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Pizza 🌟
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
What is rich people food? That also tastes good?
Hallaca (Venezuelan tamal)
Can I get some Shepherd pie/Cottage pie?
On a related note, Ethiopians make some delicious food. Everyone should at least try doro wat sometime.
And properly made Nigerian Jollof rice.
Hypothesis - rich people's food tastes good when made from top quality ingredients by top quality chefs using top quality equipment. Of course, virtually any kind of food will taste better under these conditions - but for rich people's food these are mandatory conditions for it to be palatable.
This improves its wealth signaling qualities. If you serve pizza to your guests of course it'd taste good - no surprise there. It's pizza. But if you serve caviar and it tastes good - it means you have the means to procure high quality caviar.
According to this hypothesis, when the lower (or even middle) classes get the chance to try these foods, it's usually the cheaper kind. Because who would waste good caviar on you? And because taste degrades so steeply with price, we think the type of food itself tastes bad - simply because we are not tasting the same grade the rich eat.
Poor people's food, of course, is the exact opposite. It's design to taste good even with cheaper ingredients, common equipment, and lower cooking skills (I'm not saying poor people are bad cooks - but you can't compare one's expertise with one chore among many to the top experts that money can buy)
who would waste good caviar on you? And because taste degrades so steeply with price
I'm not sure caviar is the best example here. A lot of people just don't like fish eggs, which is fine. But tons of other people eat fish eggs that aren't caviar, like salmon eggs, which are a common sushi ingredient and relatively cheap. Fish eggs definitely don't need to be sturgeon caviar to taste good, even if most people don't like them in general.
But unless you're in Japan, you're probably a somewhat rich westerner if you're eating any kind of fish eggs regularly, so maybe rich people just tend to have more access to things that would expand their palates.
Expensive meals have the value mostly in more presentation for less amount.
Or... rich people only like expensive food because it is expensive, not because it tastes good.
They want to flaunt their wealth when having visitors, so they only buy the rarest of ingredients and demand a lot of work to put into it in order to call them delicacies.
If the ingredients really would be of high quality, they wouldn't need a lot of preparation. The ingredients would speak for themselves.
Price is considered in their taste.
Because who would waste good caviar on you?
My mom would.
Awww
"This food tastes like garbage!"
"What did you expect? Rich people eat the garbage parts of the food."
"Well I ate garbage yesterday and it didn't cost me $300! Good day, sir!"
Lobster, caviar, mussels, oysters, sushi, ribs, fondue, raclette... They all started as poor people's dishes
Mussels, oysters and lobster (prawns as well) really pisses me off. Lobster costing like $30-40 a fucking tail is absolutely insane. They are pretty much the rabbits or rats of the ocean.
May I presume you live far from where lobsters are found? In places local to where they're caught they are no where near that expensive. Transporting live lobster is probably far more expensive than most other foods.
"Tricksy little scrooges, they stole it from us."
And only became associated with luxury due to the insane costs of producing and shipping them at scale. Well, for the seafood anyways.
Don't forget the scarcity through over extracting! Nothing says luxury like near extinction.
Shipping used to be the hard part. Eating caviar in Russia in a place with sturgeons nearby was easy enough, serving it at a fancy diner in Berlin or Paris involved insane logistics for the time.
Mussels, at least, are still fairly cheap. For now.
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Peasant food is the best food. Rich people's food is stupid with all those little portions, and foam.
Excuse me, it's called a sensory experience thank you very much!
Foods that are for poor people in their country of origin suddenly spike in price when served in richer countries. Banh mi is like a dollar in Saigon but almost 9 in the US.
I mean big mac is $9 in the US lol, sandwiches just dont get much cheaper than that here nowadays ðŸ˜
It's because of the labor and cost of goods.
Ingredients to make banh mi are very cheap but workers in the US are paid more for transportation, making the food and the business operating(lights, has, etc) so now the price rise to fit the cost.
Also some items are priced higher to cover more expensive ingredients. Let's say you are doing beef banh mi, that's usually scrap beef from something, let's say some sirloin scraps, your steak on the menu should probably be like $40 but if you sell a ton of banh mi you can cut that price down to like $30-$35.
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For tea, that is Genmaicha, which is a green tea with roasted rice added in as a filler. Tastes delicious and is pretty cheap!
Puttanesca was invented by prostitutes. It's a sort of stew/ragout with seafood anchovies and olives, served on spaghetti
Checks out, "pasta alla puttanesca" literally translates to "whore-style pasta"
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According to a websearch that's an oft repeated but dubious origin story
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_alla_puttanesca#Etymology
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story
Then the rich people appropriate the dishes of the workers and make them unaffordable. The wealthy produce very little of their own cuisine just as they produce very little of their own labor.
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this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
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