The prose and filler did make me skip a huge chunk of it though. It could have been probably a quarter of the length and had similar impact
Wasn't too distracted or annoyed by the obvious AI voice.
Learned a bit about ice cream and American (Western?) enshitification at work...
...but these endless, superior, contentless, dogmatic, boring streams of comment threads about how AI it all is.
*Rolls eyes*
I almost actively _long_ for the days when commenters simply didn't read the article/post/treatise/repo and went straight to the comments, or complained about the paywall or the fact that it is on Twitter.
Please be interesting.
it takes more value than it gives you as you need to verify everything and hold everything under scrutiny
I'd rather just not read at all
"Cream and egg yolk are expensive; industry tightens its belt."
The article is specific in the mechanisms by which the industry has changed formulae -- adding air, gums, and stabilizers. It also includes information about who the offending companies are (Unilever). It includes information about how many calories per cup indicate a high quality ice cream, as well as the legally required labeling you can use to recognize not-quite-ice cream.
It also specifically addresses the "cream is expensive" concern, and discusses dairy prices which have fluctuated but not spiked.
No, this is greed and "the customer is a fool who won't notice". The products of capitalism run to a point where there's basically no recourse (short of, I suppose, manufacturing the ice cream yourself) because everything's become one giant megacorp who knows you don't really have much of a choice in brands.
As a small farmer, I have nothing good to say about the USDA or FDA. I would rant further, but I’ve kinda given up at this point. I’m selling my farm next year.
https://www.vitamix.com/us/en_us/what-you-can-make/hot-soups
At least in the context of the article, the requirements for labeling ice cream as such forces some brands to change to "frozen dessert" when they skimp too much on ingredients. It's a small win, but a win nonetheless.
We were able to get a refund from the grocery store and Breyers was a completely dead brand in our family when it originally was the only brand they had bought even before I was born.
Setting aside the fact this was written by an LLM, I think this line of thought (which wasn't invented by the LLM, I mean it's something people actually think) is the very origin of this problem.
The 4 year olds don't know better, but it's because they are learning what ice cream (and everything) is. And if you're feeding them shit, that will set their base level for ice cream for the rest of their life.
IMO young kids should be given quality products as much as possible exactly because they don't know the difference. Unless you want them to grow into adults that still don't know the difference.
If you feed a 4-year-old "frozen dairy dessert" and call it "ice cream", then you're technically also legally wrong.
A Magnum or Cornetto used to be a well sized very tasty snack. In Italy the "cucciolone" (an ice cream sandwich) was literally marketed as being "10 bites".
All of those are now tiny bland things that nobody should buy.
The Magnum Company (neé Algida/Walls/etc) is a fucking disaster and everybody should stop buying their products, but other single packaged ice cream snack makers have been following suit and it's basically a meme that every one of those ice creams now looks like a mignon version of the original.
Alas, small kids still like them and have no frame of reference.
edit: also if i'm looking at the website correctly, it looks like both the "ice cream" version and the "frozen dairy desert" version are the same price ($6.99):
- https://www.fairwaymarket.com/sm/planning/rsid/4000/product/...
- https://www.fairwaymarket.com/sm/planning/rsid/4000/product/...
There is no direction of travel for them other than the nirvana of selling you nothing for something.
Competition obviously seems not to have fixed that. Food standards seemingly don't quite do it yet.
If the law banned 'frozen dairy dessert' they'd go back to selling the higher quality product, probably at a similar price to the worse product (price elasticity being a thing and all.) The only reason they sell the worse product is because they can, and they can because they hide the fact they're selling half a tub of air.
I lived on a farm during summers as a child, but I will not touch raw milk ever again after getting hospitalized with a bacterial infection from it. And the milk was from our cow, btw.
Egg yolks are safer, especially if you take care to extract them properly. Still not safe enough for mass production.
MengerSponge•56m ago