You are defintely missing out. Food and it's preparation is without a doubt one of the things that lead us humans to develop the tool making abilities that make us what wwe are today. Food has always been the most primal and important cultural aspect of any epoch in our history. It can be hard to get into when you have not been properly introduced to food culture (e.g. your mother fed you a TV dinner and a passive cigarette every evening), but it is one of THE aspects of being human.

If this is the case, why haven't you replaced the food you eat with currently available meal replacement shakes?

Didn't realise they existed until quite recently, variety of prices and use cases - research still ongoing as to what would actually work, and not eat into my purse too much, if taken as a significant part of the diet.

A lot of them seem to be a few hundred k-calories a serving, and even if you had three a day that's still not going to push you up to anywhere near the 2000 or so you need. I'm not sure what the effects of taking multiples of your recommended vitamin intakes for them would be either, since a fair few of them claim to provide 100% of your RDA per serving.

Basically, I don't know enough yet. (Google is fairly unhelpful, throwing out shakes to lose weight rather than as realistic meal substitutes.) But it's an area I'm looking into.

Then you need to eat better food!

You might be right, but how do I find it?

I've been to restaurants that are supposedly decent, and I don't think there's anything off about my cooking - others seem to find it palatable enough, (though whether they'd tell me or not if they didn't is questionable.) I've tried cooking with expensive ingredients and cheap ingredients - and there's a difference in texture but not really much in the taste.

It's not like I can't recognise tastes but the response is just, 'Meh. Oh, yeah it's food flavoured like [whatever]. That stuff you eat so you don't die.'

Take steak for example. Cheap steak needs sauce. Good steak on the other hand is spoilt by sauce, a good steak tastes amazing on its own.

Take standard supermarket vegetables: nothing special there. Know someone who grows them themselves? Try them. Taste the difference? Suddenly vegetables are worth eating again.

Take a bad dessert: it's got all the right ingredients, but it tastes meh. You've just ingested half your daily calories eating meh. Now try a good dessert: omg how did they do this.

That's the difference.