But since you’ve brought this up, I’d argue that it’s not a question of elitism, but rather that 'the masses' simply isn’t given access to these products. What they get is an abstraction of the original, which merely imitates the flavour but abstracts anything else away. Take, for example, meat or vegetable stock, which is now a staple in every kitchen in the form of powder or stock cubes. If you take a look at the ingredients and nutritional values, they’re rather disappointing. The masses may get access to the taste, but not to the nutrients.
The question is: can you give billions of people the “authentic” version?
In some cases you can. In the US at least there’s boutique groceries and farmers markets that sell more authentic organic food that usually does have better nutritional value. But it costs more.
The artificial mass market imitation is cheaper because it is thermodynamically cheaper. It takes far less labor (the most costly input to almost all processes) and it substitutes things that can be bulk produced at a lower unit cost. Being less nutritious probably directly correlates since nutrition is chemical complexity is lower entropy, higher energy, harder to scale.
There’s a lot of rare “authentic” experiences that cannot be scaled. That means most people can’t have them, ever.
You can’t have both rarity / exclusivity and democratization / equality. One side has to give.