Two reasons, actually.
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It’s not their preferred preparation. All the replicated food is based on a pattern from an original recipe. It’s not adding flair or anything, it’s literally a copy of a dish made who knows how long ago. And that’s where the next reason comes from:
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Imagine eating some spicy pepper dish from, like, the 1940’s vs the same dish made today with spicer peppers. It wouldn’t be as spicy eating something that wasn’t, at the time, really selectively bred to be more spicy. If the recipe for the replicator is, like, hundreds of years old it would probably not be as potent as the same dish made with real ingredients.
I can imagine that the characters that have expressed disdain for replicated food probably get hit by both of these. It’s not the way they would preferred it to be made, and it’s also like eating vegetable jello salad in 2024.
This isn’t how replicators work at all. We know they have tons of different versions of individual recipes, and that you can program your own recipe if you want something custom. The way the shows discuss replicated food, it seems like it just straight up doesn’t taste as good, but probably only very slightly, to the point you can’t really tell the difference if you’ve mostly eaten replicated food your whole life
So it’s like Vinyl vs mp3 but for food?
Analog vs digital
I’m guessing the “fidelity” in how accurately they copy the food is down to storage space (like, they’d need what is essentially a transporter pattern buffer for each food to copy it perfectly). So replicators are the food equivalent of mp3s at like 192kbps.
Interestingly, vinyl players applied a standard “reconstruction” filter into the low fidelity sound waves you can store on the disks. When CDs were created, there was no such filter, and a lot of studios did lots of stupid things, from using the exact same signal they stored on vinyl to playing with post-processing filters to get the most different sound possible.
So yeah, a lot of time vinyl was really measurably better than CDs.
According to Lower Decks, the replicators accessible to the junior officers have fewer (and worse?) recipes than the ones for the senior officers.
Yeah, that’s true. Could be that only senior officers can program recipes, or maybe the Cerritos has special rules. They were under heightened security after the Pakled attacks, and also, considering the Buffer Time episode, Captain Freeman is definitely the kind of captain that would make rules about that. And the Cerritos seems like the kind of crew that would need them lol
Welp, that’s my new head canon now. The rules were made after a noodle incident [warning: TVTropes link] involving literal noodles (or maybe gagh).