Ah, but yet…

“Wagenius”? The dumbest dude in the article has a surname that is the “Wario” or “Waluigi”-ified version of the word genius. That is rich.

Woof, that’s hilarious and annoying. Food service from what I understand has super thin margins - things like fountain drink sodas (and alcohol sales at other spots) do a lot of the work on keeping the place economically viable. Not excusing that guy’s pettiness but if you see weird behavior around a specific ingredient or item, it’s probably something along those lines.

The bummer is that like most things sensory, our perception of how sweet it is depends massively on how sweet everything else we eat is. So for folks in the US who just grow up eating all of these over sweetened products it seems normal and less sweet products taste bland in a way most consumers can’t easily identify.

As for how we got here, this is how it seems to me:

Food marketers learned that if you take two identical food products, and add a small amount of sugar to one, most consumers will prefer the sweeter one even if they don’t identify it as “I like this one cuz it’s a little sweeter”. Our brains are just super primed to subconsciously reach for calorie dense foods, and sweetness says “there’s energy here”.

Think of a basic item like bread or tomato sauce - no sugar initially, they aren’t sweets after all. Imagine some brands take that tactic and add a little sugar - the others who don’t slowly lose market share until they either fade to irrelevance or add sugar too - well, now that’s the new perceived normal. Later, to stand out, someone bumps it again. Consumers start preferring that new slightly sweeter product - rinse and repeat for a few decades across basically all of our food products (plus guzzling soda, another topic), and eventually you have a country full of outrageously sugary foods that taste “normal” to most folks.

It’s sad and it’s actually really challenging to reset one’s palate. I’ve done it, for like 30+ days, ate only things that had zero added sweeteners of any kind, artificial or otherwise. It’s expensive and time-consuming here but before long, even certain raw veggies like carrots start to taste unmistakably sweet. Corn on the cob becomes almost a dessert. And then, now habituated to a much more normal level of sweetness, processed foods taste like the poison they are. But to do that consistently here in the US and keep that normal degree of sensitivity, it requires a dogmatic level of dedication, never going out to eat at all, etc.

So like most things, the population here got manipulated in subtle ways into slowly changing their preferences, without any real coordination or intent by the manipulators beyond “doing a little bit of this bad thing outperforms our competition”, and rinse and repeat until we’re all deranged and don’t even realize it.

I think it’s probably being in the age range that kinda straddled the time between now - when it’s all an unshakeable piece of daily life - and the time before it existed / was commonplace. Having grown up before all of these world changing tech advances, and then being there for the ride, is just a singular experience and perspective neither our parents or our kids can possibly have.

I’m really grateful for having gotten to take the ride, but it does strike me as sad in a way.

Just got mine set up this weekend, really works a treat! Utterly painless. Even put the client on the Roku I apparently don’t own, hope the pricks somehow notice lol

You should watch the video! I don’t have a link, sorry. They turn up on a “kiss cam”, instantly freak out and hide, and the dude with the mic (Coldplay I guess?) clowns em (briefly) for it. It is a goddamn gem and the best part is their own freak out is the only reason it blew up and got found out at all. Just lovely stuff.

Or maybe this kind of comic comes from people who’ve directly witnessed a lot of wildly ignorant bigoted takes from their fellow countrymen. I agree with this comic in every way, and I’d be the first to argue that the US has a diverse, fascinating collection of culture, highly regional and frankly beautiful in its all-too-human strengths and weaknesses.

But we have a ton of clowns like the character here, who don’t understand more than a sliver of their own history or culture.

Don’t forget that tons of pizza here has a whole bunch of sugar added to the tomato sauce. Shit is gross!

Yeesh! I stumbled onto that image just scrolling, had no prior awareness of the situation. I found even just that without context off-putting and gross, wondered what the poster meant. This person just oozes toxicity, so sorry you’ve gotta deal with that.

I can’t confess to being quite as wholesome as you (well, at least your food decision-making lol) but you’re on top of it, ya love to see it. I have, though, been making much more thoughtful choices about how much factory farmed meat I consume. Getting it down pretty low these days, but it helps that I have an Indian spot nearby with vegetarian food at least as satisfying as any meat-based dish. Malai kofta, unnnnfff.

Side note - since parts of this thread run the risk of shaming poor folks for “bad” financial decisions - I’m not going there (and I don’t think you were either, you sound compassionate to me). It’s a problem to a degree of course, but also being super (often hopelessly?) poor really screws up the brain. Speaking from experience. Scarcity, even self-imposed, can sometimes take me to some dark places, most notably back to personality traits that I developed in those days that I have done tremendous work to repair. Our systems are deranged and nonsensical, not our poor.

Yet another “wtf, y’all?”, good point. I can’t personally say that grosses me out, but I tend to be in the minority on that sort of topic myself, so I totally see what you’re saying. Aint no health inspector checking these vehicles (true of traditional delivery too I suppose).

And I mean…sometimes the drivers straight up eat some food, which is awful from the standpoint of your POV, but also just… truly hilarious to me.

That is a good point (re: COVID) that I had lost along the way, thanks. Those services did do good during that time, you’re right. I’m not so sure about the GPS thing, but hey, I never thought we’d see half the ugly shit we’re seeing these days, so why not?

Of all the modern capitalistic irritations (to put it mildly), this one I really detest. And not least because of how ridiculously popular it is, wtf people? I watch folks I know, who can barely afford the food itself in the first place, then inflate the price by like 40%, just to eat the already (very!) mediocre food…cold. Solely so that they don’t have to leave the house. Just completely unhinged from my POV, and honestly produces almost a sense of alienation in me, I find it so bizarre.

Disclaimer though - I will acknowledge both that I happily enjoy various different foolish things myself, so the point about glass houses is worth my keeping in mind, and also there are some great reasons to use it (limited mobility for one, as another user pointed out).

But sheesh folks. Restaurants largely hate it from my understanding, the drivers doing it hate it (cuz the job - oh excuse me, the preferred exploitation-hiding euphemism is “gig” - is utter shit, a literal minor improvement over straight up homelessness), the environment hates it, the wear-and-tear on a likely broke person’s vehicle and the wear-and-tear on already struggling infrastructure…I mean what the fuckity fuck, seriously. How is this so popular, we’re all insane and just conveniencing our way to oblivion. SMgoddamnH.

Aside from the aforementioned reasonable uses (largely edge cases, let’s be honest), there is precisely one group of people who truly benefit in any serious way from this amazingly destructive nonsense - and wouldn’t you know it, it’s the exact same group fucking us in every other way! Weird!

Sorry. This one really gets me.

No u - go learn.

This is exactly right, and thanks for saying it. The assumption that poor people don’t understand money is just so completely incorrect, and frankly damaging. Poor folks understand money (and specifically, what it can and can’t do) better than anyone else on this earth.

Hey - I don’t usually do this, but I grew up poor and I get it. DM me, I’ll buy you the game.

Ah, now that is tricksy and I did not notice. Thanks for spelling it out, really not that complicated when I look at it today lol. Think I’ll try to take this as a useful reminder to slow down on any slander I feel compelled to dole out, lol. Cheers.

Eh? OP said they cross-posted from a locked post on Lemmy.world. Am I missing something you’re pointing out?

Edit: while the below is broadly true imo, nonetheless I made a mistake here and Lemmy.world isn’t at fault.

Lemmy.world is not a place that allows free discussion about many reasonable topics and more people need to know that. Yes it’s because of their local laws, still makes them a shitty instance.