People want a wide variety of long lasting, cheap food all year round but they don't want harmless chemical additives that allow that benchmark to be met. It's a problem in more than ice cream, but I think this article does one of the best jobs I've seen of explaining the benefits of chemical additives.
Because people fear what they don't know, they see big chemical names and immediately assume they're bad for them. They're afraid of them because they don't understand them.they don't want harmless chemical additives that allow that benchmark to be met.
I definitely agree to you and the person you replied to, and what's particularly why I liked this article. Instead of just saying "they help extend the shelf life," it explains that the additives are (in this case) emulsifiers, just like the lecithin in egg yolks, that help stop the ice cream from separating when it melts. It gives people a simple explanation of what the chemical actually does and it gives a natural equivalent for people to associate with it. Hopefully this kind of writing and sentiment becomes more common in place of the more common "This chemical is also used in RUBBER FLOOR MATS and the manufacture of CONCRETE and it has a BIG COMPLICATED NAME, is this what you want your CHILDREN to be EATING!?"
Yeah, I think there's a real public thirst for understanding what's what when it comes to food and for good reason. Much as I enjoy food and cooking and dislike the whole "foodie" thing, I am glad that more people are taking time to learn how to make foods they enjoy. Learning how something is made imparts an understanding of what the various components do or do not do, even if only in a limited capacity. I don't know if you've checked out that site, but I find that they have a lot of quality articles on food and food-related topics. It's one of my go-to sites for sure.
Sometimes you just need to show people a picture like this and let them digest it a bit.
Jesus. Forest for the trees. The article is 1500 words on how ice cream stabilizers allow distributors to abuse ice cream while still having it be palatable. It then goes into detail about all the mollycoddling necessary to make ice cream not suck. Finally, it describes Haagen Dazs, which uses no stabilizers yet whose ice cream doesn't suck. It further speculates on the heroic measures necessary for their ice cream to not suck, despite the fact that you can buy it at a goddamn gas station. The argument against ice cream (or any) stabilizer is that when you buy products that don't depend on them, you're more likely to buy something made locally, transported a short distance and handled with care. Yeah, you can eat MREs. Given a choice between MREs and fresh chicken stew, most everybody will go for the fresh chicken stew - not just because it's fresh, but because it doesn't taste like ass. The Seriouseats.com argument is "eat your fucking twinkies and like it. Agribusiness depends on you." You know, I can pay $7 for a pint of "craft ice cream" at Whole Foods or I can go to the gelato place on the corner and buy the same for $6. The gelato place's stuff was made that day; let it sit in the freezer for more than a few days and it starts to go funky. Which is just fine by me - ice cream is a treat, not a staple. Stop telling me how to fucking eat.As of now, smaller craft ice cream companies don't have the same luxury, which means they need to work with the distributors available to them. When handled right, stabilizers offer an invisible or barely noticeable way for these companies to drastically improve their products. And there's no shame in that.
Well, I think that there are enough people who go to that site who don't have access to gelato, or who might not buy nicer ice-cream on a regular basis, to justify this article. I mean, one of the prominent sponsors on the site is Pillsbury. I didn't get the same sense of "eat your fucking twinkies" that you did, but I guess I can see what you're talking about. From my read, I got the sense that the writer was aiming this at people who were avoiding stabilizers simply because they'd heard that they're "not natural" or whatever, rather than on the basis of the taste of stabilized ice-cream vs. stabilizer-free ice-cream.