I’m genuinely curious. Years ago, I was a chubby young pothead who lived on fast food. Taco Bell, McDonald’s, KFC, you name it—I ate it. Back in college, fast food probably made up at least 50% of my diet. And it wasn’t just because it was quick and cheap—I actually enjoyed it.
But these days, I find myself craving it less and less. Besides being more health-conscious, it just doesn’t hit the spot like it used to. It’s more expensive than ever, mostly bland, and I feel terrible after I eat it. So what’s changed? Is it just part of the enshitification of everything? Have I just gotten old, or has fast food really gone downhill?
I think it was always shit, you and your taste buds just grew up.
At the time I ate lots of fast-food I also liked to drink lots of soda and ice tea, like 2 liters in one sitting when hung over. Now I puke a little in my mouth just thinking of that garbage.
As far as I can tell, Wendy’s took a dive after the founder passed away, and Pizza Hut took a dive at least 20 years ago.
The rest it seems dependent on location. I often wonder how much of the variable issues of quality I see are result of continued pressure on the workers as capitalism continues to grind them down.
It doesn’t pay a living wage so the people working there don’t give a shit about anything
I think enshittification is hitting everything, but it’s probably also that you are old. I find that I just can’t eat the same way that I could 20 years ago.
I’m in my 40s, and I’ve found that fast food quality varies up and down from year to year and location to location.
Most certainly. When I was young a burger king the food was better and you did not need to say fresh from the broiler as that was default that way. Ironically mdconalds has in some ways gotten better compared to long ago. they made the warming light thing famous. Wendys I would say has kept its quality up the best but still has fallen. taco bell does some interesting things over time but I swear they have invented new technology to slather less and less of their meat flavored slop onto the product. Chicken places have kept up quality in their main sutff but have come out with more and more cheap stuff to stay competitive and cheapened the sides to. Honestly when you had buck stuff and meals under 5 bucks combined with needing something fast to fill your pie hole it was a temptation, but now with many meals over 10 and anything a dollar is now pure trash I find I prefer to miss a meal than pick up anything. Heck even gas station roller stuff is like 5 bucks now.
I miss $1 jumbo jacks that were the size of a whopper…and cheesy bean and rice burritos that had pico and creamy jalapeno sauce…also for $1…now it’s like everything taste bland and is 1/2 the size for 3xs the money. It’s really shit, about the only fast food I’ll even consider these days is the hot and readys from little Caesars, but even those have dropped in quality.
I work at McDonald’s, it is not good and is best avoided.
The other day I ordered a burger and they put tomatoes on it even though I asked them not to. I was about to complain, but decided to take a bite anyway and…huh. The tomato had no flavour whatsoever. I used to not like the taste of tomatoes but how could I object to this?
So what does this mean? Are my taste buds not functioning like they used to? But I spent lunch looking it up and apparently, there is a fair consensus that tomatoes, along with a host of other fruits and vegetables, really are blander today than when I was a kid. For something I never liked, this kind of works out but…
My wife, a keen gardener of heirloom tomatoes, says it’s because the varieties that sell commercially are bred for long shelf-life and nothing else.
My grandmother died last year at the age of 103. I’m 41. I can remember being a kid, before she became too old to maintain the house she raised 4 kids in. It was a BIG house. It had a HUGE backyard, that as a kid I didn’t have any appriciation for how massive that place was. Now, today, I remember the 80s, and think “wait…was my grandpa rich before he died?” I was 5 when he died, but he picked out the house in the 1960s, that she then lived alone in after he died. All her children were adults with their own children by then.
The end result is, she said to my grandpa “I don’t care what you do inside the house. I don’t care how you decorate. I don’t care what furniture you buy. I just want a comfortable bed, and that backyard is MINE.” My grandpa, who HATED maintaining the outdoors, readily agreed to this. It meant she would do the yardwork that men of the time were mostly expected to do. While he got the house to himself (mostly). She used the backyard to grow a garden. A big garden. Lived in the city, but you’d swear this was a farmland with no animals.
Everytime I’d go over to her house as a kid, I’d run to the garden and pick off beans. These long pod style green beans. And these other green beans which were more narrow.
I’d eat them right where they were growing. And every time my dad would be like “HEY!!! THAT’S NOT YOUR GARDEN!!! YOU CAN’T JUST EAT THINGS FROM THE GARDEN!!! I’M YOUR DAD!!! YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME!!!”
And every time, my Grandma, who was not a yeller, and not an angry person would yell back at my dad “HEY! THAT IS MY GARDEN!!! AND I SAY HE CAN EAT AS MUCH HEALTHY FRUITS AND VEGITABLES AS HE WANTS!!! I’M YOUR MOM!!! YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME!!!”
It was more in a mocking him sense, for being so angry over something so stupid. Oh no, a growing boy wants to eat healthy vegitables! What a tragedy! His logic being that I have to ask permission before eating other peoples food. Which in most contexts makes sense.
Until you realize, my grandma was like 120lbs, and she was growing like 60lbs of food in her garden. She wasn’t shy of saying that every neighborhood kid (which was a lot of kids) and all her grandkids, and her own adult kids were free to eat as much as they wanted, take as much as they wanted home. She enjoyed growing the food, but harvesting it was a chore. Plus, it was meant for all of us anyways, so if we grabed it straight from the vine, that was just free harvesting labor that she didn’t have to do, with the food going to the same place anyways.
When you ate food off her vine, you knew you were at grams house. Most people miss their childhood because they miss a tv show, or a friend group they had, or the freedom of not having bills and responsibility. I miss that garden, and helping my grandma harvest. I was 5 years old, running around, picking beans, and listening to grandma tell her stories of how she met my grandpa, and what life in the 60s was like. Which for the time would be like me today explaining what 2004 was like. The 60s seems like such a culturally distant time ago, but at the time she was talking about this, it was just 20 years prior. I’m getting nostolgic for the 80s, and the 60s, a decade I wasn’t even alive for, because I can vividly remember her telling me what life was like during the civil rights movements of the late 60s. She talked about what my dad was like when he was a kid. She wasn’t afraid to take the piss out of my dad by embarassing him to his son. All while we picked beans, and strawberries, and berries, and her favorite tomatoes.
She LOVED tomatoes. Loved loved loved them. She used to say “I know everyones welcome to my garden, but I might have to start growing more tomatoes, or placing restrictions on them. I don’t know WHAT I’d do if everybody wanted my tomatoes! I can’t get enough of them!”
Which was her polite way of basically doing the whole garden of eden thing, except instead of an apple, she was saying “don’t fucking touch my tomatoes!!!” Which nobody did. Also, nobody was naked.
Then in the mid 90s, she eventually had to admit she could no longer upkeep a 6 bedroom house, and a yard that was meant for kids to play in, when she had no kids. By then I was a teenager, and while I could have played in the sense of sports, my days of egg hunting on easter, and running around in capes, and jumping on trees was behind me. My aunt always said "You know, she held off on selling that house, so you could grow up first. It wouldn’t be fair that all her grandkids EXCEPT you got to enjoy the garden, and that yard (I’m the youngest). Then as time went on, eventually she began complaining about tomatoes around the year 2010. She’d say “Is it too late to go get my garden back? These things are tasteless, and not at all juicy. What am I supposed to do with a dry flavorless red bulb? Can it even be called a tomato??? I’m just going to call it worthless.”
I guess I took a while to get to the point of the point of the tomato in this story, but I’m never going to appologize for rambling on and on about my hero in life. I’ll ramble on and on about her to people who never met her, when I’M 90 years old. I’ll seem crazy, and it’ll just seem like old man rambling crazy talk about tomatoes, and pickling jars, and tree forts, and easter egg hunts with 1000 easter eggs for a group of 20 kids.
I’ll seem crazy, but oh well. That’s fine. I miss her, and I miss that time. That’s the biggest part I miss about my childhood. Seeing her happy with a tomato in her hand, and a big straw hat on sunny days, yelling at my dad to calm the fuck down. Nicest woman in the world. Loved you with all her heart. She’d help you with her last dollar if you were in need. But she wouldn’t take shit. When my dad tried to bully control of the conversation, she took him down a peg everytime. And because everyone, him included, respected her, she could do it at any time. The strongest person in the room doesn’t need to yell. They can control an entire room with a whisper. Make you shut up, just so you can hear them by quieting the room, and making you follow their lead. Yelling just proves you have no control of any situation. Gram taught me that everytime my dad would yell, and she would calm him down to a whisper without so much as raising her tone. THAT’S what being a strong person is. Being kind by nature, but tough by force.
Thanks for the story. That was a fun read.
very nice story your grandma was a treasure and it’s nice to hear your respect and love pour out!!
What a fantastic story! I could feel the warm sun, and taste the fresh vegetables. It really brought a smile to my face. I remember growing up in the late 80’s and my parents had an old man neighbor with a garden. He used to give tomatoes to me and my siblings and we would sit on the back steps with a salt shaker and just shake some salt on them and eat them like they were apples. They were delicious! For years I have wondered if my memory was serving me wrong, or if tomatoes have just gotten flavorless over the years. I’m happy to hear it’s not just me.
My great grandmother recently passed at the age of 100. Summers in her garden were something truly special. They had a small backyard, but the victory garden covered most of it. If I ever reach grandma status, I hope I will have an impeccable garden and carry on the tradition. Thanks for the story, it brought back so many memories. I would kill for a fresh tomato sandwich now.
That’s a beautiful story. Thanks for sharing. My mom was an avid gardener also. I miss her so much!
I for one loved reading your rambling, 10/10 would do again even without the tangential relation to the topic
Long shelf life and/or physical durability. Alton Brown made this point in an episode of Good Eats by clamping a supermarket tomato in a bench vise.
Ah that would certainly explain it.
My working theory had been that maybe they were being selected for size à la strawberries, which have grown almost comically huge in recent years. But it’s as though nature can only provide a set amount of flavour per fruit, and by growing it larger, it only gets diluted over a greater volume? But I haven’t been able to determine whether fast food tomatoes are behemoths since they are already cut up.
Not quite, but close! Molecular plant breeder here.
There is no set “limit” to flavour but it’s a complex trait that is easy to lose if you don’t select for it. If you breed for size, and don’t track taste, it’s very easy to leave the flavour-producing aspects unchanged, thus resulting in a “dilution”. Furthermore, you’re often actively selecting against flavour, indirectly and unintentionally, by selecting for shelf life - if something doesn’t ripen, it won’t over-ripen and spoil.
This is what has historically happened to a lot of produce but it doesn’t have to be the case - modern breeding lets us breed for flavour and nutrition too! Heirloom varieties can offer some reprieve, but for all their taste they tend to be quite unproductive and sickly (ofter “heirloom” means inbred and that does not produce very fit organisms).
Good news is, new varieties are being bred that have it all - yield, taste, and nutrition! It’s just hard to convince consumers and businesses to switch over to new varieties, as you don’t really buy according to the flavour, just the looks.
Greetings from the UK ;)
That is fascinating! You should do an AMA.
I would love to see fewer monocultures at the supermarket. I have noticed lately that a number of new apple varieties have been popping up, at least where I am in Canada. I keep hoping for some kind of craft beer-like renaissance in produce where there is a lot more to explore and rabid fandom over particular varieties.
Thanks for such an in depth answer. Is there a good place to buy seeds for newer strains like this?
Hydroponic tomatos are cheap, big, and never have any flavor. Those are what most fastfood uses.
Denying the plant to have genetic variance causes issues you say!?!?
😆
Look into bananas if you wanna know why banana flavoring doesn’t taste like our current bananas
The fact that you don’t like tomatoes in of itself is proof that the problem is with your taste buds. Tomatoes are high glutamic acid (umami), and I’ve never heard of a person who didn’t like savory foods.
There’s a reason why MSG is making a comeback: because it tastes good (and because people are finally starting to figure out that its stigma is deeply-rooted in racism. It’s better for you than salt).
Oh man, you sound like my mother! She was actually Japanese and grew her own tomatoes. She was always forcing them on me, saying Ne, umai-deshou! (See? They’re full of umami!)
I actually like cooked tomatoes in all forms, but there is something in the flavour profile of a raw tomato that turns me off.
Just because people don’t like a certain food doesnt mean their taste buds have a problem. Liking food is all subjective, that’s what it means to be human
I’m only partially serious. Sorry, I have a weird sense of humor that doesn’t really work well in text. Just pretend that I’m smiling and playfully punching your upper arm when you read half my comments.
That said, Umami isn’t subjective, though. It’s one of the five basic tastes. So you have to admit that not liking a food that’s loaded in it is a bit odd.
Both?
Yes it has gotten worse and time is a relentless asshole.
RIP Trans fats. So delicious, so terrible for you.
Brand names have gotten worse, that’s not you. Cost saving measures upon making sizes smaller while still raising prices. I swear, KFC mid-2000’s was amazing compared to the bland oily ones of today. That said, you probably have gotten desensitized to them in general as you grew older too.
Local fast food is still really good for me, but I’d just avoid major brands like Mcdonalds. They’ve become synonymous with trash food.
I’m in the UK and KFC has gone downhill here too - something I’m very grateful for! A few years ago I got a real craving for a crispy, juicy piece of chicken with the colonel’s secret spices. I ended up with a grim, wizened leg that tasted of stale oil and despair. Never again. My own cooking is sooo much better, and cheaper too. Win win!
Cost cutting has made fast food restaurants worse in ways that aren’t essentially shrinkflation. Restaurants like Taco Bell cutting their beef with cheaper ingredients (though apparently it’s only 12% fillers). Chipotle giving you more of the cheap ingredients like rice, and less of the good stuff like guac. Even slower service and longer lines because they don’t want to pay as much staff during peak hours.
Smaller (especially privately-held) chains have been able to buck the trend, but cutting quality has been a popular option as of late.
only 12%
hurk…
The feeling bad part is aging.
Quality has absolutely gone down, though, while cost has gone way up.
I’m feeling nitpicky in general so I apologize in advance.
Prices have gone up, not costs. The increase in overhead for these places hasn’t gone towards maintaining the same product quality, much less improving it, nor has it gone towards the pay of workers, and its not really even the real estate.
The bigger price listed is almost entirely because shareholders want more before they keel over finally fucking die
That’s fair. I meant cost as in cost to me, the consumer, which is the price, but I think what you’ve said here is a valuable thing to consider when wondering why it’s so expensive and yet shit now.
Thanks, I’m too scatterbrained to have put it in those words, but yeah, thats totally what I was getting at. Thanks
The only fast food I enjoyed in recent memory was Pizza Hut. During some scare about MSG they removed all of the MSG and I ordered it a time or two after that and it was nearly inedible.
I suspect similar things happened with other types of fast food. I think there’s a flanderization effect happening with a lot of it. The same is definitively not the case for things like pizza in general, as I can order from my local NY-style pizza place and pizza is still just as good as it ever was.
All that is to say it wouldn’t surprise me at all if fast food was objectively shittier across a number of different metrics.
The answer is probably “yes”
- Food is probably worse.
- Your taste buds might have changed.
- Your gut bacteria might be different.
I have a couple reasons for believing each.
- Nutrient concentration in food has decreased over time (Veritasium talked about a fascinating explanation for this) and the desire to find low cost alternatives like HFCS over cane sugar changes the taste of food.
- “Children prefer higher levels of sweet and are more sensitive to bitter tastes until adolescence.”
- Your gut microbiome literally changes over time.
It’s gotten worse. I don’t bother eating any of it because I make better food at home.
I stopped eating fast food during covid and never got back into it.
The one time, post covid, I was out and stopped to eat, it was gross. But it’d been so long, I genuinely don’t know if it had always been gross and I lost my acclimation to it, or if it was actually more gross than it used to be.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard complaints online that the quality has gone down while the prices went up, so it probably has gotten worse.
