5 ms·

The worst is that cheap food usually tastes great... :)

• imajes 17y ago
  not really. that's the msg which is there to trick you that it tastes good.
  • yan 17y ago
    How is being tricked into thinking something tastes good and tasting good different?
    • ErrantX 17y ago
      Yeh, especially as it is, chemically speaking, pushing exactly the same sort of buttons.
    • deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    • julio_the_squid 17y ago
      Well, to put it in the most extreme example - if you were drinking pure formaldehyde that had an additive that made it taste just like a delicious lemonade, would you feel taht you had been tricked into thinking it tastes good? Taste is supposed to identify healthy and needed substances vs. deleterious or poisonous substances, so when this is subverted artificially, it feels like a trick to me.
      • chc 17y ago
        Taste is just a heuristic, and it's based on a definition of "healthy" that evolved in a very different environment. Your taste is as likely to be "subverted" naturally as artificially. For example, strawberries taste much better than kale, but they're not really better for you — just sweeter.
        • robak 17y ago
          I don't think you know how strawberries really taste like, if you never ate them outside US... the same goes for Western Europe
    • imajes 17y ago
      It's a shame I've gotten downvoted here, and you got upvoted as much. I guess hackers like the idea of hacking food too. Here's the deal, though: You could conceivably add the right chemicals to a pile of offal cooked in a skin of some kind and it'd taste like a gourmet sausage. You might have in fact eaten such a thing. It's also common to add flavorings such as "grandma's special recipe" or that from a dude in a coat from Kentucky. All these things make us think that something tastes good, which as also commented in this thread translates in your brain to mean: "hey, this is good for you, have more!". But the reality is, what you're eating is almost certainly mechanically reclaimed meat (where carcasses with so little meat it's almost pointless to continue cutting are put through a machine which crushes, juices, minces and turns out a slushy type 'meat' goo). and MRM is the place where salmonella and other friends live. It's also not really meat: there's plenty of cartilage (aka 'gristle') and such that is cut so small, you actually ingest it. It doesn't cook properly, and it's not really good for you to eat- you just pass it. But if it's carrying salmonella or e-coli... I hope you didn't have something important to do for the next couple weeks. Also, the nutrition recovery from such a meal is incredibly limited. You feel bright and happy for a short period (the msg et al) and then you have a come down, a craving, and want some more- for that high again. So in fact, what you're eating is a bunch of mind-altering chemicals ontop of a bed of processed waste. Food shouldn't be like that. Food should melt in your mouth and be an explosion of flavor and something you genuinely feel excited about. It should be, you have a meal, which provides you with some instant energy, and also some which is "slow-burning". Brown grains (rice, some wheats, etc) are great for this. You will feel full and energised for longer periods. Cheap base foods are cheap because they are often subsidized (e.g.: corn) or because their most common consumer is the cattle, pigs, chickens etc that you want to eat. This has given a false sense of price - people expect all food to be as cheap. So supermarkets etc will look to find ways to make everything else like it. So you'll see battery farmed chickens, who are so close together they often aren't able to stand up; You'll find chickens who are injected with water to make extra weight. (yeah, that chicken you just bought? probably a pound of it is water. You just paid chicken price for water). Good food is good because it provides great nutrition, is often respectful of the environment and is sustainable. Everything else is just yet another sign of man's dominance over everything else. (BTW, no, i'm not an enviro-hippy, it's just that i refuse to eat crap if i can help it- why put yourself through that kind of thing when there's so much better choice out there?)
  • jonknee 17y ago
    We evolved to like MSG, it's no more of a trick than adding salt.
    • DrSprout 17y ago
      You actually need to eat a lot of salt to survive, so it's much more of a trick than adding salt. MSG is not an essential nutrient that you need in any quantity, so using it is a trick to make your body think you're being well nourished when you aren't.
      • jonknee 17y ago
        MSG still gets you the sodium you need so it's not worthless from that angle.
      • mtts 17y ago
        MSG is an essential nutrient. Glutamate (the G in MSG) is a component of protein rich foods, which we absolutely need to survive. That's why we have taste buds for it.
• bpyne 17y ago
  A physician friend of mine explained to me once that humans are hardwired to like fat and sugar. Fat has a high number of calories per gram and is necessary for brain development. ("Healthy fats" are necessary anyway.) Sugar stimulates our most primitive taste preference - sweet. Out of the womb humans prefer sweet but learn to like the other 4 flavors. Cheap food typically gravitates towards a combination of these 2 ingredients. Cheap food tastes great until you try it next to food made from high quality ingredients and prepared the way you want it. For example, I used to like white bread. Since getting used to the different flavors in multigrain bread, white bread is too boring. (By multigrain, I don't mean the refined stuff being labeled as multigrain. I mean the kind in which you bite into a chewy grain with a nutty flavor.)
• prawn 17y ago
  Then comes the aftertaste... And the regret. And you vow never to eat it again, but that only lasts a couple of weeks until you're lazy and craving it again!