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.
At least part of it might also just be Federation snobbery.
None of the crew on the Enterprise complained of replicated food, and for the most part, the attempts at actual cooking tended to be dismal (Rikers scrambled eggs were inedible to human palates). The only complaint we had was Troi wanting a “real chocolate sundae”, which the computer seemed happy to provide, if it didn’t exceed her nutritional intake guidelines.
The Federation prides real things and real experiences over something they consider fake, and they might consider replicated food to be in that category, even if it is otherwise fine and near-indistinguishable.
We do also know that the computer will remove poisonous substances (like removing the seeds and stems from replicated apple slices) and make as best a balanced nutritional profile it can in what it creates, which might alter the taste a bit, similar to how some healthy-variant recipes aren’t as nice as their counterparts, since they lack the salt and fat for flavour.