For a few years, I ate very little prepackaged food (canned soup, macaroni & cheese, etc.) I preferred to make things from scratch or eat out. Now that I have kids, I don’t have as much time to cook, so I’ve been eating more prepackaged stuff.
I’ve been struck by how bland most of this stuff tastes. When I was little, my favorite food was Kraft macaroni and cheese, and I seem to remember a pleasant saltiness and tanginess to the cheese sauce. I ate some the other day and I swear, if I’d been blindfolded, I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish it from oatmeal. The cheese sauce mix (the powder) used to have a real kick if you ate it dry, but I tried some recently and it was just…blah. It used to taste like the cheese powder they put on popcorn, but now it’s really…blah.
Also, I ate some Progresso soup, and it was like making love in a canoe (f**king close to water). But I noticed that when I dumped a whole lot of salt into it (like a teaspoon in one bowl), it tasted much better.
Does anyone know if the prepackaged food industry radically reduced the salt content of its food within the past few years? Perhaps to appease the Center for Science in the Public Interest and wet blankets of that ilk?
I haven’t heard anything about it. I have a personal crazy theory that children generally have much more sensitive taste (along with their other senses) than adults. It explains why so many seemingly inoccuous foods (most vegetables, for instance) are unpalatable to many children. I wonder if Kraft Macaroni & Cheese just isn’t particularly exciting flavorwise, and kids just have sharp enough senses that they enjoy it nonetheless. (Though it does seem like Kraft Dinner was better when I was a kid.)
Hi. Just a quick bit from a newbie. I looked around for a bit and found this . A few other searches on industry salt reduction turned up hits from Britain on some efforts to reduce salt content, like this one from Unilever . Overall though , from my searches it seemed the industry in general was more worried about losing customers over flavour than reducing salt in their products. Many articles I turned up were about the health risks involved in too much salt added to processed foods. It’s possible that Kraft Dinner (or mac & cheese; as an aside, I’ve heard that the ‘dinner’ name was mainly used up here in Canada) tastes less salty now because of a general trend in eating extra salt even when you don’t know it.
Not having a list of food you’ve eaten in the last X years, this is hardly an expert opinion, but it might explain the blandness of it now. I find the effect myself in a smaller timescale with sour candies. Have one that’s more sour than the rest, and the others quickly lose the ‘zing’. BTW, your wet blankets had this to say about the issue.
I agree with Excalibre. Kids definitely have “turned up” tastebuds. At least, that would explain why spicy foods are a taste most people enjoy when they’re older. Why the older folks at my table complain that the food is “tasteless” when it’s perfectly fine to us middle folks and the kids complain that it’s “too spicy.” (“Spicy” in Kidspeak, does not seem to mean what it does to the rest of us. It means any flavor they deem too strong. Lemons are spicy. Coffee is spicy. It takes many years before they “get” concepts like sour and bitter.)
Unless a product is marketed as low or lower sodium, there’s no reason to reduce the salt content from a manufacturing or marketing standpoint. We certainly have not lost our preference for salty tasting Mac and Cheese.
(I always thought Progresso was like sex in a boat. But I was raised on Campbell’s condensed - saltlick in a bowl.)
Nanook OTN: I saw old boxes of Kraft’s macaroni and cheese product on Unwrapped or some similar show a while ago, and it appears that the product was, early on, called Kraft Dinner in the US, and was also called Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Dinner some time ago. In the US, it became just Kraft Macaroni & Cheese (they were calling it ‘Cheese & Macaroni’ in the 80s, in commercials, but I don’t know if they changed the packaging). In Canada, it’s still Kraft Dinner. There’s probably some old boxes on the Web, so you might be able to see what the American boxes used to look like. I’m not sure why Kraft Canada decided to keep calling it ‘Kraft Dinner’, but it might have something to do with bilingual packaging.
I considered this, too, but what about the popularity of super-sour candies among the Sesame Street demographic? My boy is three and he loves that stuff (as well as mac-n-cheese).
Really? I’m pretty sure we in the UK still eat it by the truckload. As for the salt issue, I remember reading something about a voluntary code of conduct among UK food manufacturers aimed at reducing salt levels.
FSA being the [url=http://www.food.gov.uk/news/newsarchive/2004/sep/saltcampaignews]Food Standards Agency, which last year launched a big salt campaign:
From everything I’ve gathered, both salt and sugar contents in food have been going up steadily. It’s more likely that in your stint in home cooking, you gradually increased the salt content of your own foods until you became acclimatised to higher salt. Everybody I’ve ever spoken to about shifting from homemade to store bought has complained about over-saltiness.
What’s odd is that at the same time, I can no longer stand to eat fast-food hamburgers, which used to be one of my guilty pleasures. They’re way too salty and chemically-tasting, except for In-N-Out.
Not actually banned, but it does have a very bad rep in the US, and manufactures want to stay away from it, I forgot why but almost all chinese food places around here have in big letters NO MSG USED.
While most chinese restaurants shy away from MSG due to bad press, many manufactured food makers are sill putting it in their foods under Flavour Enhancer 621.
Hyperelastic, have many of your other tastes changed recently? Maybe you are just hitting one of those stages where your palate seems to ‘switch over’. There are some foods I loved back in the day that I wouldn’t go near now; KD being one. I used to have KD and hot dogs when I was a kid all the time (Kid Chow), but now the schoolbus orange sauce over noodles and coweyes just doesn’t appeal to me anymore. The reverse with tomatoes - they made me actually gag as a kid, but now I think they are great. Could this be a case of your tastebuds shifting gears?
MSG is the required label if the ingredient is 99% free glutamate. If the ingredient is less than 99% free glutamate, it may be called:
• Calcium caseinate
• Sodium caseinate
• Textured protein
• Natural flavoring
• Yeast food
• Autolyzed yeast
• Hydrolyzed protein
• Hydrolyzed vegetable protein
• Yeast extract
• Hydrolyzed yeast
• Natural chicken or turkey flavoring
• And other spices
• Modified food starch
Other foods or ingredients which often contain free glutamates are:
“Barley malt, Hydrolyzed oat flour, Smoke flavoring, Basted turket, Infant formula, Soy sauce, Bouillon, Malt extract or flavoring, Torula yeast, Broth or stock for soups, Processed meats in general, Vegetable gum, Carrageenan, Salad dressings, Whey protein, Sausage/bacon/lunch meats, Worcestershire sauce, Flavored cereals, Seasoned salts, Maltodextrin, Soy protein.”
I defy you to find me a prepackaged food item that doesn’t have one or more of these. Even in “ORGANIC! NATURAL! WHOLE FOOD GOODNESS! MSG FREE!” labeled boxes. If it’s pre-made food, it’ll have this stuff in it.
Now, I personally think the free glutamate scare is way overblown. But to say that prepackaged food no longer contains MSG is misleading. It may not contain pure MSG, but it almost certainly contains dilute MSG under another name.
It’s quite possible. Time was, I couldn’t stand Indian food (curries and such), but now I can’t get enough of it. The human body is interesting, isn’t it?
