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Comment by a2tech | Hacker News Reader

Here in Michigan mutton is not overly difficult to get (lots of middle eastern and african immigrants) but it's a hard sell to anyone that didn't grow up eating it.

Lamb (as you said) have a strong but not unpleasant flavor. Mutton takes that flavor dial and turns it way up.

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in my lifetime, Americans have been steadily losing their taste for not just gamy but other strong flavors as well. Endives used to be just plain bitter, for people who liked bitter, now you can safely put them in a kid's salad. It's sad. And I think other cultures are and will keep losing their tastes too; I've noticed for instance, that not all Chinese like chowing down on all the weird parts of animals, and Europe has plenty of the same "supermarket cheese" that Americans have.

On the plus side, worldwide people have expanded their palates a lot in a way that increases the range and diversity of what they eat, but in terms of the globalized ingredients we can lay our hands on there is still a general regression toward a very mean mean.

It's sad, I think there's a negative feedback loop of, supermarkets only selling the most common produce, and people only learning recipes that use the produce supermarkets sell.

One of my favorite questions "what does gamey taste like". I've gotten a wide range of answers.

For me it tastes a bit metallic, you can taste it clearly if you eat kangaroo meat.

I'd say it's a strange umami flavor. Tasting something gamey triggers something in my head that says, "oh this is animal scent". Maybe it's more olfactory than flavor?

tastes are pretty much all olfactory, except ... what is it, salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and the "fifth taste", umami? and if i'm not mistaken that means just "sourness", not "sour flavor like lemon vs lime" which is olfactory

but yes, "arrrrr, this is animal scent"

The only sad thing here is how you're trying to generalize a few billion people with high-brow "I like it and if you don't, the you're wrong" assertions.

Here's something that might rile you up: I enjoy spicy food, but sometimes I'll buy mild salsa because I don't always want cry my way through an appetizer or snack. I must be uncultured, huh?

Finally, and this might come as a shock, but maybe your tastebuds have changed as you've gotten older. Endives might not be as bitter to you now due to this change, but they still might be pungent to other people who don't eat them as frequently.

(I really wish HN had a downvote/dislike button. Maybe I need to level-up first before I get that option...)

because I still every so often get served some lamb that is gamy and I can taste it just fine, I feel that I still know what it tastes like. And I can tell the difference between beef, more aged beef, and lamb, and I while I like flavorful beef (don't serve me filet), and lamb and gamy lamb, I don't actually like the flavor of more extreme-aged beef; so since my tasting of things hits some subtle difference buttons, and all the scale buttons I used to, I feel like it's still reliable.

Chicory lettuce (which is now hard to find) and dandelion greens are bitter, and they used to be bitter and I used to and still like them. It is true that children (little boys) don't like bitter and grown men do (more than do women), so yes, taste buds shift, but I showed awareness and acknowledged that by saying "now you can serve endive to children"

> The only sad thing here is how you're trying to generalize a few billion people with high-brow "I like it and if you don't, the you're wrong" assertions.

He does have a point though. Many people, especially older generations, keep complaining that everything has gone bland / tastes the same... the problem at its core is that, thanks to market consolidation and efficiency, there aren't that many different varieties of produce and animals grown any more at scale.

Producers select for predictable amount of weight, fast growth, low variance in taste and especially long shelf life, and so we end up with 30-ish varieties of seeds producing 95% of our food, where 10 companies dominate 74% of the world market [1]. In animals, it's the same - out of 80 domestic breeds of farm animals in Germany, for example, 56 are threatened [2], and even back in 2000 the problem was already recognized for other continents [3].

> (I really wish HN had a downvote/dislike button. Maybe I need to level-up first before I get that option...)

Yup, IIRC it used to be 500-ish points?

[1] https://utopia.de/sponsored-content/saatgut-diversitaet-bedr...

[2] https://www.ble.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/2022/220...

[3] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/fao-immer-mehr-nutztierrassen...

As people age, their sense of taste literally weakens. Stuff actually does start to taste more bland once you get past 50.

So you can’t really trust grandma when she tells you food used to taste better back in the old days.

Nah, try home grown vegetables vs supermarket vegetables. There's a clear lack of flavor across many of the supermarket vegetables.

I recently cut up a whole Jalapeno pepper into my stir fry and didn't feel any heat! There was a time it would have blown top of my head off.

What have they done? Bred all the spice out of all hot peppers ?

Jalapenos have never been a very piquant pepper. Your tolerance has probably increased. Try serranos or habaneros.

I eat a lot of chillies - from milder Serrano up to the superhots like bhut jalokia. Jalapenos, in my experience, seem to have the biggest variance in capsaicin per specimen. Sometimes you'll get one that tastes basically like a bell pepper, and sometimes you'll get one that surprises you. Colour doesn't seem to have that much of an impact either. Could be you just got a duff pepper

Yes.

The TAM (Texas A&M) and NuMex Primavera (New Mexico State U) varieties were selected/hybridized to be milder for consistency for mass food production - eg use by companies like Old El Paso.

When you buy supermarket Jalapeños you aren’t getting to choose the variety (be grateful you’re at least being told that - in the UK they’re just sold as ‘green chilies’ which could be anything) - so depending on the supplier, and whether they are offloading leftovers from a Taco Bell order, it’s going to be pot luck what you get.

It’s not a new thing - TAM peppers date back to the 1980s. Possibly changes in the supply chains during the pandemic are causing more of the milder varieties to end up in supermarkets than before?

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