> Perfect for feeding 20 hungry four-year-olds who wouldn’t know the difference. But few adults were fooled
Setting aside the fact this was written by an LLM, I think this line of thought (which wasn't invented by the LLM, I mean it's something people actually think) is the very origin of this problem.
The 4 year olds don't know better, but it's because they are learning what ice cream (and everything) is. And if you're feeding them shit, that will set their base level for ice cream for the rest of their life.
IMO young kids should be given quality products as much as possible exactly because they don't know the difference. Unless you want them to grow into adults that still don't know the difference.
It's a general feeling more than a precise diagnosis, and I guess it could also be a human that has internalised LLM style, or a human-written draft that was reworded by an LLM. But it just really feels like LLM writing.
We have a milk cow. We prep our ice cream from scratch in about 5 minutes: two cups of raw milk, 1/4 cup maple syrup, 1t-1T vanilla, 1/4t salt, and 6-8 raw egg yolks. Blend everything in a quart jar with an immersion blender and pour into a Cuisinart ice cream maker. AFAIK, you literally cannot buy anything close to this good.
As a small farmer, I have nothing good to say about the USDA or FDA. I would rant further, but I’ve kinda given up at this point. I’m selling my farm next year.
> I have nothing good to say about the USDA or FDA.
At least in the context of the article, the requirements for labeling ice cream as such forces some brands to change to "frozen dessert" when they skimp too much on ingredients. It's a small win, but a win nonetheless.
This kind of recipe is wildly irresponsible to actually sell. Raw unpasteurized milk _will_ cause health issues when used in large quantities. Ditto for raw egg yolks.
I lived on a farm during summers as a child, but I will not touch raw milk ever again after getting hospitalized with a bacterial infection from it. And the milk was from our cow, btw.
Egg yolks are safer, especially if you take care to extract them properly. Still not safe enough for mass production.
I’ve been making ice cream at home for the last few years and I’ll never go back. Store bought is all trash now. If you haven’t had the chance to taste ice cream from a Ninja Creami, you’re missing out!
"industry worked out a way to sell you air at the price of cream and eggs" would be a more accurate distillation. They haven't reduced the quality of the product because the ingredients got expensive; they've reduced the quality because they worked how to sell you less for the same money, which results in more profit.
If the law banned 'frozen dairy dessert' they'd go back to selling the higher quality product, probably at a similar price to the worse product (price elasticity being a thing and all.) The only reason they sell the worse product is because they can, and they can because they hide the fact they're selling half a tub of air.
Ignoring the obvious flaws in the writing and the prose, I find it interesting because it’s one of the more obvious examples of enshittification that plagues American culture - often in ways that are so subtle that one might be considered paranoid for trying to recognize them. It lays bare, in a way that any American can understand (most Americans eat and enjoy ice cream) the consequences of the never ending treadmill of corporate greed
I think that's extremely ungenerous and misses the point of the article.
The article is specific in the mechanisms by which the industry has changed formulae -- adding air, gums, and stabilizers. It also includes information about who the offending companies are (Unilever). It includes information about how many calories per cup indicate a high quality ice cream, as well as the legally required labeling you can use to recognize not-quite-ice cream.
It also specifically addresses the "cream is expensive" concern, and discusses dairy prices which have fluctuated but not spiked.
No, this is greed and "the customer is a fool who won't notice". The products of capitalism run to a point where there's basically no recourse (short of, I suppose, manufacturing the ice cream yourself) because everything's become one giant megacorp who knows you don't really have much of a choice in brands.
how much of this is just trying to optimize the nutrition facts to come across as less unhealthy? the "full of air" version is half the fat and has less sugar. consumers are generally trending in the direction of avoiding these two line items so guess it's a win win for breyers if it's also cheaper to make.
edit: also if i'm looking at the website correctly, it looks like both the "ice cream" version and the "frozen dairy desert" version are the same price ($6.99):
I grew up on Breyers, it was the only ice cream my parents bought. I read an article over a decade ago and pointed this out to my parents that the carton said dairy desert after reading a similar article.
We were able to get a refund from the grocery store and Breyers was a completely dead brand in our family when it originally was the only brand they had bought even before I was born.
On the European side of the pond, single packaged industrial ice cream is also gone to shit.
A Magnum or Cornetto used to be a well sized very tasty snack. In Italy the "cucciolone" (an ice cream sandwich) was literally marketed as being "10 bites".
All of those are now tiny bland things that nobody should buy.
The Magnum Company (neé Algida/Walls/etc) is a fucking disaster and everybody should stop buying their products, but other single packaged ice cream snack makers have been following suit and it's basically a meme that every one of those ice creams now looks like a mignon version of the original.
Alas, small kids still like them and have no frame of reference.
There's a frozen custard shop in my town. They sometimes do silly things like including raw sliced strawberries that just turn into ice shards, but their vanilla and chocolate absolutely beat the pants off anything I can find in the grocery.
The content was pretty good though IMO. It’s something that I think a lot of people in the USA have long believed and experienced, but seeing a technical takedown demonstrating it hits harder for some reason.
The prose and filler did make me skip a huge chunk of it though. It could have been probably a quarter of the length and had similar impact
Wasn't too distracted or annoyed by the obvious AI voice.
Learned a bit about ice cream and American (Western?) enshitification at work...
...but these endless, superior, contentless, dogmatic, boring streams of comment threads about how AI it all is.
*Rolls eyes*
I almost actively _long_ for the days when commenters simply didn't read the article/post/treatise/repo and went straight to the comments, or complained about the paywall or the fact that it is on Twitter.
The USA is poor now. The problem is not that companies are enshittifying ice-cream. The problem is that people are so poor that enshttified ice-cream is all they can afford.
> Perfect for feeding 20 hungry four-year-olds who wouldn’t know the difference. But few adults were fooled
Setting aside the fact this was written by an LLM, I think this line of thought (which wasn't invented by the LLM, I mean it's something people actually think) is the very origin of this problem.
The 4 year olds don't know better, but it's because they are learning what ice cream (and everything) is. And if you're feeding them shit, that will set their base level for ice cream for the rest of their life.
IMO young kids should be given quality products as much as possible exactly because they don't know the difference. Unless you want them to grow into adults that still don't know the difference.
because they are learning what ice cream (and everything) is
If you feed a 4-year-old "frozen dairy dessert" and call it "ice cream", then you're technically also legally wrong.
Why was this written by a LLM?
It's a general feeling more than a precise diagnosis, and I guess it could also be a human that has internalised LLM style, or a human-written draft that was reworded by an LLM. But it just really feels like LLM writing.
That's the smoking gun -- he was absolutely right. It's not ice cream, it's slop!
We have a milk cow. We prep our ice cream from scratch in about 5 minutes: two cups of raw milk, 1/4 cup maple syrup, 1t-1T vanilla, 1/4t salt, and 6-8 raw egg yolks. Blend everything in a quart jar with an immersion blender and pour into a Cuisinart ice cream maker. AFAIK, you literally cannot buy anything close to this good.
As a small farmer, I have nothing good to say about the USDA or FDA. I would rant further, but I’ve kinda given up at this point. I’m selling my farm next year.
> I have nothing good to say about the USDA or FDA.
At least in the context of the article, the requirements for labeling ice cream as such forces some brands to change to "frozen dessert" when they skimp too much on ingredients. It's a small win, but a win nonetheless.
The institutions are to keep humans alive, not support the egos of farmers
You don't... heat it? Egg yolks change their role in ice cream when heated, increasing their emulsifying power and creating a richer ice cream.
An immersion blender like the Vitamix heats as it blends because of high friction, on high settings. I make soup with mine.
https://www.vitamix.com/us/en_us/what-you-can-make/hot-soups
This kind of recipe is wildly irresponsible to actually sell. Raw unpasteurized milk _will_ cause health issues when used in large quantities. Ditto for raw egg yolks.
I lived on a farm during summers as a child, but I will not touch raw milk ever again after getting hospitalized with a bacterial infection from it. And the milk was from our cow, btw.
Egg yolks are safer, especially if you take care to extract them properly. Still not safe enough for mass production.
Milk, not cream?
Why sell the farm? Somebody needs to keep up the fight against Big Agriculture.
I’ve been making ice cream at home for the last few years and I’ll never go back. Store bought is all trash now. If you haven’t had the chance to taste ice cream from a Ninja Creami, you’re missing out!
3000 words which can be distilled down to 10:
"Cream and egg yolk are expensive; industry tightens its belt."
"industry worked out a way to sell you air at the price of cream and eggs" would be a more accurate distillation. They haven't reduced the quality of the product because the ingredients got expensive; they've reduced the quality because they worked how to sell you less for the same money, which results in more profit.
If the law banned 'frozen dairy dessert' they'd go back to selling the higher quality product, probably at a similar price to the worse product (price elasticity being a thing and all.) The only reason they sell the worse product is because they can, and they can because they hide the fact they're selling half a tub of air.
But you'll miss out on such priceless gems as "This is the story of the dairy frog, boiled by ever poorer ice creams."
Ignoring the obvious flaws in the writing and the prose, I find it interesting because it’s one of the more obvious examples of enshittification that plagues American culture - often in ways that are so subtle that one might be considered paranoid for trying to recognize them. It lays bare, in a way that any American can understand (most Americans eat and enjoy ice cream) the consequences of the never ending treadmill of corporate greed
I think that's extremely ungenerous and misses the point of the article.
The article is specific in the mechanisms by which the industry has changed formulae -- adding air, gums, and stabilizers. It also includes information about who the offending companies are (Unilever). It includes information about how many calories per cup indicate a high quality ice cream, as well as the legally required labeling you can use to recognize not-quite-ice cream.
It also specifically addresses the "cream is expensive" concern, and discusses dairy prices which have fluctuated but not spiked.
No, this is greed and "the customer is a fool who won't notice". The products of capitalism run to a point where there's basically no recourse (short of, I suppose, manufacturing the ice cream yourself) because everything's become one giant megacorp who knows you don't really have much of a choice in brands.
We found the prompt, guys!
how much of this is just trying to optimize the nutrition facts to come across as less unhealthy? the "full of air" version is half the fat and has less sugar. consumers are generally trending in the direction of avoiding these two line items so guess it's a win win for breyers if it's also cheaper to make.
edit: also if i'm looking at the website correctly, it looks like both the "ice cream" version and the "frozen dairy desert" version are the same price ($6.99):
- https://www.fairwaymarket.com/sm/planning/rsid/4000/product/...
- https://www.fairwaymarket.com/sm/planning/rsid/4000/product/...
I grew up on Breyers, it was the only ice cream my parents bought. I read an article over a decade ago and pointed this out to my parents that the carton said dairy desert after reading a similar article.
We were able to get a refund from the grocery store and Breyers was a completely dead brand in our family when it originally was the only brand they had bought even before I was born.
What happened to them happens often -- quality food brands are bought and the contents changed. You as a consumer have to stay on your toes.
This reminds me of the similar fight over the term "milk": https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/almond-milk-can-keep...
On the European side of the pond, single packaged industrial ice cream is also gone to shit.
A Magnum or Cornetto used to be a well sized very tasty snack. In Italy the "cucciolone" (an ice cream sandwich) was literally marketed as being "10 bites".
All of those are now tiny bland things that nobody should buy.
The Magnum Company (neé Algida/Walls/etc) is a fucking disaster and everybody should stop buying their products, but other single packaged ice cream snack makers have been following suit and it's basically a meme that every one of those ice creams now looks like a mignon version of the original.
Alas, small kids still like them and have no frame of reference.
And their prices have gone through the roof too!
We should more liberally flag these LLM generated posts regardless of the topic
No more LLM-written articles in HN!
Good read, aside from all the LLM-isms in the writing.
enshittification is apparently what corporations do - they have no soul, only shareholders.
There is no direction of travel for them other than the nirvana of selling you nothing for something.
Competition obviously seems not to have fixed that. Food standards seemingly don't quite do it yet.
I wonder what we could do to them to take the pressure off somehow?
As an immigrant I thought for a while now that all ice cream in USA taste like shit, despite my wife saying I'm imagining things... Now I know why.
There's still a few brands, you'll just end up paying through the nose for them.
There's a frozen custard shop in my town. They sometimes do silly things like including raw sliced strawberries that just turn into ice shards, but their vanilla and chocolate absolutely beat the pants off anything I can find in the grocery.
Prose that reads as artificial as the 'dairy dessert' it describes.
glad I wasn't the only one. every other sentence had antithesis, it was exhausting to read even if accurate
The content was pretty good though IMO. It’s something that I think a lot of people in the USA have long believed and experienced, but seeing a technical takedown demonstrating it hits harder for some reason.
The prose and filler did make me skip a huge chunk of it though. It could have been probably a quarter of the length and had similar impact
I could skim the article.
Wasn't too distracted or annoyed by the obvious AI voice.
Learned a bit about ice cream and American (Western?) enshitification at work...
...but these endless, superior, contentless, dogmatic, boring streams of comment threads about how AI it all is.
*Rolls eyes*
I almost actively _long_ for the days when commenters simply didn't read the article/post/treatise/repo and went straight to the comments, or complained about the paywall or the fact that it is on Twitter.
Please be interesting.
what's the value of these AI generated posts?
it takes more value than it gives you as you need to verify everything and hold everything under scrutiny
I'd rather just not read at all
they're monetized
[flagged]
The USA is poor now. The problem is not that companies are enshittifying ice-cream. The problem is that people are so poor that enshttified ice-cream is all they can afford.
Hot take, but enshittified food is just another expression of inflation.