Also, beer, olive oil, and cigars, and every other food people argue over and say "No, just try it, you'll see I'm right, and you're wrong."

I mean flavor, not nutritional quality, so yeah, some "cheese" is not actually cheese, but flavor-wise, it's all fine. It's designed to taste good, and people buy it by the truckload.

"Oh, you just haven't had really good coffee." No, I have had coffee people claim is "really good", expensive coffee, brewed "just right", but again, it's just different to me, not better. And, no again, I don't put sugar or anything in it.

"You just don't have a 'refined pallet'." Bullshit elitism. Proven when it comes to wine, at least. People can't tell the difference between expensive wine and box wine.

Different, not better. Yes, of course, it's subjective, but the way people argue shows that many don't actually believe that. And, you'll be dismissed for not agreeing.

I disagree at most only a little bit with most of your takes, except for the cigars.

There I disagree on a completely different level:

In my very own unpopular opinion, I consider all cigars to be abysmal smoke sticks from the lower reaches of hell.

So no, they are not fine.

Take my upvote for that crazy take!

The instant coffee you posted a picture of us 100% awful tasting and I say that from experience as a non coffee snob.

Having preferences is one of the few joys that we can have left in this world.

Where I live most coffee cost the same to have it made, about $5 a cup for McDonald’s to the hyper local sourced from speciality farm brew.

The one you like most is best. people trying to share their favorite with you is a way of sharing joy.

Some people can’t share in that. Just like some people are partially deaf, some people have muted taste. They can hear something, but not enough to enjoy it. Just because someone can’t tell one piece of music from the next doesn’t mean all music is the same.

That said I think you opinion is unpopular. Most people have favorites when it comes to food and drink.

I would say that one could make the claim that one brand of coffee is bad compared to another one but if someone tells me that they like the cheap store brand instant coffee then who am I to argue with their subjective experience.

I think there's been a study about wine as well that people who are used to the taste of cheap wine generally don't enjoy the expensive ones. Not because they're bad but because it's not what they're used to.

This is a tasteless opinion, not an unpopular one.

Upvote for unpopular opinion, I think.

Taste is subjective, I agree. You could drink the most expensive, finest aged wine and one person will think it's shit and another will love it, because their tastes are different.

Though you do say "Most coffee" in your premise, which implies that some coffee is worse than others ;)

Coffee? Don't care

Wine? Don't drink

Chocolate? The style/recipe or do you mean the cacao it originates from? Pretty much all dark chocolate tastes the same to me (inferior to milk/sweet chocolate) 🤷

Cheese? CHEESE‽ WTF is wrong with you? Parmesan tastes nothing like mozzarella and ricotta is like an entirely different world!

Your opinion is clearly tasteless! It also lacks nuance and texture.

Subjective tastes don't mean quality is also subjective. You can just say that you like shit wine and shit coffee, you don't have to justify it.

Lmao, OP you might want to get your taste buds checked, or spend more time paying attention to what you're experiencing.

Yes taste is subjective, and the placebo effect is real, that doesn't meant that it's completely subjective or that there isn't broad overlapping of bell curves.

Some flavours genuinely have more complexity than others, and there's more for your brain to appreciate and process. It's why children love pure sugar candy and adults generally don't. Our brains have grown bored by just a simple flavour, kids haven't.

I do agree mostly, but chocolate is a hard disagree, cheap alternatives give a noticably bland taste.

Or, maybe, your feeling of smell and taste aren't good.

Freshly ground coffee is better than instant coffee. Freshly ground pepper is better than pregrounded. Don't know what "box wine" is, but there is a difference between badly made wine and alright wine.

Cheap wines can be very different too, alcohol in general isn't tasty but you can feel the difference between good cheap wine and bad cheap wine, because some take shortcuts and subpar grapes and some don't, local cheap wine is almost certainly will be of better quality than some overseas cheap wine.

Robusto coffee is sour and tastes terrible. I'd rather not drink coffee. If you can't taste the difference blind, you have no taste.

Not unpopular, factually incorrect.

There are thousands of varieties of all of those things and entire professions dedicated to studying the differences between them for a reason.

I mean, there are extremes of snobbishness that extend into placebo territory. It definitely happens in the world of coffee, with expensive packs people buy for the sticker.

But this is an over generalization. There is a point of “you get what you pay for.”

There is also the ethics of the sourcing to consider.

This extends to all sorts of food and drink. And other hobbies too, like electronics.

"Box wine" is a gallon of wine in a plastic bag stored in a cardboard box with a spout on it. You usually only see cheap, mass-produced wine sold that way, and you usually only see addicts drink it; most casual drinkers would prefer to save their money for something slightly more enjoyable.

Great points.

From vantage point 1 I'm a snob that prefers ethical sourced goods and services so I voluntarily pay more for similar goods and services.

Along they way, I experiment, try new things and derive a baseline quality measure, that, while still subjective, should technically be treated as a better approach to obtaining a valid opinion versus simply ' I buy the cheap stuff cause I'm used to it and it's good to me." that feels lazy and dumb.

Experience and wisdom matter.

Understood, lol. It was called powder or tetrapack around here. It wasn't as bad as it looks, better than some bottled wine I've had in recent years. It might be nostalgia or teenager mind making it up tho. 🫠

So is light roast Arabica, sour bitter.
But roasting Robusto dark and mixing it with dark roasted Arabica, removes all the sour.
In a blind taste test you would not be able to tell.

Just like taking Pinot Grigio and mixing it with Columbard, softens the bite that white wine has.

Price means nothing if the product was not thought out.

Nah you're right, some bottled wines are total trash, just badly made swill put into a bottle to sell at an upcharge.

Yeah, something wrong with your taste buds obviously, or are you just a troll?

I personally buy it for cooking, seems to work great for that, but I never actually drink it.

You do you, it's kind of sad your palette is so fucked.

Wine is maybe a bad example, since my understanding is experienced sommeliers often can’t tell the price point if you just switch bottles.

False. All coffee is bad

Lidderally.

Looking at what you actually wrote instead of anything else, you're mostly dead on.

Almost all things food related are subjective, and that extends to all the items you listed.

That being said, some aspects of flavor and scent are going to be damn near universally perceived as better. As an example, while it's fine to enjoy plain old Hershey's chocolate bars, trying to claim that they can match a decently crafted chocolate that puts effort into their process is going to be silly because they aren't really the same thing when it comes right down to it. They just share basic ingredients.

And, it is entirely possible to refine one's palate. It doesn't mean what you seem to think it means, and it absolutely doesn't mean what snobs think it means. Refining your palate is the process of training your senses to pick up even minor differences. That's it. Nothing else. Your opinion of those differences is still subjective, but you can absolutely develop the ability to not just detect, but describe the differences between two coffees, or two cheeses.

When it comes right down to it though, some things are going to be so universally preferred that it's accurate to call them "better". A mass produced cheddar from Wal-Mart is just not going to have the same complexity as a locally produced, well crafted cheese. And complexity in cheddar is what makes a good cheese good rather than just edible. It isn't that you have to like it because other people like it, but you also can't invalidate that when enough people prefer something, using the word "better" is acceptable and accurate because of the word itself.

I'm with you. I fucking despise food snobbery. But part of your post here is its own form of snobbery. Yes, it is. You're saying that your subjective impression of foods is superior to others by virtue of not relying on their set of subjective values. That's food snobbery.

I'll also add that sometimes the "better" thing isn't necessarily the more enjoyable thing, particularly with ingredients. Using a deeply aged, complex cheddar in mac n cheese is very likely to suck, as an example. For something like chocolate, making a dip for apple slices and using some really precisely selected, single origin chocolate is going to make the experience of chocolate sauce dipped apple slices way less enjoyable.

However, if you're making a fruit and cheese plate, breaking out the right cheeses to pair with each fruit is likely to make the overall experience better because each given bite can be a unique thing, as the compounds in a cheddar that go so well with apples or (sometimes) pears make it a poor choice to go with berries, where something like a brie is going to do more in the mouth. Better would still be subjective to some degree, but exploring the senses in a well organized way can be said to be better than just randomly cramming things into your mouth and seeing what you enjoy the most.

I'll also say that brewing a cheap, poorly roasted coffee well can make it better than throwing it in a percolator.

Food is like jazz. You get as much out of it as you're willing to put into it.

Ehhh, a well roasted robusto is definitely going to be different than arabica, but it isn't always sour, or terrible. It's definitely more acidic on average, and it's often used to make cheaper coffee, so little or no effort is put into it. But robusto has its place

you definitely can taste the difference between cheap coffee and good coffee, and how they are brewed.

I'm glad I can taste things and tell the difference now. Maybe quit smoking, worked for me.

Coffee contains tastes that people often find offensive, mainly bitterness. Still some people like bitter tasting coffee for exactly the bitterness. That and most taste preferences are just learned and humans suck at unlearning things.

There's a lot of snobbery and pricing based on reputation rather than any proper definition of quality, but that's not the same as saying there's no difference in quality in wine.

Life is too short. Like what you like. Gradation is for the pretentious.

How is instant coffee cheaper? 20€/k compared to 9€/k for whole beans at the lidl.

Coffee beans are literally half the price of instant coffee so yes.

congratulations this is indeed right and wrong

The coffee pictured tastes like freezer burn.

Unless you buy your food in extreme bulk, I think you mean "palate".

Upvoted for unpopular opinion. I do think for some things there's more to consider than just taste. Very cheap foods (or alcohols) might be a taste spectrum or no better or worse with the "good stuff", but the older I get the more I find that I also care if my body can handle it the same way. Rumble guts and headaches or nausea are not super fun.

Instant coffee, for example, seems to give me instant heart burn. Or at least the kind my grandma drinks does. I sometimes get it from plain old drip, but not unless I really drink a lot.

OP says the same thing, but that it's just a different taste, no better, no worse.

People who like acidic coffee though, that coffee is definitely worse.

Uhu sure. And then theres this https://time.com/4902359/wine-tastes-better-when-it-costs-more/

I would have agreed with you like 8 years ago about the coffee. For 20 years, I drank the GV brand in the photo but then it started ripping my guts apart for some reason so I switched to Nescafe Classico. Then a few years ago, I thought maybe it was my imagination and bought GV again and after a single day I had to switch back. It wasn't my imagination. I have no idea what's going on there, but there is a difference.

Also, expensive cigars are way, way better. The cheaper the cigarette or cigar, the less tobacco they have in them. Special Blend means special blend of 7 herbs and spices with maybe a sprinkling of tobacco, more than likely from the ground up roots and stalk.

Plus, leaves from different parts of the tobacco plant produces a better taste and smell. IIRC, the top leaves are the best and the lower leaves are used in cheap cigars and cigarettes. I bought a sampler nub of a like an $80 cigar once and my god it was amazing. The best tasting tobacco I ever smoked. I left the nub and ashes in the ashtray for a week it smelled so damn good. Made me want to buy some tobacco plants and roll my own cigars.

Sure, but you forget that wine cannot be burned to ashes to be sold as a starbucks christmas blend.

And somebody will tell that anything else is like drinking waste.

I'm kind of picky about wine, don't like many of them, but some of the ones I like are cheap and others pricey, different wines taste very different from each other. This is a step up from liking none of them, before.

Coffee I tend to think the preparation matters more, but have certainly had bad coffee and good coffee.

Cheese you are just wrong on. There is quality, some cheese is made with xanthan gum and wishes and is not really cheese, or is so rubbery and flavorless it is bad. I do like so many different kinds, am not limited like with wine. But don't think it's reasonable to say that processed shreds or slices are "as good as" a real cultured milk cheese.

I do agree it's not a benefit to develop a palate to the point you loop back to being really picky like someone who just likes white bread and chicken tenders, and that it's better to enjoy more things.

To build on what you're saying, appreciating the expensive version of an item doesn't necessarily mean looking down on the cheap version.

Liking fancy cheeses doesn't mean I won't seek out box mac and cheese.

The worst wines are VERY bad though

Amen! I'll throw down on stovetop mac n cheese just as happily as a cheese and fruit plate perfectly paired and balanced

Acting like your personal preferences signifies intelligence is the sorriest excuse for a personality.

Looking at you pineapple pizza haters... 😒

It's a troll opinion. The whole flaw with these unpopular opinion comms is that the concept is basically asking for low-key trolling.