Wow, what an exquisite piece of writing.

The core idea of modernity's tendency to take a Good Thing and chop it up into tiny pieces and bind it into Something Resembling Good Thing[1] hit me hard. I've long felt a discomfort with things that pretend to be other things[2]; just be the thing that you are! There's something particularly macabre about the fake version of the thing being built from the ground up bones of the actual thing.

Also: the Incas invented a natural freeze drying method‽ Totally tracks that would lead to a big military advantage before there were many effective ways to preserve food. But also like, what? It took ~500 years for us to rediscover that.

1. examples from the article: McNuggets, American cheese, instant coffee, deli ham, Pringles, particle board, sheetrock, video compilations, gig economy jobs

2. like fake window shutters on houses, brick siding that's meant to look like the house is made of brick, artificial food dyes, the fiberglass shell on the outside of cars, things painted look like they're a different color.

Oh wow, I felt like I was reading my own kid's writing for a moment, as this is very much our situation. They get tired of hearing my long-winded tangents of potatoes being the ultimate food, and of course, my particular affection for mashed potatoes. I read once that humans can live on a diet of potatoes and milk, and I never bothered fact checking that despite me repeating it to them often - and asking guess what's made of potatoes and milk?

That aside, I'm guessing the author's aversion as a child is strictly texture based which is fair. Don't get me wrong, fresh prepared is better, but instant potatoes, especially the Idahoan brand, taste exactly the same to me. It's just that they're too perfectly thin and uniform, quite unnaturally so.

If you ever wonder how fine-dining restaurants do their mashed potatoes, here’s a video from the chefs at Fallow: https://youtu.be/MvSYttvUxA0?si=9BbZtiS0bb87MGON

This reminds me of how I thought I didn't like the taste of butter growing up, because my family called margarine "butter" and never bought the real stuff.

Oh man. Instant mashed potatoes are bad even at the best of times. I can only imagine how truly awful they would be if made with margarine and skim milk inside a microwave. My heart goes out to the author for having to eat something that nasty.

I like how decades after the “Sokal Affair”, slatestarcodex is creating its own impish simulacrum of English departments in the 90s. The author would do well to note Frederic Jameson’s own definition of simulacrum: a copy of which there was never an original. Case in point: restaurant mashed potatoes (which the author blithely considers “Real”) are nothing at all like home-made, which Michelin-starred chefs like Dave Chang will readily attest. They are riced, not mashed, then mixed with as much butter as humanly possible. Restaurant mashed potatoes represent their own decadent, post-industrial, post-modern..simulacrum.

This reads to me bit like Baudrillard's general points (he took a semiotic view on this phenomenon). The author might (or might not, 20th century French philosophy can be intimidating) benefit from reading Simulacra and Simulation. There's even a well known introduction to his thought that uses a similar food concept [1].

1: http://www.critical-theory.com/understanding-jean-baudrillar...

The secret to any great mashed potatoes, ungodly amounts of butter. Just enjoy them and don’t think about the calories but probably stay away from them for a year. Side note one of the first recipes I tried myself was from Chef John of the Food Wishes channel on Youtube.

We keep a couple packs of instant mashed potatoes on hand, but never to use by themselves. It's an acceptable way to quickly scale up real mashed potatoes if you've found that you need more than you planned for. As long as you don't overdo it, the result is adequate.

I predict this was not Scott. Since he sometimes slips his own reviews into the competition.

> The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten

I don't believe potatoes have any gluten.

I wonder if the author had some more profound message?

Is it about pulverizing software artifacts into token statistics?

What remains is not "code", but code-shaped matter?

I was about 20 years old when I ate real mashed potatoes for the first time. I've never eaten that instant crap since then.

The penultimate backpacking/climbing meal IMO is chatas and mash, in which you mix instant mashed potatoes with chatas. I like the idea that it feels like an extension of chuño and the original development of instant mashed potatoes haha.

I feel so bad for picky eaters like his father.

> Potatoes quickly became an integral part of Irish life, so essential to the food systems of the island that when a blight hit them in the mid-1840s it led to one of the most devastating famines in history. The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale that the population of the island still has not recovered to its 1845 level almost two centuries later.

Ireland was exporting food throughout the famine, enough to have fed all of its people. The story there is one of economics and hands-off capitalism as much or more than it is about crop failure.

> National cuisines incorporated the new staple crop thoroughly, and it’s now hard to imagine Italian food without gnocchi, French sans vichyssoise, tapas without patatas bravas, a Eurasia bereft of aloo and rösti and colcannon and latkes.

Vichyssoise is not French food. it's a dish made by a French chef who worked in New York. ask any French and they would have no idea what a Vichyssoise is.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I like particularly Idahoan instant mashed potatoes, other instant mashed potatoes are inferior (and or horrid cardboard flavored mush). Perhaps there are preparation details, perhaps the ones in the plastic cups are awful as opposed to packets or Costco sized cartons, perhaps (this is much more likely) the excessive amount of butter and often good sharp cheese I include makes a difference.

Instant mashed potatoes are a common lazy meal or a "I forgot to eat now I find existence infuriating for some mysterious reason" meal. I find them quite satisfying. They are nutritionally complete enough, filling enough, and easy enough to fill a solid niche in my food repertoire. And an easy vehicle for four of the satisfaction food groups: salt, butter, cheese, and carbs.

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tl;dr

My Dad loves instant mashed potatoes. I think they taste awful. A long history of potato consumption. People like potatoes, particularly mashed potatoes. Thus there is money to be made out of selling them as a product, allowing people to skip the peeling, boiling, and mashing. People still buy the product even though it is objectively bad and not even proper mashed potato. This phenomenon seems ubiquitous. Maybe industrial capitalism itself is bad.

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This would be a fine nonfiction piece if they hadn’t grafted their thinly-veiled opinion about LLMs into the middle of it in such an off-putting, awkward way. I guess that was the reason why they wrote the folksy nonfiction bits in the first place, though.

> a gritty gruel of salty flakes coated with the oleic pall of margarine.

Yuck; you're supposed to use milk, and butter.

> Hannah Glasse’s procedure published in 1747 in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy is, minus the long s’s, still just about how I make them today:[with real potatoes, milk and butter]:

Exactly.