I think the comments so far are focusing too much on the biscuits, and not enough on the free market. The conundrum, after all, is not the biscuits themselves, but rather their apparently counterintuitive absence from the market.
I’m sure the biscuits are good, fantastic in fact. But the free market is absolutely inundated with food. Food is an easy problem to solve: everyone needs it and everyone likes it, and every civilization throughout history has unsurprisingly churned out thousands of varieties of it. A single average supermarket will contain thousands, if not tens of thousands, of different foods to choose from, no doubt including several hundred types of desserts and pastries. Many of these foods are outstandingly delicious, many arguably more than capable of maxing out the pleasure circuitry in the average consumer’s brain.
So we can sort of shift the burden of proof: instead of asking why these biscuits aren’t on the market, perhaps it’s easier to ask why they should be on the market given all the other foods already there. As mentioned, it’s not difficult to please consumers with food, and although each food is unique, the satisfaction and pleasure gained from it is not. Do we have any reason to believe these biscuits offer an amount of pleasure that is not already matched by 1000+ other foods already available and in mass-scale, efficient production?
I think the comments so far are focusing too much on the biscuits, and not enough on the free market. The conundrum, after all, is not the biscuits themselves, but rather their apparently counterintuitive absence from the market.
I’m sure the biscuits are good, fantastic in fact. But the free market is absolutely inundated with food. Food is an easy problem to solve: everyone needs it and everyone likes it, and every civilization throughout history has unsurprisingly churned out thousands of varieties of it. A single average supermarket will contain thousands, if not tens of thousands, of different foods to choose from, no doubt including several hundred types of desserts and pastries. Many of these foods are outstandingly delicious, many arguably more than capable of maxing out the pleasure circuitry in the average consumer’s brain.
So we can sort of shift the burden of proof: instead of asking why these biscuits aren’t on the market, perhaps it’s easier to ask why they should be on the market given all the other foods already there. As mentioned, it’s not difficult to please consumers with food, and although each food is unique, the satisfaction and pleasure gained from it is not. Do we have any reason to believe these biscuits offer an amount of pleasure that is not already matched by 1000+ other foods already available and in mass-scale, efficient production?