[jklinger410]

I have ran into this with meats as well. I had never had shrimp until I got some fresh in Baltimore. I had never eaten beef until I had some freshly butchered in Garden City, KS.

A quote I heard from some movie that released recently was..."the one thing to remember if you travel into the past is that everything is going to taste better."

The cost of modernization has been a net decrease in quality of foods across the board. "Real" foods (and many other products) are actually incredibly expensive. We don't count this along with inflation, but we should.

[j7ake]

Best beef isn’t fresh actually, it is aged for several weeks.

Similar with a lot of fish like tuna.

Sometimes it’s not about as fresh as possible, but how it is grown and processed.

[downut]

Without meaning to be critical, but just to expand the conversation a bit, what does the word "beef" mean in your comment?

Let's broaden the scope, and consider lean and fatty versions of say "grass fed beef" vs. "industrial beef".

The word "fatty" here is just a placeholder for "less than 85% lean" ("lean" is problematical, as is "fatty", too). (How those map to "tough" and "tender" is related but of course the skill of the cook now matters too).

I would rank flavor and texture of those 4 choices this way:

freshly slaughtered as grassfed fatty > industrial fatty > grassfed lean > industrial lean.

Now add in "aged for several weeks" or how about a carefully managed 4 weeks (not that hard). The ranking changes slightly, but for all 4 the result is remarkably superior in flavor.

I've recently eaten on a sailing school boat in the Golfo de California slices of a trashier tuna than bluefin caught about 30 minutes before, and it was outstanding. Almost all US grocery stores will sell you a right proper many day aged raw tuna, and they suck. Of course it's correct that you can go to that market in JP and get a counter example.

[j7ake]

Thanks for details.

I would also mention in Chinese cuisine, fresh lean beef (flank) is preferred for stirfry, fatty beef is preferred for boiling (hot pot).

American culture: aged is key to the complex flavours.

For fish, Japanese sushi often uses aged fish, while steamed fish should be as fresh as possible.

[davidholdeman]

As someone who lives 30 minutes from Garden City, KS and butchers their own beef and pork, I have some notes.

1. There is a big difference in how between how packing plants process beef and how small butcher shops do it. Carefully processed beef that's not aged is better than aged stuff from the packing plant, especially ground beef. The beef that jklinger410 ate was probably both aged and carefully processed.

2. Most people who are used to grain-fed beef do not like grass-fed beef. It's an acquired taste, though I can definitely imagine how someone who is used to it would not like grain-fed beef at all.

[hooverd]

Basically any inland fish you buy is going to be flash frozen- you might as well defrost it yourself.

[JumpCrisscross]

> if you travel into the past is that everything is going to taste better

To a point. Go too far and you get the nonsense wild types we had to domesticate to be tasty.

[jghn]

I get most of my meat from a local livestock farm. While I love the pork, and generally prefer the beef (took a while to get used to the more natural grass fed flavor), the thing that was real eye opening was the poultry. The chicken & turkey I get from them tastes ... well, it actually tastes like something.