this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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Science of Cooking
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I heard once that chicken tastes blander than it used to, hence the need for more seasoning.
https://www.bottomlineinc.com/life/food/food-really-doesnt-taste-as-good-as-it-used-to
In short: chicken got breed for quick growth, lost taste in the process.
Not a sign of the times, a sign of the raising. I've eaten Perdue and I've eaten small farm, free-ranging chickens. The latter is often leaner, tougher and incomparably more flavorful.
It depends of how they are raised. Here in France, we have a "Label Rouge" sign : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Label_Rouge . Label rouge chickens are like twice the price or more, but they are flavorful compared to the cheapest ones. There are other great labels (Loué, Janzé, bio, Nouvelle agriculture, ...).
All animal products that come from factory farms taste different than properly raised animals. Industrial beef smells like corn and tastes bland compared to well cared for beef, but you will pay a premium and it can be hard to find the further you are from the country.
If you haven't had deer, elk, or bison, you need to so you can taste what red meat is suppose to be and you can feel better knowing that the animal lived a great life in the wild before it was murdered.
Fruits and veggies are the same way. Large farms grow plants to look good and keep looking good long enough to travel around the world twice and sit on a store shelf. Small local farmed plants are more likely to actually have flavor, at the expense of not being perfectly round and shiny (and spoiling ten times faster).
I think it's just that white folks' tastes have become more accustomed to stronger seasoning. Mine certainly have since I was a kid in the 1960s. Of course some of that is just age progression for an individual, but it's mostly cultural mixing. And following the Penzeys advice to "Season Liberally."
I wonder if it's that or just availability. Some of these things are brought to places now because of our much improved infrastructure.