Two reasons, actually.
-
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:
-
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.
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.