It’s crazy how in the last few years, food here in Brazil has become trash. Yeah we’ve always head the ultra-processed food but even they were better back then. I’ll give some examples:
Chocolate: we’re one of the biggest cocoa exporters, still the regular chocolate in the shelves have become tasteless, greasy and overly sweet. Food that used to contain chocolate are now “chocolate flavored” which means actual cocoa paste being replaced with some misterious greasy artificial brown slop.
Coffee: I guess we’re the biggest coffee exporters but what we find in the supermarket has become way expensive and lower tiered brands have silently added roasted BARLEY to the package, meaning coffee now is not coffee anymore because it contains barley.
Dairy products: pure shit, pure pure shit. Good condensed milk is being silently replaced as well with some slop that has less fat content meanwhile the actual condensed milk is more expensive. Our cream cheese (requeijão) is now “cheese flavored” or something like that, which means less dairy and more cornstarch or who knows what. Not to mention it all tasting like plastic.
Pretty much every product we used to buy, either okay for daily use or ultraprocessed, is now being stripped of their core (and expected) ingredients like tomato and tomato pulp in a tomato sauce or actual dairy in heavy cream and replaced with some weird artificial glop that probably causes even more stomach and thyroid cancer while we’re paying even more for them. In 20 years we’ll all be eating seasoned cardboard.
Comments
Thankfully no.
welcome to argentina the last 20 years. its bad omen for your country. It means your people cant pay for the good products so they get straight shipped out of the country.
for example Arcor in argentina produces some of the best god on earthly jams they are not sold here. they go straight to australia, because no one would pay their price here. I live in the province that produces 80% of the lemons do you think I ever saw a giant juicy lemon? of course not.
as said before, it means your currency is devaluating or the overall economical power of the citizen is suffering a contraction. its a bad sign.
Uruguay has more cows (12.250.000) than people (3.5 million) the ratio is 3.5 cows per people. Beef and asado were basic parts of our living. Beef still is.
The rest is completely crap as you say. Meat from Paraguay is being imported (!!!!) because the majority of the cuts are being exported and in order the bring cheap meat they do that.
So meat has become expensive, very low quality.
I understand there are economic fundamentals for some of this things.
But the situation is totally under no control.
El café aquí es más chicharo que café y la leche se nota que le han echado agua
Agree with chocolate. You still can find some true chocolate but not at the supermaket and is very costly.
Heavily disagree with coffee, it used to be much worse, while now it is somewhat common to see “gourmet” brands and types, besides the ton of options of local producers and small scale production that you are a google away from finding. It wasn’t like this. That being said the bst stuff still is mainly exported, of course
Agree on dairies. “Bevida làctea” and other strange stuff
I like to try unknown brands whenever I can (I always read the info about the manufacturer in the packaging), the big brands taste less and less like food. Sadly, there’s little variety of brands where I live.
You can still find all that in good quality, just not in huge popular chains.
Mexico has been struggling with the “Americanization” of food supplies as well since I was a child. I hate how we’ve been sacrificing quality over quantity over time. Don’t get me wrong though, you can still find good quality products. You just need to seek them out at the local markets. You can’t go for the “convenience” of going to the big “Walmart” type stores. Thankfully, it seems like some people are starting to catch on to this cycle.
I live in the United States, but grew up going to Mexico to be with family. One of the my favorite things is the easy access to good quality food at a fair price when you shop at the local market or tianguis. I’ll admit, even the “processed’ stuff in Mexico tends to be of better quality than the US, which isn’t saying too much, but it makes a difference in taste and how I feel when I eat it. For example, soda in Mexico has better quality and taste than in the US (although it’s still bad for you of course)
Same thing here in the US bro. As you said, food has always been crap, but it is getting worse and worse.
They add corn syrup instead of suggar to sweet products It tastes nasty.
Loaf/bread (pão de forma) tastes sweet, and chocolate tastes like old butter.
I have become more selective about what I eat after I understood how food has been processed further. Knowing that condensed milk has barely any milk, ‘milk shake’ has no milk, etc change my whole perception of these products. It is all “modified corn syrup”.
We are on the same boat. This is happening everywhere. I hate to be alarmist but this is one of the worst aspects of late stage capitalism. This is the richest country on earth, but I need to drive 20 minutes to buy fresh food. It is insane.
Yeah. Coffee has been getting quite crappy lately (a lot of them have a cigar butt aftertaste)
Yes, here it’s normal. “X brand was better before, right?” It’s a normal thing to say.
And it will get even worse.
They thought it was a good idea to put a corrupt socialist in the presidency, here’s the result, taxes for everything, inflation, interest rates are already at the level of Dilma’s impeachment, the dollar is sky high (they went so far as to prohibit Google from showing the dollar exchange rate in reais).
There’s no way around it, costs go up, people can’t afford it, so quality and quantity go down.
Panama’s coffee is a joke. At least the “affordable” one. Dairy has always been expensive but now we are paying $14/kilo for cheese. And you have to double check the labels to see if it is actual dairy.
I’ve been looking into the mysterious greasy artificial brown slop found in so-called chocolate. It’s likely vegetable oil. It turns the experience of tasting a nice chocolate tablet into something akin to chewing a candle. Disgusting.
This is happening because people keep buying these products. It’s not the companies’ fault that people choose to eat garbage.
A general boycott would be enough to force a change of course, but unfortunately people don’t seem to be willing to do that. They actually LIKE the poor-quality stuff.
The solution is buying imported/expensive brands. It’s more healthy and you’ll end up eating less crap anyway
They started putting stickers on food with high calories, sugar or salt, and since then everything has less salt (mixed, sometimes this works out but other times, like on nuts, it makes for bland food) and there is artificial sweetener in everything. Ugh.
Yeah, definitely. A couple years ago there was a scandal about the milk, so they rebranded all of the fake milks as “dairy blend”. The same happened with chocolate. At least we can still find legitimate products, but you have to double-check. My best choice is aim for artisanal coffee and chocolate sold directly from communities.
The reason is inflation and the globalized market of commodities. Years ago, the internal demand of the country determined the price, now it’s the prices they get for exports. Coffee, Cocoa and soy(cow feeding) prices have soared.
Thank God most of our food relies on fresh vegetables, rice and potatoes and not dairy, butter and other processed items.
LatAm in general should deregulate market. You guys live in -20 years timeline of what Europe or exUSSR have. Freaking Russia with heaviest sanctions in whole world and still have lower prices and better selection of goods than Argentina.
Socialists like Kiershneer and Lula just robbing you.
This is going on across the board.
Most food products you get in the supermarket, we’re people get almost all their food, is massive consumption goods made by a few giant companies.
This companies are lowering the cost of producing the food constantly, but keeping the price the same or increasing them slowly.
That’s why we get cheese that’s not cheese, flavored stuff instead of the real thing. Soy in tuna or whatever as a fill.
I constantly have to read labels (hoping for ghe to be accurate), and what ised to be regular real products are becoming luxury items.
This is a worldwide phenomenon.
The poorer areas feel it stronger.
Capitalism, as we know it, is in danger. Big actors feel it and are squeezing gains harder and harder.
Also, consider mayonnaise.
I would say no, since the seals were created in 2016, everything little by little is becoming healthier, so as not to have seals.
There are little to no regulations here, if someone creates something brown and sticky out of plastic and add chocolate flavor, it’s alright to sell. Plus, the best is exported to places companies can profit more. And even vegetables are awful here, a few days ago I ate a bell pepper that tasted 90% like pesticides and 10% like plastic, sure there are organics, but who will buy it every single day?
The situation is going from bad to worse.
In Peru, two rules govern: everything produced on the coast is exported, and everything produced in the Andes is consumed domestically.
Decades ago, a reform distributed the lands of the Peruvian Andes to the peasants. This brought prosperity to the Andes, as farmers generally produce goods to sell locally
Late stage capitalism, when corporations only chase profit margins they make the products shittier and shittier