug.

I have a great deal of sympathy for decent and civilized people trying to feed their families on today's grocery prices, but I got no sympathy at all for primitives beset by high food prices.

It's been their votes, their candidates, their issues, that made the situation as it is today.

So the primitives can **** off about high grocery prices.

(Can anybody tell franksolich is in a bad mood because I can't post from Skins's island?)

[Delmar]

McDonald's fries used to be better.  The individual fries used to nearly all be like 6 inches long and delicious, very few stubby little fries in an order.  Nowadays half the fries in an order are only a couple inches long--or less--and the taste is blah.  The decline in tastiness was caused by switching the grease that they fry them in to some supposedly healthier type of grease.  I'm guessing that the blame for the decrease in length of the fries is busybodies yelping about genetically modifying potatoes to be bigger and McDonald's caving again to the wishes of people who'll never eat there anyway.

In short, leftists are to blame for crappy tasting food--along with nearly everything else that's wrong in this world.

[franksolich]

McDonald's fries used to be better.  The individual fries used to nearly all be like 6 inches long and delicious, very few stubby little fries in an order.  Nowadays half the fries in an order are only a couple inches long--or less--and the taste is blah.  The decline in tastiness was caused by switching the grease that they fry them in to some supposedly healthier type of grease.  I'm guessing that the blame for the decrease in length of the fries is busybodies yelping about genetically modifying potatoes to be bigger and McDonald's caving again to the wishes of people who'll never eat there anyway.

In short, leftists are to blame for crappy tasting food--along with nearly everything else that's wrong in this world.

There are so many things like that, for which the primitives have only themselves to blame.

Look at how urban primitives in California dictated to farmers in that state how to grow their crops and livestock.  It's okay in California to slaughter infants by the boxcar-load, but God forbid if a little chick breaks a leg because of a "substandard" chicken coop.

[SVPete]

I'm all in favor of DU-folk wasting their $$ at Whole Paycheck! That way they have less $$ they can use to inflict harm on this country.

[franksolich]

I'm all in favor of DU-folk wasting their $$ at Whole Paycheck! That way they have less $$ they can use to inflict harm on this country.

One of the most common topics in the cooking & baking forum on Skins's island back when it was dominated by the hippywife primitive Mrs. Alfred Packer was the small family farm; oh my, how they mourned its demise and wish it'd come back.

It was laughably contemptible though; the primitives never faced up to that it was their own party, their own politicians, their own policies, which over two generations doomed the small family farm.

Change the local, state, and federal tax systems back to the way they were circa 1940, and I can guarantee that millions, if not tens of millions, of small family farms will suddenly sprout up, from Miami to Seattle, from Boston to San Diego.

But the tax systems as they were in 1940 wouldn't allow for the generous social services we have today, so that's a no-go for the primitives. 

Stupid primitives.  They want to have their cake and eat it too.

[Carl]

None of us expect a grocery-store tomato to have much of any taste at all – even in the height of the season.  The hybrid or gmo varieties grown for supermarkets are bred to withstand transport and storage, not taste.   (If you grow a heritage variety you will notice it has none or next to none of that white pith that holds the supermarket tomato together inside.)  We know this and accept it and either buy or don’t buy those tomatoes, but we’re not surprised.

As always they speak with the authority of king while possessing the knowledge of the court fool.
Tomatoes on the shelf in the supermarket have the taste and texture they do not because of "breeding" but the logistics of getting them from the field to market without rotting.
They have to be picked green and then artificially ripened in transport,storage and packaging.
That is a process that allows the masses to have them.

Primitives know as much about agriculture as they do anything else productive...nothing.

[franksolich]

That is a process that allows the masses to have them.

Not only to have them, but cheaply too.

The primitives forget inconvenient little facts like this.

Primitives know as much about agriculture as they do anything else productive...nothing.

[FunkyZero]

There are so many things like that, for which the primitives have only themselves to blame.

Look at how urban primitives in California dictated to farmers in that state how to grow their crops and livestock.  It's okay in California to slaughter infants by the boxcar-load, but God forbid if a little chick breaks a leg because of a "substandard" chicken coop.

Yea, I can think of more than a few... like clogging "low flush" toilets and the 10 dollar light bulbs that won't even last a year.

[SVPete]

As always they speak with the authority of king while possessing the knowledge of the court fool.
Tomatoes on the shelf in the supermarket have the taste and texture they do not because of "breeding" but the logistics of getting them from the field to market without rotting.
They have to be picked green and then artificially ripened in transport,storage and packaging.
That is a process that allows the masses to have them.

Primitives know as much about agriculture as they do anything else productive...nothing.

While tomatoes bound for the supermarket bulk bins are not literally harvested green, they are "pinks", not vine-ripened.

I grew up in Yolo County, CA, notable in two respects in this context: a whole lot of tomatoes are grown in Yolo County; the inventor of the tomato harvester, University of California Davis, is in Yolo County. More personally, my Dad was a farmer, and did grow tomatoes in the early 1960s and/or late 1950s (which I can barely remember). Before the mid-1960s (or so), tomatoes were hand-picked, with the pickers going through the field every few days for a few weeks. Machine harvesters are different, going through the field once, plucking up the plants, separating the tomatoes from the vine, and then workers separate out and throw away tomatoes that are too unripe, or that are so ripe that they'll be rotten by the time they got to a store.

Back to the point at hand, few DU-folk really understand how the food they eat gets to the store at which they buy it, whether Kroger/Safeway or Whole Paycheck.

... the primitives never faced up to that it was their own party, their own politicians, their own policies, which over two generations doomed the small family farm.

Change the local, state, and federal tax systems back to the way they were circa 1940, and I can guarantee that millions, if not tens of millions, of small family farms will suddenly sprout up, from Miami to Seattle, from Boston to San Diego.

It's a bit more complex than that. Taxes generally and the inheritance tax especially have been family farm killers. While Congress probably would have balked, in 1972 McGovern proposed a 100% inheritance tax on estates over $50K. While that would eventually have @#$%ed over most Americans, it have become a family-farm-killer immediately. Taxes are a significant part of the picture of what government has done to family farms. Another big and growing part, though, is enviro-regs and other regs by which ignorant and malicious city-dwelling envirocrats and high-minded NIMBYbodies dictate how and what farmers can do. And then there's the enviro-@#$% like the court-ordered drought that killed farms in one of CA's huge and productive agricultural areas, the San Joaquin Valley (the southern half of CA's Central Valley, named for the San Joaquin River that flows through it; the northern half, in which I grew up, is named for the Sacramento River).

[FunkyZero]

...

When growing up at home, one of our neighbors (few miles away) farmed some tradition crops, but he also had several huge chicken houses and what was of great interest to me, a couple of really big greenhouses. They were total hydroponic, with cooling towers and everything.
In them, he grew tomatoes. I mean, some of these tomatoes would be a couple of pounds sometimes. No soil, completely grown in water with fertilizer.
They were some of the best damned tomatoes I ever ate. He grew them to an ripe stage and sold them locally, people bought them up as fast as he could produce them.
I don't think these DUmp-monkeys have ever had to eat "organic" foods out of necessity. We raised our own livestock and grew our own fruit and vegetables back then. Now, when I go into a grocery store, I marvel at the fruit without worm holes in it, beans with no bugs, sweet corn with no mites in the silk, tomatoes without rotten spots you have to cut off, potatoes without buds growing out of them. Most of all, I don't have to clean out all the rotten stuff from a root cellar every year and whitewash it.
Regarding grocery store food, the only thing I've noticed is there is less flavor in a lot of it and it's a direct result of the produce being picked before it is ripe, not because of what it is or where it came from.
You won't hear me complaining about it tho. I've de-stringed and snapped hundreds of bushels of green beans in my life. Cut corn and plucked chickens. This grocery store concept is one of mans greatest inventions.

[SVPete]

Yea, I can think of more than a few... like ... the 10 dollar light bulbs that won't even last a year.

Hidden in the base of those CFL light bulbs is a power supply a little less complex and lower in output power than the power supply used in Apple Computer's Apple II series. I've worked in power electronics for 36 years and counting, and I have examined and tested an Apple II+ power supply. I'm not exaggerating. While the power oscillator in the base of a CFL is more efficient than a late 70s discontinuous flyback power supply, it still dissipates power, heat that is located in the base. If the orientation of the bulb and and the socket do not aid in dissipating that heat, that CFL's life is going to be fairly brief, not the years claimed by the government.

LEDs also require a power supply, though it dissipates less power than CFLs. It's still more complex that a tungsten filament. We've had one wall-wart type LED adapter taken out by a power surge or sag. OTOH, the replacement set has lasted a couple of years.

There're other problems with CFLs and LEDs. CFLs contain mercury and have a 60 or 120 Hertz flicker than some people perceive and find annoying (this is true of fluorescents generally). LEDs are not very "green" in their fabrication. And I suspect both have very poor power factor (conducting AC current only at the peaks of the AC sine wave voltage; with significant CFL and/or LED usage, this flat-tops the AC sine wave and can cause high current in the neutral wires to breaker panel and the power pole). By way of contrast, power factor correction became normal/mandated in mainframes, mini's, and servers in the late 80s and early 90s, and in desktop PSUs in the late 90s or early 00s. But the government excluded CFLs (and probably LEDs) from the enviro-regs, to keep CFL prices less extreme.

[FunkyZero]

Hidden in the base of those CFL light bulbs is a power supply a little less complex and lower in output power than the power supply used in Apple Computer's Apple II series. I've worked in power electronics for 36 years and counting, and I have examined and tested an Apple II+ power supply. I'm not exaggerating. While the power oscillator in the base of a CFL is more efficient than a late 70s discontinuous flyback power supply, it still dissipates power, heat that is located in the base. If the orientation of the bulb and and the socket do not aid in dissipating that heat, that CFL's life is going to be fairly brief, not the years claimed by the government.

LEDs also require a power supply, though it dissipates less power than CFLs. It's still more complex that a tungsten filament. We've had one wall-wart type LED adapter taken out by a power surge or sag. OTOH, the replacement set has lasted a couple of years.

There're other problems with CFLs and LEDs. CFLs contain mercury and have a 60 or 120 Hertz flicker than some people perceive and find annoying (this is true of fluorescents generally). LEDs are not very "green" in their fabrication. And I suspect both have very poor power factor (conducting AC current only at the peaks of the AC sine wave voltage; with significant CFL and/or LED usage, this flat-tops the AC sine wave and can cause high current in the neutral wires to breaker panel and the power pole). By way of contrast, power factor correction became normal/mandated in mainframes, mini's, and servers in the late 80s and early 90s, and in desktop PSUs in the late 90s or early 00s. But the government excluded CFLs (and probably LEDs) from the enviro-regs, to keep CFL prices less extreme.

I was one of those "nutjobs" who bought 4 cases of 100 watt filament bulbs  before they dried up. I tried CFL's and LED's. You are right, the cost of the bulb is a factor. The cheap Chinese stuff normally konks out in short order. I'd say I was lucky to get 1 maybe 2 years out of them. ONOH, the pricier ones *generally* lasted a lot longer. But still, none of them are as reliable and cost effective as the old filament bulbs.
I could see the LED method working a lot better if we got to a point where homes were wired for low voltage and used a central power supply. That would make the "bulbs" a lot cheaper and reliability a lot better. But still, compare that to the cost of regular old 80 or 100 watt bulbs and it's a no brainer.

[SVPete]

... I don't think these DUmp-monkeys have ever had to eat "organic" foods out of necessity. We raised our own livestock and grew our own fruit and vegetables back then. Now, when I go into a grocery store, I marvel at the fruit without worm holes in it, beans with no bugs, sweet corn with no mites in the silk, tomatoes without rotten spots you have to cut off, potatoes without buds growing out of them. Most of all, I don't have to clean out all the rotten stuff from a root cellar every year and whitewash it.
...
You won't hear me complaining about it tho. I've de-stringed and snapped hundreds of bushels of green beans in my life. Cut corn and plucked chickens. This grocery store concept is one of mans greatest inventions.

I doubt many "organic" food true-believers have ever considered the quality cost (not to mention the productivity cost) inherent in "organic" farming. The productivity cost is part of the (usually) higher price they pay. The pesticides and fungicides they reject get rid of the bugs and result in longer shelf life (whether in the store or on their shelves). The mold issue is so significant that the definition of "organic" has been relaxed to permit some types of fungicides.

The bottom line is that if non-"organic" and "organic" produce are picked at the same degree of ripeness and have the same time-to-shelf, the flavor and nutrition/health difference will be zero ... assuming no fungus or bugs in the "organic" produce.

I've been a city-dweller for 2/3-3/4 of my life, but I'm still angered by "organic" food true-believers' slander of good people like my Dad, his farmer friends, and my school classmates who became farmers.

[franksolich]

.....Now, when I go into a grocery store, I marvel at the fruit without worm holes in it, beans with no bugs, sweet corn with no mites in the silk, tomatoes without rotten spots you have to cut off, potatoes without buds growing out of them.

And when out of season, no certain fruits and vegetables, period.

Given that the primitives tend to be older than most of us, they should remember this stuff better than we do.

This grocery store concept is one of man's greatest inventions.

[SVPete]

And when out of season, no certain fruits and vegetables, period.

Given that the primitives tend to be older than most of us, they should remember this stuff better than we do.

Many/most probably have little connection to how their food gets to their local Kroger or Safeway or Whole Paycheck. Add in their natural inclination to Luddism and conspiracy theories, and you could do a robotically performed double-blind taste test and they'd swear it was rigged when the test showed there was no discernible difference between "organic" and non-"organic".

[Big Dog]

When growing up at home, one of our neighbors (few miles away) farmed some tradition crops, but he also had several huge chicken houses and what was of great interest to me, a couple of really big greenhouses. They were total hydroponic, with cooling towers and everything.
In them, he grew tomatoes. I mean, some of these tomatoes would be a couple of pounds sometimes. No soil, completely grown in water with fertilizer.
They were some of the best damned tomatoes I ever ate. He grew them to an ripe stage and sold them locally, people bought them up as fast as he could produce them.
I don't think these DUmp-monkeys have ever had to eat "organic" foods out of necessity. We raised our own livestock and grew our own fruit and vegetables back then. Now, when I go into a grocery store, I marvel at the fruit without worm holes in it, beans with no bugs, sweet corn with no mites in the silk, tomatoes without rotten spots you have to cut off, potatoes without buds growing out of them. Most of all, I don't have to clean out all the rotten stuff from a root cellar every year and whitewash it.
Regarding grocery store food, the only thing I've noticed is there is less flavor in a lot of it and it's a direct result of the produce being picked before it is ripe, not because of what it is or where it came from.
You won't hear me complaining about it tho. I've de-stringed and snapped hundreds of bushels of green beans in my life. Cut corn and plucked chickens. This grocery store concept is one of mans greatest inventions.

^^^ This.

[BattleHymn]

I have one word for you lurking primitives that choose to cluck about what other people eat:

Kale.

You think it tastes good.  I submit that as evidence for good and decent people to judge the quality of your tastebuds.

EOM

[Bad Dog]

I have one word for you lurking primitives that choose to cluck about what other people eat:

Kale.

You think it tastes good.  I submit that as evidence for good and decent people to judge the quality of your tastebuds.

EOM

I would add tofu which we refer to as toefungus.