What are some of your unpopular opinions about food?

PAPYRUS3 wrote: »

Regarding the 'fake' potatoes - I don't think I've ever had them. Perhaps at a crappy little diner during a road trip? How different are they to the real thing?

I think that's unanswerable, more or less.

The plainer, cheaper brands IME can be IMO more starchy seeming (sort of dry despite containing liquid, in a weird way) compared to plain potatoes mashed (but also without a lot of added butter, milk, cream, etc.).

Some of the brands have odd things added to make the flavor supposedly richer, I guess. Some of those have an odd taste, to me.

Some brands I've had are not too bad, but to my taste, not as satisfying as real mashed potatoes. Part of it is that most are more a "whipped potato" texture, very smooth, and grew up eating mashed potatoes with a slightly less fully-smooth texture (but not full of chunks or anything). That's a personal preference issue, I think.

I used to keep some instant mashed potatoes around to thicken soups, or to have as the occasional spur of the moment side, since I don't usually buy potatoes (just don't eat them often enough). They're one of the things that started seeming not worth their calories when I started counting, so mostly I just wait and eat mashed potatoes at holiday meals.

I may be prejudiced by (1) having been brought up in a home where we never had instant, and (2) having gone to a school where many of the entrees were - believe it or not - gravy. Could be beef gravy, hamburger gravy, pork gravy, chicken gravy, whatever. You'd get a big heap of instant mashed potatoes (the cheap starchy kind) with a ladle-full of kind of poor gravy, with a few meat shreds in it. One of these was the lunch entree at least 1-2 times per week. It can put a person off the whole concept, I think. 🤷‍♀️

Instant mashed potatoes are a great shortcut for potato bread, and the finished product actually has a better texture than dough made with scratch-mashed potatoes, in my opinion.

pancakerunner wrote: »

Going to get a lot of flak for this, but I think apples and grapes are more unhealthy than they are healthy

I don't like grapes that much (well, I like the green ones a lot, don't like the others all that much, although I don't dislike them, but in any case rarely buy them, because I prefer other fruit), and I mainly buy apples when I want to use them in savory dishes or they are among the only fruits available, but I think they are plenty healthy. But then I don't think sugar is some evil thing.

Most of my apples seem to come in as medium or small (80-100 cals), and a medium apple has 19 g of sugar, but so what? It has 16 g net carbs. It doesn't have huge amounts of any particular vitamin/mineral (good with C, but C is easy to get, okay amount of potassium and with potassium everything adds up), and of course some fiber.

For me, they are tasty (a perfectly adequate dessert, as with fruit in general) or a nice part of breakfast or a lovely side (again, sometimes in cooked format) or addition to a salad.

100 g of grapes are only 70 cal, 15.5 g of sugar, 17 g net carbs, and have (again) a variety of micros. I think generally one can get what fruit contributes if you eat plenty of vegetables, but since many of us find fruit delicious and a good alternative to more caloric sweet snacks, and of course far too many in the US don't actually eat many veg, I can't really see thinking fruit is unhealthy (unless one has bought into the idea that sugar is inherently bad, no matter what else it is packaged with).

You can get all the protein a body needs without eating animals. I am putting this out there, even though I am NOT vegetarian.
Here we go! Everyone pile on now!