We just got up from the table after a late breakfast and something dawned on me. Where did the taste go in most commercial food products? Recently I bemoaned the lack of taste in high production commercial cheeses that tastes more of plastic than of milk products, but why is this happening with most mass-market food products? I know that according to modern corporate practices and the search for the holy bottom line, large corporations tend to homogenize their products and go for the least common denominator, but is there a universal ingredient called ‘flavor’ that is so expensive in the future market that most corporations shy away from using it in their products? This morning we opened a new package of margarine, as well as new packages of ‘spreadable’ cream cheese and peanut butter. All were supposedly ‘new and improved’ and were definitely more ‘spreadable’ than older formulations, but all were lacking taste. In the quest for ‘spreadability’ the core of the product flavor was forgotten. The margarine was bland and tasted of nothing, the cream cheese could have been bland thick cream as there was no hint of the slight sourness that is normally associated with the product, and you would have been confronted with a difficult task in trying to decide what was put in your mouth if you had tasted the peanut butter blind. The peanut taste was so light that you had to double the normal amount used to get any hint of it. Maybe that’s what they are trying to make happen… All of those products were not ‘light’ versions of the regular brand, so that was not the problem. I looked into it a bit and found out that all the brands we had opened this morning were brands from the same mega-food conglomerate, so this might be a problem that is more specific to them, but I have noticed the trend in recent years in a variety of other brands. Has anybody out there found the same thing recently? Come on big food conglomerates; let’s put the taste back in your products…

Lucito

I had a long day working straight since early this morning, and by this time I can barely keep my eyes open due to the inordinate amount of pollution in town the last few days, compounded by a bad cold I have been dragging since last week. I was trying to come up with a great subject for today’s post, and came up empty as my mind feels blank, and I am too lazy right now to write a recipe post. This would actually entail some actual work and thoughts and this would be too much for my poor addled brain.

I decided to fire up the text editor and see if I could get some stream of consciousness post going, but staring at the blinking cursor on a blank screen did not stimulate my mind enough. I then thought at recycling some old stuff I wrote ages ago and the digging through the archives was way too much like real work for my lazy mood to tolerate, so I guess you will have to read this short note about my writer’s block to satisfy yourself today. Hopefully when tomorrow rolls in my brain will come back to it’s usual self and I will find the energy to post something coherent and sticking to the topic of this blog. This reminds me to ask yet again the Padrino and Normita to write a few posts, as they promised many times, that I will be able to use on days like these in the future. Until then…

Lucito