Complex Numbers

Substandard

Ironically, the tagline for The Takeout, which provides today's link, is: "Food is delicious."

    Everything Tastes Worse Than It Used To  
You've heard of shrinkflation, but what about skimpflation?

You know what else is inflating? My rage at portmanteaux. Every time I see a cutesy one, it's like I have an anger bar (like a health bar in a video game) and it just keeps getting fuller and fuller. I call it... rageflation.

It's okay when I do the portmanteau.

If you swear your go-to snacks and candies all seem to taste different—and worse—these days and you can’t quite put your finger on why, you’re not alone.

I mean... it is supposedly true that one's sense of taste dulls with age.

Business Insider has taken a deep dive into food manufacturers’ increasing adoption of what BI calls skimpflation or flavorflation, aka modifying recipes in order to (you guessed it!) maintain or increase profit margins.

Oh, good, now I know what entity to blame for the maddening portmanteau. Call it what it actually is: enshittification.

Ingredient costs, obviously, are a huge factor in the pricing of any consumer product.

So are employee wages, which is why we replace them with robots.

Business Insider cites an instance of Conagra reducing the fat content in its Wish-Bone House Italian Dressing by 10%, replacing it with additional salt and... water.

On the bright side, we're running out of fresh water, so the price of that is going to go up, too.

In 2013, Breyers, the ice cream of my childhood, had to legally change the labeling of its products from ice cream to “frozen dairy dessert.” Why? Because the company had reduced the amount of dairy fat in its product to the point that it didn’t legally qualify as ice cream anymore.

Good to know there are standards. I eat "frozen dairy dessert" so infrequently that I'd probably never notice. Part of the reason is that I have cold-sensitive teeth. But once a "quart" of ice cream became 3.75 cups or whatever, I quit buying it. Apologies for the shitty measurement system to anyone using a logical one; what you need to know is that one quart, which is a bit less than a liter, is equivalent to four standard cups.

Speaking of logical measurement systems, I remember when soda was sold in half-gallon bottles (and they were made of glass, prone to shattering, and heavy). At some point, they switched to 2-liter plastic bottles. As I noted, a liter is slightly more than a quart, and 2 liters is thus more than a half-gallon. Again, apologies to metric users: it's called a quart because it's a quarter of a gallon, okay?

I'm not really sure why. Perhaps they were thus able to increase the price beyond what it cost them to include those few extra drops in the bottle. If so, that would be one way to sneak a price increase past us: give us a bit more of the product, while charging disproportionately more.

I digress. This is about (ugh) skimpflation and not (blech) shrinkflation.

The most egregious example of so-called skimpflation we’ve seen recently was October 2022, when Conagra dropped the amount of fat in its dairy-free Smart Balance spread from 64% to 39%, which meant water became the most plentiful ingredient in the product.

I guess someone there found a smarter balance on their accounting spreadsheet. My solution? Use butter.

As an aside, I'm going to complain about English muffins (or, as I believe the English call them, muffins), which are one of my favorite foods. I even use them for hamburger buns. For a while, though, the only kind sold by my go-to grocery store was Thomas', so I didn't buy them (or I made a special trip to Whole Paycheck to get the good kind). Thomas' is to English muffins as Lender's is to bagels; that is, a piss-poor replica. Unsurprisingly, those are now both products of the same soulless corporation (aptly named Bimbo). Bread is food; everything else is a condiment.

Anyway, more recently, the nearby grocery store started selling its store-brand English muffins. One time, they were out, and the shopper (yes, I get groceries delivered, because I am remarkably lazy) subbed Thomas'. Not only are they inferior in taste, but I noticed that they seemed to be quite a lot thinner than they used to be, so thin it took hours of careful work with specialized tools to split them without destroying them. Now, that could have been my own perception, colored by comparison with the much heftier thickness of the store-brand muffins (which, I should note, are also cheaper), but it could also have been (gag) shrinkflation.

Either way, now I have to include a note with my delivery order: "DO NOT substitute Thomas'." I'd rather go without than deal with that bullshit.

In conclusion, however, the headline is wrong: Not everything tastes worse than it used to. Beer, for instance, has vastly improved in quality with the advent of craft breweries. More expensive? Sure. But worth every penny.

Well. This discussion didn't lower my rage bar. I'm going to go eat an English muffin with butter.