From Meat Buns to Monster Buns: How Food and Software Change Over Time

Back when I was still a student in Hsinchu, I often rode my scooter with friends to buy a bag of Black Cat buns near the City God Temple. And when I was traveling around the island of Taiwan, I liked to grab a Gongzheng bun in Hualien and a Donghe meat bun once I reached Taitung.

These meat buns tend to be wonderful in memory. It’s precisely because they tasted so good that they left such a special impression. I believe everyone feels the same way—that’s what made these meat buns famous nationwide.

The Taste in Memory, and the Reunion Years Later

But when you pass by years later and buy one again, you often find the taste no longer amazes you. The seasoning feels ordinary, and the meat doesn’t seem as satisfying as it once was.

Did the meat bun change, or did my tongue change? Perhaps both. Memory beautifies the past, and taste buds shift with age and experience. But some changes really are the meat buns themselves becoming different.

The Kind of Meat Bun I Hate Most

The thing I observe most often is whether the meat inside the bun has been turned into a hard, rigid ball.

The main reason for this kind of meat bun is factory-style, automated production. This is the meat bun I hate the most—the meat and the bun are completely separated, with none of the satisfaction of everything blending together in a single bite. You bite in, and the wrapper is the wrapper, the filling is the filling, like two unrelated things forced together.

A good meat bun should have its juices soaking into the dough, with wrapper and filling melding in your mouth. When it becomes a hard ball, it means the making process has lost that handmade warmth.

The Making of a Software Monster

Every software monster usually has a traceable path: from the simplest early version to a deeply enhanced best version, and finally, after endless tweaks and additions, it becomes bloated and overstuffed.

The problem is that the reason users first chose this software was, in many cases, just the core application of that early version.

How similar this is to meat buns. A shop might initially sell only one kind of meat bun—simple, pure, delicious. Once business grows, it starts adding items, introducing automation and standardized processes. Output goes up, but that memorable taste disappears.

Software is the same. A tool might initially solve just one problem—light, handy, intuitive. As features pile up and the interface grows more complex, it eventually becomes a massive beast, and people find themselves longing for that first simple version.

Conclusion

Whether it’s meat buns or software, time seems to push them in the same direction—from lean to bloated, from pure to complex.

Occasionally biting into a meat bun from memory, or opening an old version of software, that sigh of “it seemed better before” may not just be nostalgia, but a longing for “simplicity.”