The USA is poor now. The problem is not that companies are enshittifying ice-cream. The problem is that people are so poor that enshttified ice-cream is all they can afford.
What Big Food Did to Ice Cream
21–30 of 76 posts
Re: What Big Food Did to Ice Cream
#22We have a milk cow. We prep our ice cream from scratch in about 5 minutes: two cups of raw milk, 1/4 cup maple syrup, 1t-1T vanilla, 1/4t salt, and 6-8 raw egg yolks. Blend everything in a quart jar with an immersion blender and pour into a Cuisinart ice cream maker. AFAIK, you literally cannot buy anything close to this good. As a small farmer, I have nothing good to say about the USDA or FDA. I would rant further,…
You don't... heat it? Egg yolks change their role in ice cream when heated, increasing their emulsifying power and creating a richer ice cream.
Re: What Big Food Did to Ice Cream
#23As an immigrant I thought for a while now that all ice cream in USA taste like shit, despite my wife saying I'm imagining things... Now I know why.
There's still a few brands, you'll just end up paying through the nose for them.
Re: What Big Food Did to Ice Cream
#24Prose that reads as artificial as the 'dairy dessert' it describes.
glad I wasn't the only one. every other sentence had antithesis, it was exhausting to read even if accurate
I could skim the article.
Wasn't too distracted or annoyed by the obvious AI voice.
Learned a bit about ice cream and American (Western?) enshitification at work...
...but these endless, superior, contentless, dogmatic, boring streams of comment threads about how AI it all is.
*Rolls eyes*
I almost actively _long_ for the days when commenters simply didn't read the article/post/treatise/repo and went straight to the comments, or complained about the paywall or the fact that it is on Twitter.
Please be interesting.
Re: What Big Food Did to Ice Cream
#25We have a milk cow. We prep our ice cream from scratch in about 5 minutes: two cups of raw milk, 1/4 cup maple syrup, 1t-1T vanilla, 1/4t salt, and 6-8 raw egg yolks. Blend everything in a quart jar with an immersion blender and pour into a Cuisinart ice cream maker. AFAIK, you literally cannot buy anything close to this good. As a small farmer, I have nothing good to say about the USDA or FDA. I would rant further,…
> I have nothing good to say about the USDA or FDA.
At least in the context of the article, the requirements for labeling ice cream as such forces some brands to change to "frozen dessert" when they skimp too much on ingredients. It's a small win, but a win nonetheless.
Re: What Big Food Did to Ice Cream
#26I grew up on Breyers, it was the only ice cream my parents bought. I read an article over a decade ago and pointed this out to my parents that the carton said dairy desert after reading a similar article. We were able to get a refund from the grocery store and Breyers was a completely dead brand in our family when it originally was the only brand they had bought even before I was born.
What happened to them happens often -- quality food brands are bought and the contents changed. You as a consumer have to stay on your toes.
Re: What Big Food Did to Ice Cream
#273000 words which can be distilled down to 10: "Cream and egg yolk are expensive; industry tightens its belt."
But you'll miss out on such priceless gems as "This is the story of the dairy frog, boiled by ever poorer ice creams."
Re: What Big Food Did to Ice Cream
#283000 words which can be distilled down to 10: "Cream and egg yolk are expensive; industry tightens its belt."
"industry worked out a way to sell you air at the price of cream and eggs" would be a more accurate distillation. They haven't reduced the quality of the product because the ingredients got expensive; they've reduced the quality because they worked how to sell you less for the same money, which results in more profit.
If the law banned 'frozen dairy dessert' they'd go back to selling the higher quality product, probably at a similar price to the worse product (price elasticity being a thing and all.) The only reason they sell the worse product is because they can, and they can because they hide the fact they're selling half a tub of air.
Re: What Big Food Did to Ice Cream
#29[deleted]
Re: What Big Food Did to Ice Cream
#30This reminds me of the similar fight over the term "milk": https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/almond-milk-can-keep...