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Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

I really, truely do not like the taste of sugar in my bread, pasta sauce, and yogurt. (I like the yogurt to taste yogurty, then add something sweet to it, like a banana or chocolate chips.)

But it's maddening going through package after package of bread, trying to find one without lots of added sugar. Free market capitalism is often advertised as just giving people what they want, but there are lots of cases like this where what people want and what is available to buy don't match up.

I really hope what the article says about food company profits dropping because people are buying less processed foods. Maybe it will become easier to buy food that tastes like something other than salt, sugar, and fat.

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Trust yourself that you can make your own, delicious, low-effort bread. I produce 2-3 loaves a week, and the effort involved is maybe 30 minutes each time. The cost, barring additional ingredients (usually egg), is close to a dollar per loaf, and you can make exactly the loaf you're in the mood for.

As long as you don't find a way to kill the yeast, even your bad bread will taste better than store bought bread.

Or you can even automate that. Bread Automats are cheap, and even sold at ALDI at least once a year. Press a button, fresh loaf of bread in 2 hours.

After a brief trip to Europe a couple of years back, I returned to the States to discover that our bread is actually, physically, nauseating. It was weeks before I could stomach it again. I've been to Europe on other occasions and not had this happen, not sure why it happened this time.

Same. I'm continually disappointed at how hard it is to find decent bread back home (US), and how expensive it is when you do. Cheese, too.

I know we've supposedly got some of the lowest food prices in the developed world, but buy like-for-like with a typical (say) Parisian's shopping basket and I bet we don't do so well.

Indeed, and it's not for lack of interest. Trying to imitate European foodstuffs is a huge part of what our food industry does. But since it's produced by the same industrial machine as everything else, it mostly comes out the same. "Greek" yogurt, for instance. Or "Italian" bread. It's as if we understand that Europeans eat better food, but we can't seem to figure out what makes it that way.

Well, if one wants to figure out why European foodstuffs often has higher quality, that’s simple.

If you buy the bread you find at ALDI for half a dollar, that’s made in factories in Poland, that won’t be any better. But most people don’t.

Go to a local brick & mortar bakery, usually there’s a bakery that makes fresh bread next to most stores in the suburbs, or, if you’re in a city, at every street corner.

Go there, and you’ll find fresh bread, rolls, crossaints, sandwiches, etc. A mix of a bakery, a starbucks, and a subways, but cheaper and better.

And of course, fresh, handmade quality bread will be better – as these bakeries’ only selling point is quality. If their quality would not be far above the factory bread, they wouldn’t exist anymore.

Same here. Once I cut back on soda and salt, it's hard to eat popular food items.

Things like panda express and Hawaiian onion chips are way too salty... silk soy milk is way too sweet, even when unsweetened. And forget about popular cereal brands... geesh, it's like drinking sugar water. Then there are Starbucks drinks... man, those things are super sweet. Not sure how other people drink it.

I also like what you said about capitalism. As you can see by my food choices, I am not a vegan hipster or anything. But I definitely feel that corporate America does not cater to my taste buds.

I've been wondering for years no why nobody offers sweetener-free pops. I just want something bubbly with a hint of flavor, but without the sweetness: like lemon-flavored club soda for example.

I have a hard time believing there's no market for this.

Like LaCroix? http://www.lacroixwater.com/flavors/

They sold it all over the place in Chicago when I lived there.

seltzer water (i like Polar) is this. It's an enormous market in the US.

There is? I can go to the store and get about twelve different flavors of seltzer water.

That stuff is everywhere (in grocery stores) in the US. My local safeway carries several "flavors" (which are more like an essence or hint of flavor): raspberry, lemon, etc.

I always find it in stores, just in the water section instead of the soda section. That said, I never see it in gas stations and the like.

If you're in a rich area in the US, look for Spindrift soda -- the brand started out in Boston, but has spread to other upper-class milieus since then. There's also La Croix, as mentioned by another poster here -- it's artificially flavored, I think, but still pretty good and definitely low on sugar. (Spindrifts are made with fruit and soda water; they're not low-sugar or sugar-free, but they haven't been sweetened out the wazoo like Coca-Cola.)

> Free market capitalism is often advertised as just giving people what they want,

They should also know what they're getting to make an informed choice. Sadly, most ways of selling or advertising are about lying through omission.

buy real ingredients and cook your own food. stop giving these people money. eliminating sugar from pre-made food is a battle you can't win.

Free market capitalism is not going to give me a non-x86-based PC ecosystem even if I want it, because not enough other people want it to justify the required investment. Of course for say $30G/year one could get it, and you can get whatever bread you want to for much less, but perhaps for more than you'd like to. In other words, you either need to be in the majority or to spend a lot to get what you want from a market.

Which doesn't sound that great if you didn't live in a centrally planned economy where you can't buy woolen socks nor wool so what you do is you buy a woolen sweater and you make woolen socks out of that. That's the sort of unarguably idiotic waste of resources that free markets eliminate. Of course it's easier to appreciate that if you've spent thousands of hours queuing to buy some bread, any bread, than it is when the bread you can most easily buy doesn't taste as you'd want it to.

Conversely, to me non-white bread tends to taste like mud to me unless it's fresh bakery bread or somerhing similar. I'm glad wonderbread et al are the way they are.

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