> Perfect for feeding 20 hungry four-year-olds who wouldn’t know the difference. But few adults were fooled
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.
Far be it from me to defend Big Food, but let's play devil's advocate for a moment, just facts with no LLM slop.
Hyperbole aside they created a new product category which has less milk fat, and adds more air and gum/gelatin.
It tastes similar to ice cream at half the calories, not so insignificant in a world where obesity is the #1 public health crisis.
Their labeling is technically compliant with regulations but converting classic ice cream brands into these "ice milk desserts" was unpleasantly sneaky of them.
Are we 100% sure all the consumers eating these desserts have been fooled? We're sure no one's choosing them because they're lower calorie, lower fat, lower price, tastes good enough etc.?
If it tasted good, a dessert that's 99% air and ice would be a public health win would it not? That's pretty much what bingsu is, I don't care for it, but many people love it.
Haagen-Dazs is still there on the shelves and still good ice cream.
I don't know, I think the outrage is a little overblown. "Tastes better but is twice the calories" is a very significant consumer choice. I bet many will say they want the "real" stuff, but when it comes to purchasing decisions, buy the "fake" stuff more often.
There may be better windmills to tilt at than lecturing people on which type of milk dessert is the right choice. The brand shenanigans aside maybe we are in a better position having both options on the shelves.
It's a general feeling more than a precise diagnosis, and I guess it could also be a human that has internalised LLM style, or a human-written draft that was reworded by an LLM. But it just really feels like LLM writing.
We have a milk cow. We prep our ice cream from scratch in about 5 minutes: two cups of raw milk, 1/4 cup maple syrup, 1t-1T vanilla, 1/4t salt, and 6-8 raw egg yolks. Blend everything in a quart jar with an immersion blender and pour into a Cuisinart ice cream maker. AFAIK, you literally cannot buy anything close to this good.
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.
> I have nothing good to say about the USDA or FDA.
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.
This kind of recipe is wildly irresponsible to actually sell. Raw unpasteurized milk _will_ cause health issues when used in large quantities. Ditto for raw egg yolks.
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.
I’ve been making ice cream at home for the last few years and I’ll never go back. Store bought is all trash now. If you haven’t had the chance to taste ice cream from a Ninja Creami, you’re missing out!
"industry worked out a way to sell you air at the price of cream and eggs" would be a more accurate distillation. They haven't reduced the quality of the product because the ingredients got expensive; they've reduced the quality because they worked how to sell you less for the same money, which results in more profit.
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.
Ignoring the obvious flaws in the writing and the prose, I find it interesting because it’s one of the more obvious examples of enshittification that plagues American culture - often in ways that are so subtle that one might be considered paranoid for trying to recognize them. It lays bare, in a way that any American can understand (most Americans eat and enjoy ice cream) the consequences of the never ending treadmill of corporate greed
I think that's extremely ungenerous and misses the point of the article.
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.
how much of this is just trying to optimize the nutrition facts to come across as less unhealthy? the "full of air" version is half the fat and has less sugar. consumers are generally trending in the direction of avoiding these two line items so guess it's a win win for breyers if it's also cheaper to make.
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):
I grew up on Breyers, it was the only ice cream my parents bought. I read an article over a decade ago and pointed this out to my parents that the carton said dairy desert after reading a similar article.
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.
On the European side of the pond, single packaged industrial ice cream is also gone to shit.
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.
There's a frozen custard shop in my town. They sometimes do silly things like including raw sliced strawberries that just turn into ice shards, but their vanilla and chocolate absolutely beat the pants off anything I can find in the grocery.
The content was pretty good though IMO. It’s something that I think a lot of people in the USA have long believed and experienced, but seeing a technical takedown demonstrating it hits harder for some reason.
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.
The USA is poor now. The problem is not that companies are enshittifying ice-cream. The problem is that people are so poor that enshttified ice-cream is all they can afford.
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.
Hyperbole aside they created a new product category which has less milk fat, and adds more air and gum/gelatin.
It tastes similar to ice cream at half the calories, not so insignificant in a world where obesity is the #1 public health crisis.
Their labeling is technically compliant with regulations but converting classic ice cream brands into these "ice milk desserts" was unpleasantly sneaky of them.
Are we 100% sure all the consumers eating these desserts have been fooled? We're sure no one's choosing them because they're lower calorie, lower fat, lower price, tastes good enough etc.?
If it tasted good, a dessert that's 99% air and ice would be a public health win would it not? That's pretty much what bingsu is, I don't care for it, but many people love it.
Haagen-Dazs is still there on the shelves and still good ice cream.
I don't know, I think the outrage is a little overblown. "Tastes better but is twice the calories" is a very significant consumer choice. I bet many will say they want the "real" stuff, but when it comes to purchasing decisions, buy the "fake" stuff more often.
There may be better windmills to tilt at than lecturing people on which type of milk dessert is the right choice. The brand shenanigans aside maybe we are in a better position having both options on the shelves.
If you feed a 4-year-old "frozen dairy dessert" and call it "ice cream", then you're technically also legally wrong.
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.
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.
What will you do for ice cream then?
https://www.vitamix.com/us/en_us/what-you-can-make/hot-soups
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.
"Cream and egg yolk are expensive; industry tightens its belt."
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.
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.
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/...
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.
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.
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.
I wonder what we could do to them to take the pressure off somehow?
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