Food manufacturers are reducing or changing ingredients, making it impossible to recreate 'grandma's recipes.'

Food manufacturers are reducing the amount of food in their products and changing the ingredients in their recipes to keep up with rising prices and changes in the market environment. Articles claiming that these changes are making traditional family recipes obsolete are becoming a hot topic.

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Just as recipes for stews and other dishes are passed down from generation to generation within families in Japan, recipes for pies and other dishes are also passed down from generation to generation in the West. However, according to food writer Ari Domrongchai, food manufacturers are changing the contents and ingredients of their products, making family recipes unusable.

For example, Judith, who lives in Domrongchai's neighborhood, is a chocolate cookie maker who inherited it from her grandmother and was popular at potluck parties, but recently she has stopped making chocolate cookies.

Judith's chocolate cookie recipe, which previously called for one box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix , two eggs, and 1/3 cup fat, would produce 24 fluffy cookies. However, the chocolate cake mix volume has been reduced by 5 ounces, meaning that the recipe now only produces 20 sticky cookies.

While it might seem like the solution would be to buy more chocolate cake mix, the ingredients in the mix have changed, making it impossible to recreate the same flavor. Judith also uses the same mix for cakes, pancakes, and other sweets, so the flavors of those have also changed.

Reddit users have also been posting about changes to Betty Crocker's chocolate cake mix, with one user writing, 'The addition of leavening agents gives the cake a more authentic appearance right out of the oven. However, it deflates when cooled and leaves behind an unpleasant taste.'

Domrongchai's article has generated a huge response, with over 600 comments on the news sharing site Hacker News at the time of writing. Some commenters argue that 'chocolate cake mix seems easy to replicate, since it's primarily made of flour with added sugar, chocolate, and yeast.' However, others counter this by saying, 'Commercial cake mixes contain ingredients like those in a chemistry lab kit, such as starch, dextrin, surfactants, encapsulated flavorings, and leavening agents. The most difficult of these is 'modified starch,' and it's difficult to pinpoint the exact ratio of each of the many types of modified starch present. This makes it extremely difficult to replicate a commercial cake mix.'

Some Hacker News users are also working to preserve recipes for the future, recording things like flour particle size and protein content, and recording mass measurements in the International System of Units (SI), rather than pounds, to ensure that inherited recipes are not affected by specific products . However, this user said, 'I can't recreate my great-grandmother's banana pudding unless I adjust the amount of isoamyl acetate (a banana aroma component). Modern bananas have less isoamyl acetate than the once-dominant Gros Michel variety,' indicating that it may be difficult to recreate a recipe no matter how well it's preserved.