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.
I saw a theory on reddit years ago that the reason there are no overweight people in Star Trek’s utopia is that the computers keep track of your calorie intake. You order as much food as you like but if you’re over your calorie limit its going to taste like ass because its lowered the carbs or nutritional content of the food in favour of your health
It’s not even a theory, really. Troi had to argue with the computer to get a chocolate sundae in one early episode.
Don’t they ever update the patterns though? Every time a new species joins the federation all their food products need to be added to the database, so there must be some kind of update system. Surely they don’t have to wait for each ship to come back into space dock and have a retrofit.
Yes. One of the complaints Paris had about the Voyager replicators is that his preferences weren’t synced to the ship yet, so he had to manually pick what variety of tomato soup he wanted (the horror).
