actually in the case of kfc the colonel himself said in the late 70s that what they were calling KFC didn’t have much to do with what he originally made … and its worse now …
well todays 7 up is supposed to be "all natural "
It’s not a valid comparison to compare something decades old to a new product. Even soda changes with age despite it being in a can or bottle. When I first got together with my ex, I was desperate for a Coke. She gave a years old one from her fridge (her family didn’t drink soda) and it only only tasted odd, but there was clump of “something” a the bottom. I used to collect Coca Cola items and tried a few cans and bottles that I had on display for years. They all tasted differently bad.
Coke from Mexico has cane sugar and during certain holidays, some stores will sell commemorative bottles with cane sugar.
Don’t know if this an urban legend or not, but I’ve read and believe stories that Coca Cola was fiddling with the original non-coca formula before New Coke was introduced. As I’ve discussed at length the thread about why there’s so few mainstream sugarless candies, companies don’t just introduce changes to their products without extensive market research and probably unknowing human guinea pig testing. Hey, we made Coke sweeter in markets X, Y and Z so people like it! So New Coke it is!
In the post New Coke era, it’s a sure thing that extensive testing is done, including introducing new product lines like Coke Zero Sugar to supplement their diet cola line before possibly replacing existing products.
Mexican cane sugar Coke is widely available here in a variety of stores (in glass bottles!). It’s popular with all sorts of people. No need to wait for Passover.
- You don’t say where “here” is. (One of my pet peeves here at the SDMB.) B) It’s more expensive than the regular stuff, right?
My point was that, for people who aren’t wherever “here” is, real-sugar Coke may be available for a month or two each year, and probably with no price premium.
Yeah, not everyone lives in Texas, where you can get it pretty much anywhere year round, if you’re willing to pay the markup. It’s more expensive, I want to say a half liter glass bottle costs $1.99, so it’s not excessive, but it is pricey.
It’s also not the ancient Coca-Cola formula, either. It’s basically the 70’s formula. It’s tasty, has a different, softer, less acidic feel in your mouth than corn syrup coke. If you don’t drink soft drinks all the time, you might not notice it, and maybe not even then.
a few people think new Coke was a publicity stunt. People love a good conspiracy.
I buy Coke in returnable, half liter, glass bottles for about 40 cents. It definitely tastes better than the plastic ones, but I believe it is because of the glass.
You folks say it is the cane sugar vs HFCS. But the truth is, there are no ingredients listed on either product. So, how can we be sure?
Passover Coke and Mexican Coke taste indistinguishable to me. And only slightly different than the normal HFCS sweetened stuff.
Where there’s a difference between them is that the HFCS ones have a… syrupy taste and mouthfeel that kind of lingers, while the sugar sweetened one’s sweetness fades faster.
If we consider God (god) a creator of foods, then I would assume chicken has always tasted like chicken. Other than that, I got nuthin’. 
Fentiman’s isn’t that hard to find, but you’re probably looking in the wrong places. I never see it in grocery stores, but often in liquor stores in the mixer section. Their tonic and ginger ale are popular among cocktail snobs. I’ve bought Curiosity Cola within the past couple years, and it is definitely tasty.
In the same vein, Poundstone (where are you these days Will? We need you more than ever!) claims modern day KFC only has about 4 herbs and spices. He speculated the other 7 herbs and spices may have been taken out over the years. If this sounds pretty conspiratorial, he noted even the Colonel noted the gravy recipe had changed over the years–and the Colonel didn’t like it at all. For what it’s worth, I don’t notice any real difference between mid-80s KFC and the current stuff.
I haven’t seen the Kosher Coke for years but I usually find Mexican Coke in single bottles year round in the International aisle at most grocery stores. Also, at the exits of Home Depot, locally, they have coolers with Mexican Coke. There’s a couple places you can try.
Cheerios publicly changed their recipe to make it stay crisp in milk longer. The original recipe got soggy pretty much immediately, and disintegrated shortly thereafter. I liked it better before, even so.
Actually, for many of the old, popular varieties of apples, a number of genetic sports have been found and propagated. So, a bud on a red delicious apple was hit by cosmic rays, changing one gene, and now that branch produces apples that are a little redder. Tissue from that branch is propagated, and sold to orchardists as an improved “red delicious”, and it’s still marketed as “red delicious”
There are a LOT of cultivars of “red delicious” available right now. And by and large, the older, greener ones have better flavor than the “improved” version.
How they are cultivated also affects the quality of the apple, including its size, crispness, and flavor. Domestic apples are grown on trees that are a sort of Frankenstein – the rootstock is genetically different from the top. And while the top mostly determines what the apple will look and taste like (and what it is called) the rootstock has some influence. Some rootstocks are known to produce larger or smaller apples, or more or fewer apples (affecting sweetness, as the tree only has so many leaves) and so on. Speaking of number of apples, most apples are thinned as they grow, because larger sweeter apples command a premium price. And how crunchy the apple is depends not only on the cultivar, but on whether it got enough calcium (possibly helped along with a calcium spray of the foliage) how cold it was in the evening as it ripened, and a host of other things.
But overall, you are right. Apples today tend to be larger, sweeter, and crisper than in the past – even for the same cultivar.
I had Indonesian coca-cola on Kuta beach 12 years ago. I’d just finished surfing and was very tired. The bottle came out of a cooler filled with ice, so it was very cold. I’m not a big soda drinker, but I could taste that it was different from the last coke I’d had in the states. It reminded me of the coke I used to drink in the US in the 70s, before the ‘new coke’ debacle of 1985.
We have Mexican coke in the supermarkets here, along with throwback Pepsi products: Mountain Dew, etc.
As fat as I am, I’ll stick to club soda.
I can tell you about when Taco Bell changed - it would have been in 1990 or '91. I worked at Taco Bell in high school and when I started the meat was delivered to us as ground beef, and we added a bag of seasoning and cooked it all in giant, rectangular pans with an oversized potato masher. The beans were dried beans that we cooked in a big pressure cooker, then beat with a long rotary tool on a drill. The chicken and beef fajita strips were pre-cut but raw, and we would cook those on a large, flat “cooking table” (sorry, I forgot what it was called but it’s the same sort of thing that they use at McDonald’s for cooking the burgers).
The ground beef was the first to change. It came pre-cooked in plastic bags, which we would heat in boiling water. A few months later the beans started to come in a bag in powder form, to which we would add hot water. Somewhere in there the fajita strips also started to come pre-cooked in bags like the beef, and they were also heated in boiling water.
The only one of those changes I liked were the beans, and that was mostly a logistics thing. If we ran out of the old beans, it took 90 minutes to cook another batch. The new beans could be whipped up in a moment.
Amazon sells Mexican coke if you can’t find it locally.
I don’t know about Graham crackers or Saltine crackers, but Ritz crackers sure changed, and not for the better. I think they switched baking oils or something. They just seem…off…now.
I agree! The last few times I had Ritz crackers, they seemed almost stale.