h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How come, in general the cheaper the food, the more ingredients it has? More ingredients must cost more and involve more processes/time/energy, right?

(example; compare the ingredients list of cheap white supermarket bread against 'artisan' or home-made bread.)

It has also been said that the less cloth there is in clothes the more expensive they are, though that's probably more to do with fashion, which exists in its very own sphere of reality.

You wouldn't eat white bread if you knew what was in it.

Google L-Cysteine...

I don't (well unless it's provided free at a do, or a pub desperate for business)

I know what's in all my breads ...


A lot of the processed food; which contains the zillions of unnecessary ingredients, are there to enable the manfacturer to attempt to make soemthing which otherwise isn't, taste edible, or, taste remotely like what it is meant to taste of.... I'm guessing you can use really cheap, say cuts of meat, and just add sufficient 'animal protein', 'starch agents', 'stabalising agents', 'flavourings', 'colour stabelisers', etc., to make it both look like what its meant to be, and taste like what its supposed to be

The weirdest one I still find odd, is beef burgers.... even the brand name ones, which arn't exactly cheap are just terrible yet, if I get a bag of the beef mince, and make it with that, (not their value mince, just the 'standard' one), then the resultant 'burgers', are really tasty... (I just add onion garlic chopped chillis, oragano black pepper etc)... So, I guess, even the more expensive branded burgers, are made using absolute rubbish meat...

Just did a quick bit of looking.... ON a supermarket website; their own brand crumpets have less* ingredients, than the high street branded crumpets quite a lot of a differnce; Plus; the supermarket own brand ones, contained ingredients all of which were recognizible, and none of which had to be 'hidden', with terms like 'emulsifying agents', 'leveling agents', 'stabalising agents', or 'E' numbers mmmm... crumpets...

"...the resultant 'burgers', are really tasty... (I just add onion garlic chopped chillis, oragano black pepper etc)... So, I guess, even the more expensive branded burgers, are made using absolute rubbish meat..." [2Legs]

I'm going with theory B: Anything cooked by 2Legs is going to taste great.

You wouldn't say that if you saw my mangled pancake creations from a few days back... They were meant* to be crumpets Mind... still edible, but impossible to keep the butter on top of them, as they didn't have the holes that they should I'm sure I put on 2 LB in weight the last time I made burgers for dinner

Have you ever seen a clapped-out, patched up car on a forecourt? With lots of putty and filler in all the dents? The filler is cheaper than the original material and thus a new ingredient is added, and the profit margin increases. "Beef"burgers work the same way.

I did some further investigation on the crumpets; Although the more expensive ones looked like having more ingredients, and more 'exotic' ingredients, they seemed after soem investigation to be almost* the same ingredients in each; only the more expensive one had some of the ingredients listed as E numbers, whereas the own brand ones, had the actual chemical names

Three word answer: economies of scale.

If you want to make four burgers, you have to go to the butcher and get a pound of mince, some onions, garlic, salt and pepper. It might take you an average of fifteen minutes work per burger. The amount you'd have to charge to cover labour and the cost of those ingredients would make those burgers pretty expensive.

If you wanted to make four THOUSAND burgers, you'd need to build a machine... but once you'd built the machine, you could make forty MILLION burgers with it, and each individual burger would be the work of a second or less, so you could sell them extremely cheaply.

Except... you'd be using cheaper meat, delivered in bulk, so you'd need to enhance the flavour somehow. And they'd sit in a warehouse for a while, so you'd need preservatives in their. And if you're going to make them really cheap you'd probably want to bulk them out with some cheaper filler materials like breadcrumbs or similar. And to make them move through the machine smoothly without gumming it up you might want to add processing aids.

So you can see very quickly how making a shedload of really cheap burgers can require more actual stuff going into each one, but ending up much cheaper.

I think the answer is if you want nice food and want to know what went into that food you have to make it youself

four burgers from one pound of meat? No wonder why I eat too much.... I'd get maybe two from that (actually mainly lazyness; quicker to make up two burgers which are larger than four which are smaller; though makign the four is my prefered option, as it allows for making cheese larva burgers.... err take two smaller burgers, stick far too much mature cheddar or other hard cheese, between the two, and kinda squish together, to make a 'sandwich' with the cheese in the middle, so the burger kinda holds together, and hey presto, you can seirously burn the inside of your mouth when you bite into the cooked end-product)

The best 'natural' tasting burgers I used to be able to buy* were Iceland own make ones; which, strangely enough were ones with the larva cheese hidden inside them... far superior to birds eye, ross, etc., etc.... Some of the other supearmarket (sainsburys and tesco and waitrose), Fresh burgers, were fairly* good too... but I've not bought pre-made burgers since I was a student I think... err circa 2000 I think
Damnit now I want to make burgers again tonight