food | BaronHK's Rants

Old anti-margarine laws resurface and protect consumers as food companies add water to the food supply to hide shortages and price hikes.

In the United States, the dairy industry has been influential enough over that years that in many states, it was illegal to sell margarine, or at least yellow margarine.

In Wisconsin, there are still anti-margarine laws on the books. One of them makes it illegal for the Sheriffs and the state agency managing the prisons to feed margarine to the prisoners.

As part of the anti-margarine laws, butter became a highly regulated product. There are different “grades” of butter, but the only kind you’re likely to come across in the stores are AA graded, which is the highest possible rating.

Margarine, in comparison, has no legal definition, and many companies are eschewing the “margarine” label even if some state has a definition. Simply calling something a “spread” or a “plant-based butter” or “buttery tasting spread” is undefined.

So it should come as no surprise when ConAgra decided to fill their “Smart Balance” product full of water, except that they figured consumers wouldn’t notice as big of a change as they tried to pull off and be angry.

Many of the reviews I’ve read say that the stuff is now semi-liquid or semi-solid, and it takes twice as much to cook with, and it doesn’t properly melt anymore.

Margarine, in my book, is a no-go in the kitchen anyway. It’s something that most people only ever bought for economic reasons or some seriously misplaced concern for their health.

(Margarine is not healthy, it just has different health hazards than real butter.)

Since butter is legally defined, there’s never any surprises when I take it home. If the cost to make it goes up, the price I pay at the store goes up, but it’s still butter, and I still get four sticks per box that add up to a pound.

While I was looking around, I noticed that food I buy at Walmart is gradually being replaced with water.

Some non-margarine examples are Stouffer’s Stuffed Peppers, which used to be very flavorful (for frozen dinner) and covered in a viscous and tasty tomato sauce.

I just made them for dinner tonight and my spouse said “Dinner was not good.”. I said, “I know, Stouffer’s used to be the best.”.

The stuffed peppers are so watery now that I tried to get them to my plate as they splayed and fell apart, and the meat/rice mixture was so loosely held together that the fork went through it way easier than you should be able to cut “meat”.

Somehow, they added 10 calories per serving vs. the pictured item on Walmart’s Web site.

I also noticed that Hellman’s Mayonnaise is being watered down.

They used to be the best Mayo you could buy at the store, and now they’re just the most expensive. They’re doing these gimmicky rebates like Stouffer’s is instead of maintaining product quality.

On the “Hellman’s Mayo with Avocado Oil”, it’s not even 100% Avocado oil that they use. If you look at the ingredients, water is the first ingredient, and then there is still soybean and canola oil.

There’s only a tiny amount of Avocado oil in there. Just enough to make an issue of it on the product label.

Hellman’s Mayo has actually been run into the ground now to the point where the Walmart store brand is actually better, and has more eggs and oils and less WATER, and it’s half the price.

I think what’s going on here are two things.

They don’t want to shrink the packages further because they know that customers are getting tired of that, and they’re onto them. They don’t want to increase prices, but they have, because Congress and Biden have ruined the US Dollar’s buying power with inflation, and so their last card to play is slip some water in and see if anyone makes a big fuss about it.

In at least the Smart Balance margarine case, “consumer” feedback was so strongly negative and sudden that they promised to have the old formulation back in stores by Winter. We’ll see.

It’s insulting that these companies think that they can slip this by people and will ultimately have customers buying their products again.

In the case of Stouffer’s, they’ve always been a life hack for when you don’t have time to make dinner yourself. For now, the stuffed peppers were the only awful product we’ve come across. I bought some others, on rebate.

We had the salisbury steaks last night and those are still okay. I didn’t think they were watery or using tricks to bulk up the meat to an egregious level, like the stuffed peppers I have a chicken lasagna we’ll get to eventually.

But the general trend in the grocery store is 30% higher prices Year over Year, and when you get home, you find out that they skimp on seasonings and slipped in water to hide the inflation.

I also noticed this going on in lunch meat. Brands that used to say “Contains up to 14% of a solution.” (water) They’re now up to 20%.

This actually makes me a lot angrier than them just admitting there’s inflation and giving me their former recipes.

Fake meat stocks in the toilet and layoffs at Impossible and Beyond.

Fake meat was one of the most overhyped investments in the past few years, and reality has set in.

The stock price for Beyond Meat Inc. sank from $109.95 per share to $14 in just the past year, and the situation at Impossible Foods isn’t much better.

After losing 86.5% of its share price, Beyond Meat also made the news when their COO, Doug Ramsey, bit another man on the nose during an altercation outside of a football game recently.

“Creepy Uncle Bill” Gates is heavily invested in both companies and was perplexed at the market rejection of both products. He took to his bribed/friendly media a while back to say that states were passing laws that prevented them from calling these products “beef” (because they’re not beef, and calling it beef is a form of fraud). So now, they have to call it “Plant Based Ground” on the package.

He said that they sort of want to “force us to call it lab garbage”, which is basically what the stuff is.

Plants are healthy. Beyond and Impossible are not.

To make it taste better, they salt the crap out of it and do things to give it an unhealthy lipid profile, to the point where, from a health standpoint, you’re better off eating beef. Which obviously tastes like beef. Even if they made the fake stuff taste like beef, it would still be an unnatural highly processed junk food.

The companies generally tend to charge about $9 per pound for “Plant Based Ground” lab garbage, whereas beef costs half that, for the decent stuff.

Bill has some big problems.

He invested heavily in these things, even though he admits that he doesn’t eat them himself. Of course not. Why would he? He’s so concerned about climate change that he has 9 private jets and it’s usually just him flying on them, and his house is 50 times bigger than the space he needs, especially now that his wife Melinda divorced him due to being embarrassed by his association with Jeffery Epstein.

Joe Biden’s mismanagement of the economy has cost a lot of people a lot of money. Even the billionaires in America haven’t been spared. They’ve lost $400 billion since Biden was sworn in. But they’ll still be fine.

Bill is good at diversifying and slithering around and getting government bailouts. He managed to secure a lot of Department of Energy money for a very dangerous type of nuclear reactor which won’t even have a prototype generating any power for 15 more years, assuming it ever gets built at all, but that (taxpayer) money is gone now.

Fake beef is dead, dead, dead, though. Between January and October alone, Impossible and Beyond have laid off a combined ~115 employees with ~100 or so in the last three months alone (source: various articles you can easily search for, or scroll through layoff tracker), and with no new investor stupid enough to throw money at this after watching their business plans fall apart, more layoffs are inevitable.

The story about the COO of Beyond being arrested for biting a guy on the nose is actually pretty tame if you pay attention to the circus of freaks and weirdos in orbit around Microsoft and Gates personally.

They banked on McDonalds launching the “McPlant” “burger”, but the trial run failed miserably even in leftist bastions like San Francisco, and they decided to scrub the entire project.

Now they’re launching a “Beyond Steak” at Taco Bell. Most people who go to Taco Bell are “high af”, as the cool kids call it these days, and usually at 3 AM, and they’re not going to order a Beyond Steak taco.

This whole thing was always highly speculative.

From the get go, vegans and vegetarians complained that they weren’t going to order any of it from a fast food restaurant that grilled it on the same grill they just had actual meat on, and meat eaters aren’t going to order fake burger unless it was a one off thing to amuse themselves out of curiosity.

I ordered an Impossible Whopper (with cheese) once to see how they tasted. I thought it was fairly close, but a real Whopper with cheese tastes better and doesn’t come at a cost premium.

Political conservatives certainly aren’t going to be the customer for this stuff. They see “switching” as degrading their masculinity and propping up “liberals in San Francisco” and “Bill Gates”.

The only thing most people seem to agree on is that once you know more about Bill Gates than his “reading list” puff pieces, the more you dislike him.

The US economy is in serious trouble, and the media (to protect Democrats mainly) won’t admit it, especially with the election coming up. They already know the results will be a Democrat wipeout, but they’re hoping to contain the damage by blaming people being laid off for their own layoffs, faking unemployment numbers, saying that we don’t even know if we’re in a recession or bickering about what the textbook definition of hyperinflation is when most Americans agree things are really really bad at the stores.

Like the bag of potato chips that used to be 15 ounces, but is now 7.5 ounces at the same price. Most things have gotten that way. Rent, your whole grocery bill, the cost to keep the lights on and the car gassed up.

That’s another problem for fake meat. It’s an expensive novelty, and you’ll have a hard time selling it in this economy.

The lying media is irritating people and there will be political consequences very shortly because nobody believes the bullshit and the Billshit that the media is peddling about these things anymore.