[omnicognate]

Nobody's going to make you give up your Coke Zero. The sweetener epidemic has, however, deprived me of things I enjoy. Coke, fortunately, remains available in "Classic" form, but here in the UK many drinks are no longer available without sweeteners: Vimto, Irn Bru, Tango, Lilt, Ribena, Robinson's Barley Water, Schweppes Tonic Water - all are now full of aspartame and saccharin in their non-"diet" variants.

As a person with a healthy weight and the self-discipline to maintain it long term, with no diabetes or risk of it, who is not and never has been addicted to sugary drinks but who enjoys them (greatly) as an infrequent, calorie-counted treat, the loss of these childhood tastes is saddening, especially since there is very little evidence of any actual public health benefit.

If I were magically transported back to the 1980s the first thing I'd do is buy a bottle of Corona Cherryade.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

To me what is saddening is that those were your childhood tastes. That stuff should never have been allowed to be sold to kids. Coloured sugar water should not be what someone remembers as a childhood treat.

Then again, I understand. I'm a long-term exile to the UK from a Mediterranean country. Fruit and veg in the UK are absolutely tasteless and therefore pointless as anything but a sort of medicine. You guys are really unlucky.

Well at least you got... turnips.

[omnicognate]

What a bizarre little drive-by. You make several assumptions about my life, tastes and eating habits that couldn't be further from the truth, but I don't have to defend myself. I'm sorry to hear you've moved to the UK but aren't earning enough to afford decent fruit and veg.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Wait, what assumption did I make? You said that Ribena, Irn Bru and friends are "childhood tastes". I made no other assumption. The rest of my comment is my experience of living in the UK.

And there's nobody more sorry of this than me but the food in the UK is shite. There's this story I like to tell where I was buying bread from the Waitrose and it tasted like carton, like it had a distinct taste of wet box. So I figured they just don't know how to make bread because they're British and bread is not their thing. So I bought some flour and made my own bread... and it tasted exactly the same. Because it was the flour that tasted like carton. That was wholemeal flour, Waitrose own brand, and Waitrose is supposed to be "posh" or "poncy" or whatever. "Supposed" as in the British call it that because it has decent produce, imagine that.

And if it was just the bread! Everything I've ever eaten Made in Britain tastes bland, odorless, tasteless, like the perfect murder poison.

Then I take the ferry and cross to France and finally bread tastes of bread, again, cheese tastes of cheese, coffee tastes of coffee and not of boiled rotten socks. The fruit and veg is still not stellar, mind, but at least I can finally enjoy food. And if I take the train and go back home, every stop on the way I can taste the coffee getting better the farther away I move from those wretched, miserable rain-drenched isles.

But, you know, the turnips are fine.

[omnicognate]

For one thing you assumed my childhood was spent in the UK. More importantly, though, you assumed that when I called those drinks "childhood tastes" it meant they were the tastes of my childhood. Far from it. Food is the most important thing in my life after family, and that goes back generations.

Your experiences of food in the UK don't match mine, and I've travelled plenty. In most places in the world you'll find some specialities done well, but I've yet to find anywhere with a greater range and depth of culinary options than London (although any truly global city will compete).

I rarely eat supermarket bread as we make our own daily. We mostly use Marriage's flour, which is available in many places, including Waitrose. That said, the bog standard Chorleywood stuff is comparable to equivalent products in Europe and decent farmhouse loaves, San Francisco style sourdough, baguettes, ciabatta, pain de campagne, etc. are all widely available in supermarkets. I can obtain more specialised baked goods from any of at least 4 good bakeries a short walk from my house.

As for cheese, France, Italy and Switzerland do have some wonderful ones, and I can obtain many of them any time I want from the cheesemonger down the road. As often as not, though, I'll buy something UK made. Baron Bigod is better than any Brie de Meaux I've tried and while Roquefort is briefly entertaining in a salty sort of way it can't compete with Colston Bassett Stilton. I don't recall seeing much of any of them in Mediterranean countries.

I can't speak for coffee as I don't drink the stuff. I'm pretty sure I could obtain just about any kind of coffee in the world with ease here, though, if I wanted to.

The tyranny of "healthy" food is the exclusion of experiences for no good reason. There's nothing wrong with sugar, fat or salt, you just need to avoid eating too much of them (or too little in the case of fat and salt). By far the most effective tool for that is good old-fashioned calorie counting, and thank god that alongside the various ill-judged public health measures in the UK there's also now the requirement for most food sellers to provide calorie info.

FWIW my dinner last night was homemade olive and garlic sourdough, which I had with some Ubriaco Rosso and some Godminster Cheddar. Delicious and life-affirming. 820kcal.

I don't know where your obsession with turnips has come from. I think I've only ever had them as part of Cornish pasties, which rule. I'm more of a swede man myself - give me haggis, neeps and tatties any time.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Well that is very unreasonable. First you say that Ribena et al. are "childhood tastes". Then when I say that's sad, you say "not my childhood!" and accuse me of making assumptions. Well, by that token, you're making assumptions too: I never said I think your childhood was spent in the UK.

There is an XKCD for that style of communication, you know:

https://xkcd.com/169/

About the cheese, you should check out any supermarket in France, Italy or Greece. In Italy or Greece, chances are you'll find 30 different kinds, including a couple of locally-made ones. In France it's more like 130. In the small Auchan at the corner of Tolbiac and Rue Barrault, near where I stayed in Paris, there were six or seven refrigerators dedicated exclusively to cheese- cheese of every type (bloomy rinds, washed rinds, pressed, cooked, hard, soft, blue, white, ... ), and from every corner of France (little goat's cheeses from the Valee de la Loire, Corsican sheep's milk cheese, tommes from all over the place...). The larger Carrefour in the Italie Deux mall, at the center of the 13th arrondissement had about a dozen. My friendly neighbourhood cheesemonger stocked an even greater variety and at a much better quality. I swear I have never seen so much cheese, of so many different kinds and from so many different places all together in one place. Of course, he was "Meilleur Ouvrier de France". Try to imagine the British DWP handing out medals to the best cheesemongers, or bakers!

Stilton? Well that's a good cheese, no disagreeing. But then, you go to a Sainsbury's, or a Tesco's, and what authentically British cheeses do they stock? If they stock Stilton, that's lucky. Then it's cheddar, cheddar, cheddar... oh, and even more cheddar. Maybe a bit of Wensleydale, and that only thanks to Aardman. And you know why? Because the average Brit only knows three kinds of cheese: haloumi, mozzarella and cheddar. Did I mention cheddar?

Sorry, but the variety and quality of cheese in the continent is just not something that the UK can compare with, and the Europeans know what they are and how to appreciate them.

P.S. Olive and garlic sourdough... why? Why put things in bread? Unless you're making pizza that is. See, I don't know if you're British but that's just such a British thing to do. The British have no understanding of why bread is good, because it sucks when they make it, so they stuff it with... stuff. Because they think that makes it somehow magickally better. It doesn't! It just makes it bad bread with stuff in it.

[omnicognate]

I didn't say they weren't the tastes of my childhood, I said they weren't the tastes of my childhood, with that emphasis. Perhaps it wasn't obvious what I meant if English isn't your first language. I was saying that they are childhood tastes (of my childhood, and loved ones!) but some among many and not defining ones. There's no semantic trickery involved. The insult I was responding to was the implication that because I enjoyed these drinks as a child it meant I had a limited diet and crude tastes.

The rest of it isn't worth responding to as I'm pretty sure I've had the exact same conversation with you before. You won't change your mind. Why you choose to live in a country you're so convinced is a shithole is a mystery to me, but next time I see you whinging about it on hn I'll know to walk on by.

The olive and garlic sourdough was wonderful. I don't care a jot if it doesn't conform to some arbitrary food rules you've invented.

[marliechiller]

> the farther away I move from those wretched, miserable rain-drenched isles.

you dont make a compelling case when you end your point with such bias

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Well, I'm biased. What can I say? I've lived seventeen years in this country! There was a time when people asked me why do I stay if it's so bad, and I would say, "oh, it's because of the beautiful weather, the great food, and the friendly people". And then no more questions.

A country that keeps voting the Nasty Party to power again and again, and only votes otherwise when it votes its Light version, is not a country that people choose because it's a nice place to live in.