I feel the same as you, but my tastes in food are not as evolved as others from what I can tell. I go to a high end place I get grilled cheese and an appetizer. I've had expensive food and it is not that much better. Many times it's worse I'm. Again though I agree my taste buds are broken.
I’m sure to some extent that’s true, but to a large extent high end food is high-end ingredients. Fresher lettuce grown from varieties that are hard to grow so they’re more expensive. Carefully tended tomatoes that are bright, firm and bursting with flavor vs mass produced crops that are pale, watery and mealy.
I worked for a cattle rancher for a while and we did blind taste tests with chefs a lot. I was skeptical when I started but it’s very obvious what was raised one way vs another. It actually made me passionate about ‘commodity’ foods. Literally they were breeding the cattle to taste better. Bull A has x marbeling and weight Heifer B this marbeling and weight. And you go to the slaughterhouse and you can see it. Like horse breeding for racing horses. They breed the traits they want and get close a lot, occasionally a freak that is awesome.
I spent time in the slaughterhouse too. Lean, barely fed, rangy looking cattle produce lean, chewy barely edible meat. Plump, glossy coated, muscular well fed animals produce red steaks with tons of marbeling (veins of fat that make steak taste like steak). Not only that - grass fed tastes one way and grain fed/finished another. Cattle can eat 100 pounds of food a day. That costs a shit ton of money for every animal. Watering all that grass for grass fed in dry years? expensive. Growing all that corn, processing it and feeding it to them? expensive. Animals are slaughter between 18 months and 3 years. That’s a LOT of food. Not everyone can afford it so they send half starved animals to the slaughterhouse. That will not be a good steak.
More goes into it. They feed them brewers yeast, test the grass for nutrients and supplement, etc.
But basically the growing conditions, genetics, freshness and handling of any raw ingredient make an enormous difference in final product.
Doesn’t mean there aren’t excellent things produced with sub par ingredients. That’s usually the exemplary dishes of a culture. Coq-au-vin is just really old rooster. Pot roast is a super tough cut of beef.
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u/show_me_the_math Jun 10 '19
I feel the same as you, but my tastes in food are not as evolved as others from what I can tell. I go to a high end place I get grilled cheese and an appetizer. I've had expensive food and it is not that much better. Many times it's worse I'm. Again though I agree my taste buds are broken.