The Artisanal Products You’re Paying Too Much For
Whiskey, olive oil, truffle oil, and meat are some of life’s finer pleasures. But more often than not, we pay too much for products that end up being a scam, or worse, no different than the cheap stuff. Here are just a few of the more popular types of artisanal goods you might be wasting money on.
If you’re willing to look around, you’ll find high-end, expensive versions of just about every single food product imaginable. For connoisseurs and those willing to put in the legwork, this is a great way to refine your palette, but for most us, it usually ends up being a pretty big waste of money. Some foods are bigger offenders than others, or have large scale scams that come with them that makes it hard to justify spending any extra money at all without the research. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the worst offenders.
Craft Whiskey
Whiskey’s great, and small batch rye whiskey is often the top desire among whiskey lovers in the US. When it’s good, it’s good, but unfortunately, small batch whiskey isn’t always what it seems to be.
As the Daily Beast reports, many supposed small batch whiskeys come from the same distillery in Indiana. Essentially, a small distillery buys barrels of rye or bourbon from one company, then bottles it under their own name. Hundreds of whiskey distilleries do this, including bigger names like Bulleit and Templeton. This means they’re not distilling their own whiskey, and instead simply bottling it in their own way, storing it in different barrels, or blending it with other flavors. The Chicago Tribune describes this process at Templeton:
All they actually make in Templeton is specialty whiskies that aren’t mass produced. The stuff in bottles is contracted out to Lawrenceburg Distillers in southeast Indiana, which at 28 million gallons of spirits produced per year is anything but the quaint Iowa image the Templeton brand is meant to evoke. The whiskey is trucked to Templeton, offloaded at the plant and bottled there. A staff of gray-haired locals does the rest: hand-writing the labels, affixing them to bottles and sealing the bottles shut. At least in that way the operation is very quaint, very small town and very Iowa.
The solution to finding a legit bottle of small batch whiskey? Do a little math when you can. The Daily Beast suggests looking to see when a distillery was founded, then doing the math to see if it’s possible they made their own whiskey. For example, a distillery founded in 2009 can’t have anything older than 5 years. A distillery founded in 2013 probably doesn’t have any of its own whiskey at all.
NPR also suggests looking to see if it’s distilled by the company, or another. You can also look into the recipe, because most ryes that come from the Indiana distillery tend to use 95% rye, which is a good indicator.
Not every distillery is selling under false pretenses though, nor is it always a bad thing. Whiskey produced by the larger distillers is often still good, but dropping $100 on a bottle just because it has a hand-written label doesn’t always mean you’re buying quality. Of course, it’s also worth considering that, like wine (and most liquors), most of us can’t always tell the difference between good and bad varieties. A bit of training and care can help you learn, but if you’re new to whiskey, as Priceonomics reminds us, “taste does not equal your taste buds.”
Truffle Oil
By its name alone, truffle oil sounds elegant and tasty. Unfortunately, truffle oil isn’t made from truffles and it’s not as expensive as it’s made out to be. The New York Times explains that most truffle oils are made by combining the chemical compound (2,4-Dithiapentane) responsible for the aroma with some olive oil.
Which is to say, truffle oil is a pretty cheap because it’s not made from truffles. Why? Because truffles are incredibly expensive, with one truffle selling for upwards of $120,000. Even the packaging on truffle oil suggests it’s the real deal with phrases like “100% natural.” Basically, truffle oil is a scam, and a bad one at that. Priceonomics adds:
And if you believe the oil’s critics, rather than imparting some of the earthy flavor of truffles at an affordable prices, truffle oil emits a chemical, gasoline scent that ruins dishes. Yet everyone fell for it…
Many chefs perpetuated the truffle oil fraud inadvertently, assuming it contained real truffles out of a desire to believe. Chef Patterson concedes to happily using truffle oil for years despite the many warning signs (the oil’s price didn’t fluctuate with real truffle prices; white and black truffle oil cost the same even though white truffles are much more expensive) while he eschewed a natural ingredients philosophy…
So, the next time you see truffle oil listed on a menu as an added cost, skip it. Likewise, the stuff at your local grocery store probably isn’t the real stuff either. The price is rarely justified and it’s not giving you much in the way of flavor to begin with.
Olive Oil
A study from UC Davis found that about 69% of store bought extra virgin olive oils are fake. Which means that most of them don’t qualify as extra virgin (extra virgin means the olive oil was made from crushed olives and not refined by chemical solvents). Considering the high cost of these extra virgin oils, this is a pretty nasty problem.
Essentially, most top-selling extra virgin olive oils aren’t actually extra virgin. Worse, they’re often just poor quality or cheap, refined oils. Since the olive oil industry is basically unregulated, it’s up to you to do the research to figure out which bottles are legit. To figure out if an olive oil is legit, you need to see where it comes from, check for a seal of approval, look at the harvest date, and look for the cultivar.
It’s also worth noting that expensive, extra virgin olive oils isn’t always necessary. Speaking with NPR, author Tom Mueller adds:
From a taste point of view, there are times when at really, really high temperatures, an extra-virgin with really bitter flavors and pungency can become a little unbalanced. And the bitterness can become overbearing. And obviously, from an economic point of view, if you’re spending a lot of money for an extra-virgin, maybe high-heat cooking in some circumstances really isn’t the best thing. But for lower heat, every extra-virgin olive oil is good — it really depends on the dish you’re putting together.
You’re often paying a premium price for non-premium olive oil. Lower grade oils tend to just be a mix of other cheap oils, which is fine for frying, but not great when you’re looking for a specific taste. So, before you spend the $20-$30 on that bottle of olive oil, make sure you actually buying real stuff.
Beef and Seafood
There’s no denying that quality meat tastes a lot better than the cheap stuff, but unfortunately labels on meat don’t always make it easy to find quality.
The most obvious example of this is Angus beef. Angus beef was originally just a breed, but now there’s a brand called Certified Angus Beef (CAB). If beef has a CAB listing, it should be in the top two-thirds of of the USDA quality scale, but just about anyone can label something “certified Angus Beef.” Slate explains that unlike USDA Organic, “Certified Angus Beef” isn’t a government designation, so anyone, like McDonald’s for example, can use the phrase to advertise their burgers without imposing any standards on their meat.
Angus beef is often just a marketing term and not an indicator of quality beef. Likewise, a lot of other terms, like “natural,” “antibiotic free,” and “free range” don’t mean anything because they’re unregulated. Instead, you want to look for good cuts of meat and ignore most of the labels. The Kitchn outlines two factors to look for in meat:
Color – Color can vary depending on the particular cut or which animal it’s coming from, but fresh meat should have a rich, vibrant, eye-catching color. Uniformity in color is usually an indicator of quality, since discolored spots can be a sign of poor handling or meat that’s past its prime.
Texture – We also look at the grain of the meat (the direction of the muscle fibers) and how tight or uniform this looks. If the fibers are broken, very loose, or uneven, these can be more signs of poor handling or just poor quality meat.
Of course, it’s not just beef that gets mislabeled and upcharged. Seafood has all kinds of scams that go with it as well. Restaurants are often accused of mislabeling fish on their menu and seafood fraud is rampant enough that the US Government has a site dedicated to it. For example, Consumer Reports study found that only four of 14 types of fish they bough we properly labeled and found that around supermarkets mislabel 20-25% of most seafood. They also offer this advice to get quality cuts of fish:
Buy from a well-run, clean fish retailer. Make sure that employees working behind the counter are wearing clean clothes, hair coverings, and disposable gloves. In a supermarket, shop for fish last.
Whatever fish you buy, look for:
- Fish that are refrigerated or displayed on a thick bed of fresh ice, without a tag stuck in their flesh.
- Fish that smell fresh and mild, not fishy, sour, or ammonialike.
- Fillets with no discoloration and no darkening or drying around the edges.
- Firm, shiny flesh that’s moist but not mushy and springs back when pressed.
- Eyes that are clear and bulge a little; gills that are bright red and free of slime.
- Frozen seafood with the package intact—not open, torn, or crushed at the edges—and without frost or ice crystals, which could indicate that the fish has been stored a long time or thawed and refrozen.
The lesson for all these is pretty straightforward: your eyes and taste buds are better at judging quality than a label. Price doesn’t always predict quality, and for a lot of things, it’s worth the extra effort and research before dropping the cash on an overpriced luxury item.
