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Comment by plastic-enjoyer

3 hours ago

I don’t see my post as making any judgement, let alone offering criticism. It’s simply my observation that many people prefer the artificial stuff to the original product.

But since you’ve brought this up, I’d argue that it’s not a question of elitism, but rather that 'the masses' simply isn’t given access to these products. What they get is an abstraction of the original, which merely imitates the flavour but abstracts anything else away. Take, for example, meat or vegetable stock, which is now a staple in every kitchen in the form of powder or stock cubes. If you take a look at the ingredients and nutritional values, they’re rather disappointing. The masses may get access to the taste, but not to the nutrients.

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plastic-enjoyer

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api  3 hours ago

I didn’t mean to come off as criticizing you, just providing a balancing counterpoint on some of the ideas.

The question is: can you give billions of people the “authentic” version?

In some cases you can. In the US at least there’s boutique groceries and farmers markets that sell more authentic organic food that usually does have better nutritional value. But it costs more.

The artificial mass market imitation is cheaper because it is thermodynamically cheaper. It takes far less labor (the most costly input to almost all processes) and it substitutes things that can be bulk produced at a lower unit cost. Being less nutritious probably directly correlates since nutrition is chemical complexity is lower entropy, higher energy, harder to scale.

There’s a lot of rare “authentic” experiences that cannot be scaled. That means most people can’t have them, ever.

You can’t have both rarity / exclusivity and democratization / equality. One side has to give.

  • pluralmonad  3 hours ago

    This is exactly what the article touches on, the race to the bottom. It drags everyone's experience down. This appeal to scalability is part of the problem, IMO. Not every experience is or should be scalable. Some kids find blackberry bushes at grandma's instead of strawberries. Little is gained by strip mining human experience so the thinnest veneer can be "scaled".

    • brookst  2 hours ago

      But what do you do about free will? If billions of people want maple syrup, do you say “no, no, we can’t scale the real thing and corn syrup is a poor substitute, so you can’t have even a simulacrum of the experience”?