Or because here in the US, pasta is served by the wheelbarrow load at crappy “Italian” restaurants, and soaked in either butter sauce, meat sauce or both. Pizza has gotten so cheesy that you have to ask for light cheese to get what they used to put on it when I was a kid.
It blows my mind how much sugar is in tomato sauce here. I’ve seen anywhere from 3-7 grams of sugar per half cup serving on the jars at the grocery store.
I never put sugar in my tomato sauce I make at home. I don’t get it.
The bummer is that like most things sensory, our perception of how sweet it is depends massively on how sweet everything else we eat is. So for folks in the US who just grow up eating all of these over sweetened products it seems normal and less sweet products taste bland in a way most consumers can’t easily identify.
As for how we got here, this is how it seems to me:
Food marketers learned that if you take two identical food products, and add a small amount of sugar to one, most consumers will prefer the sweeter one even if they don’t identify it as “I like this one cuz it’s a little sweeter”. Our brains are just super primed to subconsciously reach for calorie dense foods, and sweetness says “there’s energy here”.
Think of a basic item like bread or tomato sauce - no sugar initially, they aren’t sweets after all. Imagine some brands take that tactic and add a little sugar - the others who don’t slowly lose market share until they either fade to irrelevance or add sugar too - well, now that’s the new perceived normal. Later, to stand out, someone bumps it again. Consumers start preferring that new slightly sweeter product - rinse and repeat for a few decades across basically all of our food products (plus guzzling soda, another topic), and eventually you have a country full of outrageously sugary foods that taste “normal” to most folks.
It’s sad and it’s actually really challenging to reset one’s palate. I’ve done it, for like 30+ days, ate only things that had zero added sweeteners of any kind, artificial or otherwise. It’s expensive and time-consuming here but before long, even certain raw veggies like carrots start to taste unmistakably sweet. Corn on the cob becomes almost a dessert. And then, now habituated to a much more normal level of sweetness, processed foods taste like the poison they are. But to do that consistently here in the US and keep that normal degree of sensitivity, it requires a dogmatic level of dedication, never going out to eat at all, etc.
So like most things, the population here got manipulated in subtle ways into slowly changing their preferences, without any real coordination or intent by the manipulators beyond “doing a little bit of this bad thing outperforms our competition”, and rinse and repeat until we’re all deranged and don’t even realize it.
Oh yeah, we usually go for store brand for most items but I made the mistake of getting store brand pizza sauce a couple months ago and it was disgustingly sweet. There’s a regional brand that’s really good but only a bit more and completely worth it.
Also pizza was my Covid recipe project. I’ve got a 20 minute dough recipe down and can have pizza ready from scratch in about 35 minutes.
Or because here in the US, pasta is served by the wheelbarrow load at crappy “Italian” restaurants, and soaked in either butter sauce, meat sauce or both. Pizza has gotten so cheesy that you have to ask for light cheese to get what they used to put on it when I was a kid.
Don’t forget that tons of pizza here has a whole bunch of sugar added to the tomato sauce. Shit is gross!
It blows my mind how much sugar is in tomato sauce here. I’ve seen anywhere from 3-7 grams of sugar per half cup serving on the jars at the grocery store.
I never put sugar in my tomato sauce I make at home. I don’t get it.
The bummer is that like most things sensory, our perception of how sweet it is depends massively on how sweet everything else we eat is. So for folks in the US who just grow up eating all of these over sweetened products it seems normal and less sweet products taste bland in a way most consumers can’t easily identify.
As for how we got here, this is how it seems to me:
Food marketers learned that if you take two identical food products, and add a small amount of sugar to one, most consumers will prefer the sweeter one even if they don’t identify it as “I like this one cuz it’s a little sweeter”. Our brains are just super primed to subconsciously reach for calorie dense foods, and sweetness says “there’s energy here”.
Think of a basic item like bread or tomato sauce - no sugar initially, they aren’t sweets after all. Imagine some brands take that tactic and add a little sugar - the others who don’t slowly lose market share until they either fade to irrelevance or add sugar too - well, now that’s the new perceived normal. Later, to stand out, someone bumps it again. Consumers start preferring that new slightly sweeter product - rinse and repeat for a few decades across basically all of our food products (plus guzzling soda, another topic), and eventually you have a country full of outrageously sugary foods that taste “normal” to most folks.
It’s sad and it’s actually really challenging to reset one’s palate. I’ve done it, for like 30+ days, ate only things that had zero added sweeteners of any kind, artificial or otherwise. It’s expensive and time-consuming here but before long, even certain raw veggies like carrots start to taste unmistakably sweet. Corn on the cob becomes almost a dessert. And then, now habituated to a much more normal level of sweetness, processed foods taste like the poison they are. But to do that consistently here in the US and keep that normal degree of sensitivity, it requires a dogmatic level of dedication, never going out to eat at all, etc.
So like most things, the population here got manipulated in subtle ways into slowly changing their preferences, without any real coordination or intent by the manipulators beyond “doing a little bit of this bad thing outperforms our competition”, and rinse and repeat until we’re all deranged and don’t even realize it.
Oh yeah, we usually go for store brand for most items but I made the mistake of getting store brand pizza sauce a couple months ago and it was disgustingly sweet. There’s a regional brand that’s really good but only a bit more and completely worth it.
Also pizza was my Covid recipe project. I’ve got a 20 minute dough recipe down and can have pizza ready from scratch in about 35 minutes.
What do you use for sauce?