Did pastries and fast foods use to taste better?

[haele]

84. Yes. Though with baked goods, texture tended to be either harder or more doughy.

These days, the baked goods are "fluffier" but not as tasty. That was one of the reasons that "Wonderbread" and Twinkies were such treats back when I was a kid - their "mouth" texture was unusual for what could be gotten from home or from the local bakers. What I bake from home now is pretty much the same texture to what I would get at the stores growing up.

Those gums and much of the ingredients you listed are chemically neutral in taste, but the processing and factory farming of grains and other actual food ingredients have meant they have gotten blander over the years.
When I was growing up, and commercial bakeries were local businesses that sourced most ingredients regionally, there was a subtle difference between seasonal flours due to the different wheats, and minimally processed produce items like applesauce, peanut butter, jellies and jams could have different flavors even if they were processed the same way depending on the area of the country they came from (i.e. apples from the pacific northwest had a different flavor profile than apples from the northeast).

Hostess tasted different than Dolley Madison, than TastyKake, etc...

Not to mention, there was usually a lot more stuffing in the store-bought baked goods - the Hostess pies would have at least half a cup of fruit mix, instead of the third to quarter cup they have now.

But still, to a lot of people, that consistent commercial mouth texture and regulated "always the same" taste is a good trade off for an inconsistency of texture and subtle batch differences to taste.

Haele