I just bought a little beef jerky. Haven’t had any in quite a while. It was supposed to be spicy. What I got was something sweet, rubbery and gummy, with barely a hint of heat. (In the US) W.t.f.
When I was a kid, jerky was dry AF, thin, salty, tooth-rippingly tough sometimes, never sweet unless you specifically got a teryaki flavor or something. If you wanted spicy, it was covered in pepper and your mouth would be on fire after just a couple pieces. It was awesome.
Now it’s sugary and chewy. Why people gotta put sugar on everything? Can’t find that dry, thin, peppery stuff anywhere.
What food of yours has disappeared or been wrecked in order to appeal to more people?
Potato skins chips. I gorged myself on them aa a kid and can’t find them easily anymore. The ones I found tasted like regular chips.
Cadbury Creme Eggs were one of my favorites as a kid in the 80’s. Soft chocolaty shell, with creamy goodness on the inside.
Now it’s a chalky brown husk with a nasty grainy gritty paste in the middle. 🤮
Truth. Cadbury used to be great back in the day. I liked their candy shell milk chocolate eggs too. It’s crap now.
I’d go with junk food generically. While some of it has to do with changing tastes as I get older, most junk food has gotten so bad that it’s not even tempting. Now ice cream is trying to join that mess, but there are still a few brands worth enjoying.
On the other hand, Trader Joe’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups are truly amazing, in a way Reese’s could never even dream
We prefer the milk chocolate cups, but they’re both good. I think TJ’s has changed the filling formula a little sometime in the last few years. The filling used to be a little denser and faintly crunchy if I remember right. Now it’s very smooth. I liked the previous filling better.
When I was a kid, jerky was dry AF, thin, salty, tooth-rippingly tough sometimes, never sweet unless you specifically got a teryaki flavor or something.
Look for local brands. I saw something like that just last year. You gotta keep it in your mouth for a while before it’s soft enough to chew. National brands aim for the lowest common denominator.
Basically all of them at this point
I spent a fair bit of time in hospitals as a kid and subsequently, because the two are somehow linked, ate a lot of grapes.
I genuinely swear to you, thirty years ago white grapes used to be delicious, and unless they were getting old and gross, they weren’t even particularly sweet. Their flavour wasn’t strong, the skin was fruity and the flesh was slightly sour, but they were so refreshing and watery, and if they’d been in the fridge, crunchy too! Oh and they had pips! I used to try and swallow the pips whole as spitting them was gross, but ngl I even kinda miss the crunchy tannins they bought to the experience.
In some mad fit of nostalgia not too long ago, I bought all the green grapes I could find online that I could get delivered to me. I spent like £80 on grapes.
Grapes suck now. They are all so obnoxiously sweet, every variety I could get my hands on tasted like juice concentrate, and they’re all freaking huge now too. Fuck whoever decided grapes needed to taste like ‘cotton candy’, you ruined grapes.
This is me with berries, at least at my local supermarkets. I didn’t even realize how bad it was until I had blackberries right off the bush at a friend’s house. Now I only ever get them frozen or (when I can splurge a little) at a farmer’s market.
Yep. They’re generically hard and sweet. They’ve lost their distinct flavor. They’re not bad, but they’re not great, either.
We live in an area where there are a lot of different kinds of farms. When fruit is in season, even grapes, they’re incredible. They taste “real”. I miss how fruit used to be good and not bred to maintain looks and survive shipping.
I know what you mean. There’s a street market near me that occassionally gets in the most fantastic produce, it’s a bit hit or miss though, even for seasonal as they rarely have the same stuff in each week.
But I still think about that perfect, sun warmed, juicy af yellow melon I bought there a few summers back. That taste was something else, it was like melon³, like there was just so much more melon to this melon. No yellow melon has even come close since then.
Your tastes change as you old. Can’t tolerate as much sweet but still dull enough that you need more heat to feel anything.
Yeah but fruit has also been selectivly bred to be much, much sweeter too though. Zoos now can’t feed fruit to animals evolved to eat it as the sugar content has gotten so high.
Vanilla coke. The older version tasted like proper vanilla and now it tastes just bad.
Entenmann’s chocolate cake with the black and white frosting. You can still get chocolate cake but the icing is just not the same.
Drake’s Devil Dogs. There used to be so much cream filling that I could run my fingers down each side and still leave plenty in the middle.
I must second the disappointment that is modern jerky. I loved how a piece used to take a long time to chew.
For me it’s been kutchup. I don’t remember it being so sweet. It used to be tangy and salty. I stopped buying and using it about two decades ago and recently tried making an old family recipe. It came out rather sweet. Definitely not how i remember. Went looking for a sugar free version of katchup and got tricked. The suger free katchup was loaded with artificial sweetener. Had to make the katchup from scratch in the end. Why is suger in everything now?
That can also be an age thing. Sweet things can taste more overly sweet as an adult, especially if you’ve been removing sweet things from other parts of your life.
Ya, looking into the history of katchup I’m inclined to agree. It likely is more an age thing.
I did find the Primal Kitchen ketchup seemed what i have been looking for. I’m going to see if i can get a bottle in the near future.
I was going to recommend Primal Kitchen! I only will get theirs, it tastes like what (IMO) ketchup is supposed to taste like.
Sounds like OP bought some BBQ or Korean-style jerky, and both of those things can be surprisingly sweet. Also, the ‘heat’ factor in food has always been on the tame side when it comes to the States (in general, anyway), so that really shouldn’t have been a surprise.
I must second the disappointment that is modern jerky.
“Modern jerky” is right. I read a comment by someone with experience (or in the industry), and my understanding is that what’s commonly sold as “jerky” in the States actually skips some important steps in the making-process. Authentic jerky is a different beast, and harder to find.
I don’t know if that’s what it is. It’s not labeled as such, however the industry could have moved in that direction without specifying that the style is what they were imitating. It’s the same jerky everywhere. Softer, chewy but not dry, often requiring refrigeration after opening. The sweetness I just attribute to people having to add sugar to damn near everything these days.
often requiring refrigeration after opening.
Hokey smokes, that is not any kind of jerky or even “jerky” that I’ve ever come across. oO
Sugar has always been in ketchup, but if you want a big improvement get ketchup with real sugar and not HFCS. Simply Heinz is my go-to.
Ecto Cooler Kool Aid.
Ecto cooler was Hi-C.
That’s how long it’s been since the stuff was around; can’t even remember the actual brand. Either that or I keep changing dimensions. What do you call the Bearenstien Bears here? Is Neslon Mandella alive or dead?
I was looking for this one. I miss Ecto Cooler with Slimer on the packaging :(
Old El Paso taco seasoning. I think they changed it a long time ago. I’m sure it was cost considerations, and not broader appeal.
I’ve tried making my own but I can never get it quite right.
I made tacos with this one the other day and it was pretty damn close. Fiance was happy with them too and we eat a lot of old el paso tacos.
https://www.recipetineats.com/taco-seasoning/#recipe
Also, highly recommend these recipes in general. A lot of them have made their way into my regular rotation. The lasagna is delicious.
Cookie dough ice cream, without chocolate chips. Maybe it was a limited time thing, but I remember having this at an ice cream shop similar to Baskin Robbins in my youth. It was just plain vanilla ice cream with cookie dough in it and neither part had chocolate chips.
I get that I’m likely one of very few people this would have sold to. But, I really do wish I could have this again.
IMO ice cream in general has really gone downhill. The flavors are all worse and more artificial, the ice cream is lucky to have any real “ice cream” in it anymore, and it’s all areated or “fluffed” with air to reduce the actual amount in the carton.
We kinda laughed at some ice cream one of our kids had left partly unfinished and it melted. Well, sorta. The liquid (whatever it was) drained out of the remaining ice cream and we were left with this lump of rubbery foam sitting in a pool of whatever.
Probably one of the last decent ice creams that can be bought in a normal (not tiny Ben and Jerry’s or other botique priced grocery store ice creams) container is Costco’s Kirkland brand Vanilla.
Thankfully ice cream is something that can be easily made at home and the jump in quality makes it well worth it. Frozen drum type ice cream machines end up in thrift shops all the time, but are also under $100 new. I don’t eat any ice cream that isn’t home made now, it’s completely spoiled me. I use light cream, whole milk, sugar, my flavoring of choice, and add a little alcohol (the equivalent of a tsp of wine per serving) to keep it soft. I really can’t recommend it enough!
Ice cream nerd here!
Start by looking for “super premium ice cream” on the label. Super premium is a category of ice cream that will be 14-18% butterfat and no more than 50% air by volume (this amount is called overrun in ice cream manufacturing).
You also want to check ingredients as with all foods - real cream, milk and sugar, high fat content, high calorie content. Fat and calories = good ice cream.
Finally, pick the dang thing up. Is it heavy and dense? That’s a good sign. Is it expensive? That’s also a good sign. Good ice cream isn’t cheap and cheap “ice cream” isn’t good.
Kirkland is a super premium brand. I also like Haagen-Dazs, Turkey Hill, Ben and Jerry’s, and great regional brands like Jeni’s or Chocolate Shoppe if you have them.
This is my problem with American products. The standards are too low! Sugar is replaced with corn. The cream in ice cream is replaced with oil. Chocolate is replaced with unrelated fats. And it’s all legally allowed to be sold as what they’re a facsimile of!
At best, there are names like “chocolatey”. Bullshit.
My least favourite alternative that Nestle loves is just leaving what it is off the package. So here in Canada, it doesn’t say ice cream. It doesn’t say anything unless you look for the fine print.
But it’s in an ice cream carton sitting a metre away from real ice cream. This is false marketing by omission. If I wrote the laws, this would be illegal.
To be fair, at least currently (until the government fucks this up, too), to be legally called “ice cream”, it has to have minimum milkfat and butterfat percentages. Otherwise it has to be called “frozen dairy dessert,” or whatever.
Ice cream’s composition standards focus on dairy content, specifically minimum percentages of milkfat and total milk solids. The finished product must contain a minimum of 10% milkfat, also known as butterfat. This fat must be derived exclusively from milk; other fats are excluded, except for incidental amounts naturally present in flavorings.
The product must also contain at least 20% total milk solids, which is the combined weight of milkfat and nonfat milk solids. Nonfat milk solids, such as proteins, lactose, and minerals, must constitute at least 10% of the total weight. If a manufacturer exceeds the 10% milkfat minimum, the required nonfat milk solids percentage may be slightly reduced based on a defined inverse relationship.
The FDA allows for a reduction in these minimum percentages when bulky flavorings are added, such as fruits, nuts, or chocolate. In these cases, the milkfat content cannot fall below 8% of the finished weight, and the total milk solids must remain at or above 16%.
You’re right; I just don’t think the law goes far enough
Also make sure what you’re buying isn’t labeled “frozen dairy dessert”. That’s a product that does not legally meet the requirements of being ice cream and cannot be labeled as such.
Thanks for the pointers. I knew some of those, but the “super premium” is helpful.
Edit: just went to the store. No “super premium” available. :(
We used to get Trickling Springs Creamery ice cream from a local farm store. And it was really good ice cream. But, they had some problems and shut down. I’m not sure what they did to make the ice cream so good, but I’ve not found anything since which compared.
CHOCO TACOS
I’ve never heard of that or had that, but it sounds absolutely perfect to me. Maybe there are dozens of us.
Is anything still the same as it once was? Corporately produced food is designed by food chemists to be maximally profitable and shifts recipes regularly. Most smaller food makers/preparers are downstream from those corporate entities, relying on them for ingredients. Even the base ingredients, like produce, are being bred to be more profitable, so they change too, just slower. The only thing that won’t have changed is things like ‘that fruit tree that mom has growing by her window.’
Tomatoes.
Back then: the home grown ones of my mom were the normal thing. Strong taste, a little sour maybe.
Nowadays: only water with only a slight remembrance of tomato. Thick and hard wax on the outside.
Hard and sometimes pithy on the inside.
Agreed.
I used to enjoy puffed corn snacks called Monster Munch. Apparently they’re British-produced and still available over there. An expat friend who goes to Gencon* every year likes to take a few packs of gherkin flavour Monster Munch to horrify his American friends.
*Maybe not this year… or ever again.
