PBS FTW, been digging their stuff since I was a toddler watching Sesame Street lol. Their PBS Eons channel (on YT…) is great, when I was watching more video content I enjoyed their streaming service for a range of stuff too, can’t remember what it was called now though.
So yeah give em some bucks folks and watch cool stuff, they really need it.
“Wagenius”? The dumbest dude in the article has a surname that is the “Wario” or “Waluigi”-ified version of the word genius. That is rich.
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.
I think it’s probably being in the age range that kinda straddled the time between now - when it’s all an unshakeable piece of daily life - and the time before it existed / was commonplace. Having grown up before all of these world changing tech advances, and then being there for the ride, is just a singular experience and perspective neither our parents or our kids can possibly have.
I’m really grateful for having gotten to take the ride, but it does strike me as sad in a way.
Don’t forget that tons of pizza here has a whole bunch of sugar added to the tomato sauce. Shit is gross!
This is exactly right, and thanks for saying it. The assumption that poor people don’t understand money is just so completely incorrect, and frankly damaging. Poor folks understand money (and specifically, what it can and can’t do) better than anyone else on this earth.
Hey - I don’t usually do this, but I grew up poor and I get it. DM me, I’ll buy you the game.
Ah, now that is tricksy and I did not notice. Thanks for spelling it out, really not that complicated when I look at it today lol. Think I’ll try to take this as a useful reminder to slow down on any slander I feel compelled to dole out, lol. Cheers.
Eh? OP said they cross-posted from a locked post on Lemmy.world. Am I missing something you’re pointing out?
Edit: while the below is broadly true imo, nonetheless I made a mistake here and Lemmy.world isn’t at fault.
Lemmy.world is not a place that allows free discussion about many reasonable topics and more people need to know that. Yes it’s because of their local laws, still makes them a shitty instance.
what the fuck