Hypothesis - rich people’s food tastes good when made from top quality ingredients by top quality chefs using top quality equipment. Of course, virtually any kind of food will taste better under these conditions - but for rich people’s food these are mandatory conditions for it to be palatable.
This improves its wealth signaling qualities. If you serve pizza to your guests of course it’d taste good - no surprise there. It’s pizza. But if you serve caviar and it tastes good - it means you have the means to procure high quality caviar.
According to this hypothesis, when the lower (or even middle) classes get the chance to try these foods, it’s usually the cheaper kind. Because who would waste good caviar on you? And because taste degrades so steeply with price, we think the type of food itself tastes bad - simply because we are not tasting the same grade the rich eat.
Poor people’s food, of course, is the exact opposite. It’s design to taste good even with cheaper ingredients, common equipment, and lower cooking skills (I’m not saying poor people are bad cooks - but you can’t compare one’s expertise with one chore among many to the top experts that money can buy)
Because who would waste good caviar on you?
My mom would.
“This food tastes like garbage!”
“What did you expect? Rich people eat the garbage parts of the food.”
“Well I ate garbage yesterday and it didn’t cost me $300! Good day, sir!”
Peasant food is the best food. Rich people’s food is stupid with all those little portions, and foam.
Excuse me, it’s called a sensory experience thank you very much!
Foods that are for poor people in their country of origin suddenly spike in price when served in richer countries. Banh mi is like a dollar in Saigon but almost 9 in the US.
I mean big mac is $9 in the US lol, sandwiches just dont get much cheaper than that here nowadays 😭
Though it was weird that bahn exists in the US when we have sub places in the US. Never ordered a bahn mi when pho is on the menu, but they look like small subs
Yeah it’s basically a sub with thai spices and sauces instead of mustard ketchup etc – there’s lots of places that are only bahn mi and nothing else, it’s getting quite popular.
It’s because of the labor and cost of goods.
Ingredients to make banh mi are very cheap but workers in the US are paid more for transportation, making the food and the business operating(lights, has, etc) so now the price rise to fit the cost.
Also some items are priced higher to cover more expensive ingredients. Let’s say you are doing beef banh mi, that’s usually scrap beef from something, let’s say some sirloin scraps, your steak on the menu should probably be like $40 but if you sell a ton of banh mi you can cut that price down to like $30-$35.
does that has a name? or can we call it food gentrification?
It’s also partially just the truth of supply chains. I’m from the US, but live in Germany and the peaches here are simply always going to be more expensive for a worse peach (I’m sure somewhere in Italy or Spain can produce good peaches, but I haven’t had them yet).
Purchasing Power and local market variables.
For tea, that is Genmaicha, which is a green tea with roasted rice added in as a filler. Tastes delicious and is pretty cheap!
Lobster, caviar, mussels, oysters, sushi, ribs, fondue, raclette… They all started as poor people’s dishes
And only became associated with luxury due to the insane costs of producing and shipping them at scale. Well, for the seafood anyways.
Don’t forget the scarcity through over extracting! Nothing says luxury like near extinction.
Shipping used to be the hard part. Eating caviar in Russia in a place with sturgeons nearby was easy enough, serving it at a fancy diner in Berlin or Paris involved insane logistics for the time.
Pizza
its one of the best things in life 👍
Puttanesca was invented by prostitutes. It’s a sort of stew/ragout with seafood anchovies and olives, served on spaghetti
Checks out, “pasta alla puttanesca” literally translates to “whore-style pasta”
Love me some whore dish 🤤
i learned this from a children’s book (series of unfortunate events)
Why not whore-ish
Slutty spaghetti
Next Halloween costume
That would be “pasta puttanesca”
According to a websearch that’s an oft repeated but dubious origin story
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_alla_puttanesca#Etymology
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story
Then the rich people appropriate the dishes of the workers and make them unaffordable. The wealthy produce very little of their own cuisine just as they produce very little of their own labor.
Hopefully we poors will create a new dish out of them.
Remember when cooking fatty meats cook low and slow to properly render out the fat.
Oxtails have entered the chat.
Tbh that’s exactly what I was thinking of as well, for generations it has been a stable of minority communities and workers but is slowly being turned fancy. I don’t want expensive oxtail, I want real authentic oxtail from a local Dominican restaurant.
There was a Chad/Virgin meme about Mexican restaurants.
An expensive Mexican restaurant has 20 kinds of expensive tequila and charges $50.00 for three tacos.
An authentic place has two kinds of beer and you can’t finish $50.00 worth of food by yourself.
All the poor people couldn’t afford cooks; the cooks were their neighbours too.
Wait until you hear about Pinsa
They just made up an “ancient” Roman version of pizza??
In its basic version it’s actually a flat bread like a focaccia, I’ve gotten used to keeping a pair of supermarket-sold ones in the fridge, if one day I don’t have time to buy fresh bread I chuck one of those in the oven, no need to turn it into a pizza.
Looks awesome but Its hard for me to find 3 types of wheat. is there a way to make it with normal wheat.
In your kitchen you can do whatever you want
culture is born out of shared struggles
it happens the other way round.
Spices? meat?
Poor people get to eat diluted wheat porridge and be happy about it.
Clever recipes have been my recent go to a lot lately.
I am starting to think the concepts of Asia being some socialist utopia comes partially from them having more simple cheap and mass made food items designed to feed lots of people for less resources. Food came first, governing style after.
You think they invented that food culture to fit the society? Asian food culture evolved over centuries, it wasn’t “designed.” Rice was an established staple crop in Asia long before they were discussing modern governmental philosophies. It happens to fit your description of cheap and plentiful food, but it wasn’t “designed” to be that, it evolved to be that.
I am starting to think the concepts of Asia being some socialist utopia
What concepts?
Oh a new CCP shill to add to my blocklist
Who told you all of asia is a monolith? They sound racist.
History of bread
