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)