Tonight I was at the local food store, and I noticed packaged slices of cake on the counter. They were partially blocking the conveyor belt, so I asked the checkout girl if they belonged there. She said yes, and also said with a big smile that they were delicious, that she had eaten one and loved it. So I got a slice of chocolate-iced marble pound cake. If I had looked at the label, I would have seen that it had a very long ingredients list, with lots of artificial ingredients like carrageenan and locust bean gum and mono-and-diglycerides. Now, I'm sure that those are useful ingredients that don't hurt anyone, but they are not natural ingredients that a home baker would use. Over the years I have learned that baked products with ingredients like that don't taste very good. This was no exception. It didn't have the rich home-made taste that I expected (given what the checkout girl had said). The flavor was bland, and it had an artificial taste. My mistake was to think that an 18-year-old girl should know what good baked products taste like. Learning to identify good food takes a lifetime. (The name of the bakery was Simple Joys Bakery in San Antonio, TX.)
I was reminded of an experience that I had with my mother about forty years ago. I was visiting her. Knowing that I had a sweet tooth, she took me to a restaurant that was famous for their desserts. Well, the dessert I got was big but lousy, full of artificial ingredients just like the pound cake. (For example, the whipped cream topping wasn't real whipped cream but some kind of artificial whipped product, like Cool Whip.) In other words, the reputation of their desserts was based on the size of the desserts, not on the quality.
It has taken me a lifetime to realize that most people don't know what good foods taste like, especially baked products. They eat garbage all their lives, and so, to them, garbage is what's tasty.
I had a more serious experience once in which I took bad advice. I rented roller skates from a truck on the west side of Manhattan. I had never tried roller skating before, and I somehow managed to get myself up onto the West Side Highway, which had been taken out of service and was free of car traffic. When I was finished lurching around on the highway -- enough to know that I couldn't roller-skate and had no interest learning -- I started to inch my way down to the road below by holding onto the side wall of the ramp. Along came a man who told me to just get on the skates and skate down. What he didn't know was that I had no experience roller-skating and hadn't even learned how to brake. Well, I started skating down the ramp and quickly hit a high, dangerous speed. The skates went out from under me and I landed on my tail bone. I might have fractured a vertebra or damaged one of my spinal disks, but I didn't know because I was too poor to go to the doctor and get an x-ray. A year later, my back problems started, and I had back problems for the remainder of my life. I am now 70.
Thanks for the unsolicited advice, mister. Instead of butting into my business, why didn't you just keep walking?
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