Jesus. Forest for the trees. The article is 1500 words on how ice cream stabilizers allow distributors to abuse ice cream while still having it be palatable. It then goes into detail about all the mollycoddling necessary to make ice cream not suck. Finally, it describes Haagen Dazs, which uses no stabilizers yet whose ice cream doesn't suck. It further speculates on the heroic measures necessary for their ice cream to not suck, despite the fact that you can buy it at a goddamn gas station. The argument against ice cream (or any) stabilizer is that when you buy products that don't depend on them, you're more likely to buy something made locally, transported a short distance and handled with care. Yeah, you can eat MREs. Given a choice between MREs and fresh chicken stew, most everybody will go for the fresh chicken stew - not just because it's fresh, but because it doesn't taste like ass. The Seriouseats.com argument is "eat your fucking twinkies and like it. Agribusiness depends on you." You know, I can pay $7 for a pint of "craft ice cream" at Whole Foods or I can go to the gelato place on the corner and buy the same for $6. The gelato place's stuff was made that day; let it sit in the freezer for more than a few days and it starts to go funky. Which is just fine by me - ice cream is a treat, not a staple. Stop telling me how to fucking eat.As of now, smaller craft ice cream companies don't have the same luxury, which means they need to work with the distributors available to them. When handled right, stabilizers offer an invisible or barely noticeable way for these companies to drastically improve their products. And there's no shame in that.
Well, I think that there are enough people who go to that site who don't have access to gelato, or who might not buy nicer ice-cream on a regular basis, to justify this article. I mean, one of the prominent sponsors on the site is Pillsbury. I didn't get the same sense of "eat your fucking twinkies" that you did, but I guess I can see what you're talking about. From my read, I got the sense that the writer was aiming this at people who were avoiding stabilizers simply because they'd heard that they're "not natural" or whatever, rather than on the basis of the taste of stabilized ice-cream vs. stabilizer-free ice-cream.