Nobody Wants to Admit They Disliked the Most Overrated Foods, So I’ll Go First

The overhyped pastry division is the most financially aggressive. There’s the macaron, an item that costs several dollars for two small bites of almond flour and air, and which exists primarily to be photographed rather than eaten. There’s the giant viral cookie chain, where a single item contains enough sugar to require a subsequent nap, and where the center is frequently raw in a way that’s marketed as a feature. And there’s the trendy pistachio chocolate bar that the algorithm decided everyone needed, priced like a car payment, delivering a crunchy candy bar experience that was available for two dollars under a different name. The photos are excellent. The eating is a formality.

Then the luxury gimmicks, which is where the pricing detaches from reality entirely. There’s edible gold leaf, which adds no flavor whatsoever and converts a reasonable steak into an unreasonable one purely through appearance, with consequences later that I’ll leave unexamined. There’s caviar, salty and expensive and genuinely tasting, as one commenter put it, like being slapped by the ocean, and I’d like to note that ocean-adjacent slapping is available for free at any coastline. These items aren’t sold as food. They’re sold as evidence that you can afford them, which is a different product entirely and should be priced in a different section.

And the disappointing classics, where nostalgia is carrying weight the flavor cannot. There’s the seasonal fast food sandwich that people campaign for annually and then, upon its return, remember precisely why it left. There’s the traditional confection famous from a children’s book, where a character betrayed his entire family for it, and which turns out to taste largely of perfume and powdered gelatin. There’s a certain red licorice that functions better as weather stripping than as candy. And cold overnight oats, which meal prep culture successfully convinced an entire generation was acceptable, when the microwave is right there and takes ninety seconds. Just heat it up. Please.

Here’s the mechanism behind all of this, and it’s not the food’s fault: expectation is an ingredient. When something costs a lot or arrives with enormous hype, your brain adjusts upward before the first bite, and then the actual item has to clear a bar it never agreed to. A perfectly decent chocolate bar fails at forty dollars and succeeds at four. Nothing about the recipe changed. The framing did all the damage.

And the real value of threads like these is permission. Everyone has privately thought the macaron was fine and not much else, and stayed quiet, because disliking an expensive thing sounds like you didn’t get it. Then one person says it out loud and four thousand people exhale. That’s not cynicism, that’s just honesty finally reaching the food section. Eat what you actually enjoy. It’s almost certainly cheaper, and nobody has to photograph it first.

The photo was gorgeous. The bite was nothing. Order what you actually like.