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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Vanilla coke. The older version tasted like proper vanilla and now it tastes just bad.
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.
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.’
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.
Healthy food.
Affordable healthy food.
Also on the opposite of healthy, I miss cheap grocery store lemon crème cookies. Fuck those lemon Oreo rip-offs.
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.
Butterfingers used to be my goto, up until they changed the recipe a few years ago to be more nutella-like. They’re horrible now.
I still remember butterfinger bb’s, would risk diabetes for a pack of those right about now
I had one of my kid’s Butterfinger bars from their Halloween stash last Fall. It was awful. I remember that chocolate-crispy-peanut brittle flavor being so much better. Instead it was waxy sugar.
yessss old butterfingers were the best
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.
You might want to check if there’s someplace nearby that sells biltong. There’s a local butcher shop in my area that makes and sells it and it’s like the jerky you describe from when you were a kid.
I highly recommend purchasing a dehydrator and making one’s own beef (or other) jerky. You can get a good ehyrdeator for like $100 or so. The only downside is how expensive beef is, currently. That said, you’ll still save a massive amount of money per pound, and it’s amazing.
Hershey’s made a smores bar decades ago. Despite not liking Hershey’s at all, I loved that thing. Had the perfect ratio of chocolate, marshmallow, and Graham cracker, wasn’t too sweet, and it was easy to eat unlike the messy real deal. I still crave it from time to time.
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.
