Yes, and you can thank private equity for it.
this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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Mmmm, tastes like supply chain optimization.
Is it just part of the enshitification of everything?
Yes
Have I just gotten old
Get off my lawn.
It’s gotten worse, however, I think the perception is compounded by how expensive it is now and also just eating better as I get older. Now that I know how to cook real, delicious food, fast food just seems so much grosser than it used to. It’s a little worse compared to 10 years ago, but much worse compared to the 80’s and early 90’s, depending on the chain. For example, Taco Bell was a LOT better back in the 80’s. You were more likely spend a bunch of time on the toilet later, but hey, give a little take a little.
Seeing the brand names you cited, I'll assume you're in the US, so my comment may or may not be as useful as some brands are way different in France (for example, Subway is decent most of the time).
Growing up I sure got less and less attracted to fast food, and trying it occasionally did feel bad in some case. Although there's a definite shift in not wanting to clog my own arteries, it's not all there is to it. Some brands really feel awful now (McDonald's being the worst fast food out there these days), but there are also other that still "hit that spot" (BK mostly). I think it's safe to say that some big names let themselves go bad, AND it is still possible to find good fast food stuff.
With that said, it do gets more expensive, as everything else. The craving for fast food really become less common as time pass, and although it's still good while eating, there's still a tinge of guilt afterward, knowing it's both too expensive for what it is (I mean the actual food, not necessarily that it's too expensive for service and stuff) and that it's not that great for yourself.
I'd say if you keep them as an occasional treat and know a few good places to indulge, it can work. But it sure feels like it requires more thinking than just dropping in any fast food joint to have a good time.
Fast food is called "fast food" because it's fast, not because it's food.
Apart from that, there is probably no production chain that has profited better from making things the cheaper way than anything related to food.
So this does not just concern fast food, but the HFCS loaded soda you drink, your bread swimming in dough raising and stabilizing chemicals, or your tinned soup made from water, starch, food coloring, flavors, and preservatives.
Just because of the masses produced and sold, any cent saved on a single Burger quickly adds up to a million dollar in extra profits. Don't expect them to waste that money on better ingredients or flavor, as long as you keep buying that stuff, they keep on making it worse to save yet another cent.
Yeh you don't like it, sure, but the question was whether it had gotten worse in some way that's quantifiably different to how it used to be in the past, or if it's just OP's personal taste changing.
Given that nearly all fast food recipies changed in the last decades primarily to make them cheaper to produce, you can safely assume their flavor went down the drain.
Both?
Yes it has gotten worse and time is a relentless asshole.
Brand names have gotten worse, that's not you. Cost saving measures upon making sizes smaller while still raising prices. I swear, KFC mid-2000's was amazing compared to the bland oily ones of today. That said, you probably have gotten desensitized to them in general as you grew older too.
Local fast food is still really good for me, but I'd just avoid major brands like Mcdonalds. They've become synonymous with trash food.
Cost cutting has made fast food restaurants worse in ways that aren't essentially shrinkflation. Restaurants like Taco Bell cutting their beef with cheaper ingredients (though apparently it's only 12% fillers). Chipotle giving you more of the cheap ingredients like rice, and less of the good stuff like guac. Even slower service and longer lines because they don't want to pay as much staff during peak hours.
Smaller (especially privately-held) chains have been able to buck the trend, but cutting quality has been a popular option as of late.
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The feeling bad part is aging.
Quality has absolutely gone down, though, while cost has gone way up.
I'm feeling nitpicky in general so I apologize in advance.
Prices have gone up, not costs. The increase in overhead for these places hasn't gone towards maintaining the same product quality, much less improving it, nor has it gone towards the pay of workers, and its not really even the real estate.
The bigger price listed is almost entirely because shareholders want more before they keel over finally fucking die
That's fair. I meant cost as in cost to me, the consumer, which is the price, but I think what you've said here is a valuable thing to consider when wondering why it's so expensive and yet shit now.
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The answer is probably "yes"
- Food is probably worse.
- Your taste buds might have changed.
- Your gut bacteria might be different.
I have a couple reasons for believing each.
- Nutrient concentration in food has decreased over time (Veritasium talked about a fascinating explanation for this) and the desire to find low cost alternatives like HFCS over cane sugar changes the taste of food.
- "Children prefer higher levels of sweet and are more sensitive to bitter tastes until adolescence."
- Your gut microbiome literally changes over time.
The other day I ordered a burger and they put tomatoes on it even though I asked them not to. I was about to complain, but decided to take a bite anyway and…huh. The tomato had no flavour whatsoever. I used to not like the taste of tomatoes but how could I object to this?
So what does this mean? Are my taste buds not functioning like they used to? But I spent lunch looking it up and apparently, there is a fair consensus that tomatoes, along with a host of other fruits and vegetables, really are blander today than when I was a kid. For something I never liked, this kind of works out but…
My wife, a keen gardener of heirloom tomatoes, says it's because the varieties that sell commercially are bred for long shelf-life and nothing else.
My grandmother died last year at the age of 103. I'm 41. I can remember being a kid, before she became too old to maintain the house she raised 4 kids in. It was a BIG house. It had a HUGE backyard, that as a kid I didn't have any appriciation for how massive that place was. Now, today, I remember the 80s, and think "wait......was my grandpa rich before he died?" I was 5 when he died, but he picked out the house in the 1960s, that she then lived alone in after he died. All her children were adults with their own children by then.
The end result is, she said to my grandpa "I don't care what you do inside the house. I don't care how you decorate. I don't care what furniture you buy. I just want a comfortable bed, and that backyard is MINE." My grandpa, who HATED maintaining the outdoors, readily agreed to this. It meant she would do the yardwork that men of the time were mostly expected to do. While he got the house to himself (mostly). She used the backyard to grow a garden. A big garden. Lived in the city, but you'd swear this was a farmland with no animals.
Everytime I'd go over to her house as a kid, I'd run to the garden and pick off beans. These long pod style green beans. And these other green beans which were more narrow.
I'd eat them right where they were growing. And every time my dad would be like "HEY!!! THAT'S NOT YOUR GARDEN!!! YOU CAN'T JUST EAT THINGS FROM THE GARDEN!!! I'M YOUR DAD!!! YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME!!!"
And every time, my Grandma, who was not a yeller, and not an angry person would yell back at my dad "HEY! THAT IS MY GARDEN!!! AND I SAY HE CAN EAT AS MUCH HEALTHY FRUITS AND VEGITABLES AS HE WANTS!!! I'M YOUR MOM!!! YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME!!!"
It was more in a mocking him sense, for being so angry over something so stupid. Oh no, a growing boy wants to eat healthy vegitables! What a tragedy! His logic being that I have to ask permission before eating other peoples food. Which in most contexts makes sense.
Until you realize, my grandma was like 120lbs, and she was growing like 60lbs of food in her garden. She wasn't shy of saying that every neighborhood kid (which was a lot of kids) and all her grandkids, and her own adult kids were free to eat as much as they wanted, take as much as they wanted home. She enjoyed growing the food, but harvesting it was a chore. Plus, it was meant for all of us anyways, so if we grabed it straight from the vine, that was just free harvesting labor that she didn't have to do, with the food going to the same place anyways.
When you ate food off her vine, you knew you were at grams house. Most people miss their childhood because they miss a tv show, or a friend group they had, or the freedom of not having bills and responsibility. I miss that garden, and helping my grandma harvest. I was 5 years old, running around, picking beans, and listening to grandma tell her stories of how she met my grandpa, and what life in the 60s was like. Which for the time would be like me today explaining what 2004 was like. The 60s seems like such a culturally distant time ago, but at the time she was talking about this, it was just 20 years prior. I'm getting nostolgic for the 80s, and the 60s, a decade I wasn't even alive for, because I can vividly remember her telling me what life was like during the civil rights movements of the late 60s. She talked about what my dad was like when he was a kid. She wasn't afraid to take the piss out of my dad by embarassing him to his son. All while we picked beans, and strawberries, and berries, and her favorite tomatoes.
She LOVED tomatoes. Loved loved loved them. She used to say "I know everyones welcome to my garden, but I might have to start growing more tomatoes, or placing restrictions on them. I don't know WHAT I'd do if everybody wanted my tomatoes! I can't get enough of them!"
Which was her polite way of basically doing the whole garden of eden thing, except instead of an apple, she was saying "don't fucking touch my tomatoes!!!" Which nobody did. Also, nobody was naked.
Then in the mid 90s, she eventually had to admit she could no longer upkeep a 6 bedroom house, and a yard that was meant for kids to play in, when she had no kids. By then I was a teenager, and while I could have played in the sense of sports, my days of egg hunting on easter, and running around in capes, and jumping on trees was behind me. My aunt always said "You know, she held off on selling that house, so you could grow up first. It wouldn't be fair that all her grandkids EXCEPT you got to enjoy the garden, and that yard (I'm the youngest). Then as time went on, eventually she began complaining about tomatoes around the year 2010. She'd say "Is it too late to go get my garden back? These things are tasteless, and not at all juicy. What am I supposed to do with a dry flavorless red bulb? Can it even be called a tomato??? I'm just going to call it worthless."
I guess I took a while to get to the point of the point of the tomato in this story, but I'm never going to appologize for rambling on and on about my hero in life. I'll ramble on and on about her to people who never met her, when I'M 90 years old. I'll seem crazy, and it'll just seem like old man rambling crazy talk about tomatoes, and pickling jars, and tree forts, and easter egg hunts with 1000 easter eggs for a group of 20 kids.
I'll seem crazy, but oh well. That's fine. I miss her, and I miss that time. That's the biggest part I miss about my childhood. Seeing her happy with a tomato in her hand, and a big straw hat on sunny days, yelling at my dad to calm the fuck down. Nicest woman in the world. Loved you with all her heart. She'd help you with her last dollar if you were in need. But she wouldn't take shit. When my dad tried to bully control of the conversation, she took him down a peg everytime. And because everyone, him included, respected her, she could do it at any time. The strongest person in the room doesn't need to yell. They can control an entire room with a whisper. Make you shut up, just so you can hear them by quieting the room, and making you follow their lead. Yelling just proves you have no control of any situation. Gram taught me that everytime my dad would yell, and she would calm him down to a whisper without so much as raising her tone. THAT'S what being a strong person is. Being kind by nature, but tough by force.
I for one loved reading your rambling, 10/10 would do again even without the tangential relation to the topic
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Ah that would certainly explain it.
My working theory had been that maybe they were being selected for size à la strawberries, which have grown almost comically huge in recent years. But it's as though nature can only provide a set amount of flavour per fruit, and by growing it larger, it only gets diluted over a greater volume? But I haven't been able to determine whether fast food tomatoes are behemoths since they are already cut up.
Not quite, but close! Molecular plant breeder here.
There is no set "limit" to flavour but it's a complex trait that is easy to lose if you don't select for it. If you breed for size, and don't track taste, it's very easy to leave the flavour-producing aspects unchanged, thus resulting in a "dilution". Furthermore, you're often actively selecting against flavour, indirectly and unintentionally, by selecting for shelf life - if something doesn't ripen, it won't over-ripen and spoil.
This is what has historically happened to a lot of produce but it doesn't have to be the case - modern breeding lets us breed for flavour and nutrition too! Heirloom varieties can offer some reprieve, but for all their taste they tend to be quite unproductive and sickly (ofter "heirloom" means inbred and that does not produce very fit organisms).
Good news is, new varieties are being bred that have it all - yield, taste, and nutrition! It's just hard to convince consumers and businesses to switch over to new varieties, as you don't really buy according to the flavour, just the looks.
Greetings from the UK ;)
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Long shelf life and/or physical durability. Alton Brown made this point in an episode of Good Eats by clamping a supermarket tomato in a bench vise.
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Hydroponic tomatos are cheap, big, and never have any flavor. Those are what most fastfood uses.
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I stopped eating fast food during covid and never got back into it.
The one time, post covid, I was out and stopped to eat, it was gross. But it'd been so long, I genuinely don't know if it had always been gross and I lost my acclimation to it, or if it was actually more gross than it used to be.
Anecdotally, I've heard complaints online that the quality has gone down while the prices went up, so it probably has gotten worse.
I think it was always shit, you and your taste buds just grew up.
At the time I ate lots of fast-food I also liked to drink lots of soda and ice tea, like 2 liters in one sitting when hung over. Now I puke a little in my mouth just thinking of that garbage.
As far as I can tell, Wendy's took a dive after the founder passed away, and Pizza Hut took a dive at least 20 years ago.
The rest it seems dependent on location. I often wonder how much of the variable issues of quality I see are result of continued pressure on the workers as capitalism continues to grind them down.
I work at McDonald's, it is not good and is best avoided.
It doesn't pay a living wage so the people working there don't give a shit about anything
I'm 60 now and am literally a Boomer; fast food has definitely gotten worse. Especially in the last 10 years or so. The foods and processes have been tweaked and tuned to the point that the value of the food hovers just barely above the price and not a tick more.
Health concerns also play a role. McDonald's fries are a good example. When I was young they were cooked in beef tallow and they were so good they would roll your eyes back in your head in in ecstacy (not kidding). They switched to vegetable oil due to health concerns over saturated fats and they've just never been the same.
They switched to vegetable oil due to health concerns over saturated fats
I thought they wanted to make it "vegan" or whatever.
Either way, they took a good fat like tallow and replaced with utter shite.
To be clear, not all vegetable oil is trash but boy macshit will surely use the lowest quality most chemically processed shite out there because they don't respect the customer or their own product.
You can also trust a corpo to do that.
I worked in a "European" US bakery for a hot minute around 2012, and one of the things I remember most was them trying to find new providers with cheaper products. This lead to a difference in taste because obviously in this case the cheaper products are actually a sub-par product.
A big part of it has been the consolidation of the businesses who sell food to restaurants. They all pull from the same places, and so the variety has gone down and the filler gone up.
It's not just fast food, it's all restaurants that are suffering this plague.
I never did anything better than learning to cook at home. My home-made pizza tops any delivery, and I always get to eat it hot out of the oven.
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It's gotten worse. I don't bother eating any of it because I make better food at home.
Not just fast food, chains and franchises in general. Local only may be more of a quality gamble when trying things out but when you find that unassuming diner or small restaurant that takes pride in their daily soups, and doesn't do delivery or apps, and closes at reasonable times for their workers, and is usually packed on weekends, you've found something special.
We sense less and less as we get older. I’ve learned this from observing my kids and seeing them react to things like needles and spicy food with such greater sensitivity than me. I can remember being like them, too. But I just plow through experiences now with less sensation of them. Part of it is that my senses are physically more dull, but also important: my cognitive filters are much more established and sensations that are outside of them get little notice. Meanwhile my kids are like raw nerves at the mercy of every experience that comes their way. Bubble gum probably doesn’t blow your hair back anymore either but I bet it was awesome when you were a kid.
It's not just cognitive. We lose taste buds with age, and the ones that remain shrink and lose sensitivity.
It makes sense if you think about it. Bitterness is associated with a lot of poisons. Sourness is associated with spoiled foods. Having a strong aversion to these tastes during childhood compelled our ancestors to avoid dangerous foods during their most fragile stages of life.
Then of course, sugar is a quick source of energy. It should be a given why a quick source of energy benefitted our ancient ancestors (for whom food was much more scarce.)
In short, that increased childhood sensitivity allowed our ancestors to survive until adulthood.
So parents - next time a kid complains about their dinner being too bitter, take comfort in knowing that if they were ever exposed to actual poison, they'd avoid it with the same urgency.
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It has gone to shit.
In some cases like McDonald's, the ingredients have been on par while the cooking quality has tanked.
For a lot of other places, both the cooking and ingredient quality tanked.
Taco Bell is probably one of the few major chains I still eat at because their ingredients are hard to fuck up cooking and putting it together isn't that difficult.
I’m in my 40s, and I’ve found that fast food quality varies up and down from year to year and location to location.
i freakin love fast food, and as soon as covid hit i had to start a 'blacklist' of places that have gotten so bad (chipotle/tacobell/bugerking), its just not even kind of worth it.
fiveguys is one of my favorites as it did not change in any way.
fiveguys is one of my favorites as it did not change in any way.
Besides that price haha
20 bucks you can get a proper burger at a pub
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I think enshittification is hitting everything, but it's probably also that you are old. I find that I just can't eat the same way that I could 20 years ago.
im in my 40s and feel the same as you. things like fast food dont hold the same appeal, just nostalgia wishing for the 'old taste'
Genuinely shocking to me how disgusting fast food places have gotten. But I’m also not sure if it’s just my perception
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