Just a disclaimer here. I am not a breakfast cereal person. I like Cheerios and Rice Krispies but I was not raised on sugary or flavored cereals. I do like Froot Loops, although as far as I can tell their predominant flavor is not fruit but sweet. I have never eaten Fruity Pebbles.
I got my groceries delivered yesterday and included were four bags of Fruity Pebbles Crisps, as apparently a marketing giveaway. I thought to myself that I would tty them. It would be like eating Froot Loops as a snack. Just a sweet, crispy bite.
I could not have been more wrong. These were quite possibly the most foul things I have ever put in my mouth. How to explain the flavor? It was fake fruit mixed with chemicals, as if you had sprayed a fruit-scented air freshener directly into you mouth. I was thinking if I didn’t like them I could donate them to the staff at work but I can’t even do that. Seriously, do Fruity Pebbles themselves taste like you licked an air freshener?
I totally agree that most modern ‘fruit flavored’ or G-d forbid, ‘froot flavored’ foods are just unpalatably bad. They’re almost always cloyingly sweet in an already over-sweet market, which seems to be an effort to cover up the very artificial flavors you mentioned. And if you want to dial it up to 11, try any ‘fruit’ flavored candy/drink/etc that has non-sugar/diet sweeteners.
IMHO, a part of it is a result of the candy and sugar cereal craze of the 70s/80s : a lot of people buying this stuff right now find these flavors as being sort of ‘normal’ or even ‘nostalgic’. I mean what you ate when you’re younger becomes the taste that you find most comfortable or correct. And that was, in cases of those decades (and probably much of the 90s) was highly artificial and processed. When I think back to things I had in those decades (Anyone remember Runts?) - I see the shape of things to come.
Sounds sort of like when Doritos came out with a “mystery flavor”, a decade or so back, that turned out to be Mt Dew. They would have been unpalatably sour, except that they were also so sweet as to overwhelm the overwhelming sour flavor.
I bought a box of Kashi cereal that tasted like something you would feed a horse. I have eaten some things that tasted worse, but it really hurts to spend a lot of money on cereal that’s not even legitimate people food.
I don’t mind some fruit flavored sweets. I like starburst. It was the extreme chemical taste that bothered me. I still want to know if the actual cereal has that chemical taste.
I’ve heard of ( fried ) pork rinds and someone had a bag and offered me some. I can like something crunchy and spicy, but not this. Really gross fatty aftertaste.
I like pork rinds, but don’t eat them because of the health risk/reward factor.
But if the taste alone didn’t do it for you, be glad that you didn’t get one that had a fried nipple in the middle!
Try Nattō. Japanese people like it, it is an acquired taste, but if you were not raised with it… well, try it. It won’t kill you.
Should you by chance happen to be Japanese, substitute Nattō with a cheese like Roquefort. Same difference.
I thought I had the ultimate refutation lined up, but it turns out there’s been an update to the story. Regardless, eating live octopus was certainly considered to be a plausible cause of death, so I still think it’s a pretty lousy food stuff.
