Samin Nosrat visited this soy producer as part of her Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat show... the Salt episode is dedicated to Japan, where she also tries traditional mis

Samin Nosrat visited this soy producer as part of her Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat show... the Salt episode is dedicated to Japan, where she also tries traditional miso (which is apparently similarly complex in its original form). Very interesting to watch if you haven't. Joining the fray of the discussions above, I think we can acknowledge both the pros and the cons of the mass-availability of things that used to be hard to come by. It's true that the $150/bottle, traditional balsamic vinegar, in its special glass bottle (aged for a minimum of 15 years), is pretty far removed from even the good balsamics that can be found in most grocery stores. If you have a chance to try it, you'll gain a deeper understanding of what made balsamic vinegar special to begin with, and a better idea of why _some_ version of it is now available to everyone. But, as others have said, that's not to say that commonly available balsamic vinegars are uniformly _bad_, either. There certainly _are_ bad mass-produced balsamic vinegars, but also plenty of mass-produced good ones that are perfectly appropriate for cooking or dressing a salad (or even having on their own, though for me they tend to me a bit too acidic-tasting to really enjoy, whereas the $150 bottle isn't) without breaking the bank. I think the lesson we can learn from top-quality traditional balsamic, top-quality traditional soy sauce, and the like, is that these ingredients did use to have a deeper, much more complex flavor, and that we have traded some of that away -- out of necessity -- in order to make them available to a larger number of people at lower cost. I think there's a place for both versions, but also that we should acknowledge that they are _not_ the same; they're just optimizing for different goals.