Two reasons, actually.
-
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:
-
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.
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.
There are probably a near infinite number of downloadable recipes, and you can program in new or altered ones.