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by secstate 4502 days ago
Sorry I criticized your claim of being a supertaster.

But before we go off on a tangent about how certain markets encourage production of low quality goods, let's go back to your original claim that somehow qualitatively some people prefer texture over flavor. As I already pointed out, except for the functional difference between supertasters, food preference is purely subjective and not worth arguing about.

What is objective is the amount of cacao and milk fat (amongst other ingredients) used in the manufacture of chocolate candy. If what you desire is something with actual chocolate in it, American manfuactured candy (pick your brand, it doesn't matter), it will, objectively, contain less chocolate on average than most other places in the world.

What Hershey's does to their milk chocolate is called adulteration. It is manipulating the amount of the key ingredient in something to produce it is as cheaply as possible. It's the same thing fast food vendors do to their meat to make it go farther.

It may very well be true that American tastes prefer lower-quality chocolate, but that's a chicken and egg problem that I'm not prepared to debate.

I actually find it ironic that you would suggest that supertasters who prefer taste over texture would prefer American Kit Kat bars, as everything I've been led to believe suggests that those who actually prefer taste would lean towards the chocolate with higher milk fat and cacao and less palm oil and wax. The later would provide a more consistent mouthfeel, but would sacrifice taste (which, in my humble opinion, is exactly what happens with American chocolate).

Of course, because supertaster is not a better/worse proposition, but just a different experience with tastes, perhaps there's something about the bitterness of high percentages of cacao (like coffee, green tea, or grapefruit juice) that is unpalatable to someone with a heightened sense of taste.