Breach of Consistency

I love travel. I love new experiences. I love new flavors. But sometimes you want a taste of home. I remember when we were traveling with our children over a decade ago. We were in Marrakech, Morocco. And I wanted brownies. I told Alrica I wanted brownies and maybe we would have to go back the states just so I could have brownies. Fortunately, we found brownies made right there in Marrakech, so a trans-oceanic trip wasn't necessary.

Luckily there are certain foods which are global. You find them everywhere. For example, Coca-Cola. Everywhere has Coca-Cola. The problem is this: it doesn't always taste the same. In some places, including Brazil, it is very much like the Coke in the USA. Except some of these places use sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. But in many countries, including Peru and Thailand, even Coca-Cola which is labeled as Original or Regular also has a subtitle: Less Sugar. It isn't sugar-free. It isn't Coke Zero. But it has less sugar (and presumably some amount of artificial sweetener) than the Coke I am used to.

KFC is perhaps not global, but close. There are KFC restaurants in more countries than any other single restaurant franchise. Now we don't always eat KFC just because it's there. But when we do, it is nice to think you are getting the exact same eleven herbs and spices. When we were in Ecuador a couple years ago, we found Ecuadorian food pretty bland. I even talked about this in a post called The Mixed Stomach. And I ate several meals at KFC because the chicken had flavor! The exact flavor I remembered. Now, we have had KFC in some other places where the chicken, though good, was not the same original recipe. Maybe it only had eight of the herbs and spices, I don't know. But it wasn't the colonel's magical eleven.

Nutella is pretty much everywhere. I can't say for sure if it is the same flavor, because it is usually so expensive it just isn't worth it to buy. Often there are local knockoff brands. Sometimes they are good, other times it is like eating cake frosting.

But there has been one product I could count on. You can always find it. It always tastes exactly like it is supposed to taste. I speak of Oreos.

Not Nova Receita. NOOOO!

That is, until today. Today I opened a pack of Oreos that I bought here in Brazil and tasted one. And it's different. It's not bad, but it's not as good. So then I looked at the package. Up in the top left it tells me it's a new recipe. What?! Why would you ever need a new recipe for Oreos? Oreos are great and the value of that greatness is that they are great everywhere you go. Why mess with that?

I'm not even talking about the constant ferris wheel of limited edition flavors. I'm talking about regular old original Oreos. No! Don't take that away from me. I am hoping that this is a Brazil only thing and when I get somewhere else, the Oreos will be the recipe I remember.

I guess one final question: Why are almost all of the globally available foods bad for you?