It’s not that butter and olive oil is SO expensive but that the cheaper alternatives fill the niches well enough while keeping the shareholders happy. See also cane sugar vs corn syrup or fresh squeezed vs frozen concentrate juice.
The real stuff is all available, too, just not at the lowest levels of dining away from home where the worst of the cost cutting occurs. As said, sometimes you get lucky with a place that still has whipped butter or, say, cheap homemade corned beef hash but it’s not realistic to expect.
I meant in a wider commercial food sense but, thinking about it, I’ll bet you have, for some definitions of ‘jar full.’ And eatery. Ok, gas station coffee nooks. …which often have jugs of liquid coffee additives briming with corn syrup.
Beet sugar does not need to be labeled differently from cane sugar in the US and most Americans have probably eaten some in the past month.
Yep, true. At the best places they use something with like 10% real maple syrup, or at least they used to. My Dad used to buy Log Cabin, which back then (no longer) had 10 or 15% real maple syrup.
I’ve had real maple syrup at restaurants. But they usually give you a little bottle, and charge extra if you want more. I imagine that’s more common in Vermont and Quebec than in most other places.
Plastic chopsticks? I confess I’ve not encountered this before. Granted, with a diabetic in the family we seldom get Chinese food anymore (carbohydrates found in many Chinese dishes are typically quite high) I’ve only ever seen restaurants provide the disposable wooden ones you split apart. When did plastic ones become a thing?
Aren’t wooden chopsticks considered an ‘essential item’ anymore?
The disposable wooden chopsticks are newer, in my experience. They all used to have plastic (fake ivory) chopsticks when i was a kid. Maybe no place does that any longer.
In California, you will find disposable chopsticks at a $150 a person Omakasi seating. I can’t remember the last time I was given fancy, reusable chopsticks in an Asian restaurant and it’s not like I eat at places like Panda Express.
As a Vermont resident, I can report that while ‘bottomless’ quantities of Malpe syrup are rarer than they used to be (as opposed to portioned out amounts per order), you would be hard pressed to find a restaurant or diner here that didn’t include maple syrup as included in the price of pancakes or waffles. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen little jugs or vessels of maple syrup sitting out along with other tableside condiments, but that used to be pretty common.
I didn’t think of them as fancy. But i do remember the last time i used them, and it was shortly before the pandemic. The restaurant had a bin holding chopsticks upright, next to the soy sauce and vinegar and hot sauce containers. It was a medium-quality Chinese place. I saw disposable chopsticks at Japanese places well before they moved into the Chinese places, fwiw.
Yep, I’ve never been to a $150 a person Japanese restaurant but at all the teppanyaki places I’ve been to, which can get pricey if you order the high end stuff and lots of appetizers and drinks, I’ve also never seen anything but disposable chopsticks.
