Ask Lemmy

At my place of work, one project we worked on involved a lot of contractors from a place based in China. (The project was an absolute cluster-fuck all the way from soup to nuts, but that's a story for another day.) When the project concluded, they sent our office a thank-you gift box of various Chinese snacks.

One of the snacks was a... dried... meat... "candy"... I guess? The taste wasn't "sweet" so much. It tasted like it had been dipped in perfume. And the texture of the meat was hard to describe. Not chewy like jerky, and it didn't have that highly-processed Slim Jim sort of texture to it. Maybe it was sortof freeze-dried or something? I also couldn't identify what animal the meat might have come from. (And I couldn't read the text on the packaging.)

I'm not sure whether it was just an acquired taste or rather a practical joke by the folks at the Chinese company. Lol.

Cella's milk chocolate covered cherries. My grams was addicted to them, so I'd bring a box when I visited. I couldn't even stand the way they smelled though lol

When I was a kid someone gave me a "buttered popcorn" flavored dum-dum sucker. It tasted so terrible that it gave me a taste aversion to real buttered popcorn for nearly 2 decades.

I’m seeing a lot of black licorice mentions, but there’s a special hell for Läkerol’s menthol black licorice.

Black licorice is just horrific. I try it every once in a while as I age thinking "Old people like this, maybe I'm old enough to like it myself, now", but no. It's still an instant headache/nausea combo at one taste. Ugh.

One Halloween as a kid we got gummy false teeth. It looked exactly like how you think it would look. I cant actually remember how it tasted, but it want good. Second was some sugar free sour patch kid clones, they mostly tasted like soap.

Black licorice. Or anything containing black licorice. It’s just fucking disgusting.

American or South African chocolate products.

NOT an anti-American/-Saffer thing. They add butyric acid, which tastes like vomit to the rest of the world. (Accurate, as vomit contains it).

Presumably because the market there have been trained to expect that flavour for some reason. To the rest of us, a US or ZA origin is usually a sign to avoid.

Well, licorice is definitely up there.

There's some pralines that with some alcohol based filling that's also really gross.

But I still remember I was a kid and my parents bought these cheese crackers. They were awful, the it was a bit crumbly but they had this really bad taste of something I can only describe as for fungus & cream cheese. I literally had to take a break and concentrate on not barfing even though we just wanted to play tabletop games. I know it's not sweet but that stuff lives rent-free in my head to this day.

Black licorice.

I firmly believe candy should be sweet; not bitter.

Related anecdote: When I worked an offshore rotation with people from all over the world, I made an effort to bring candy that I'd never seen outside of Scandinavia. It was always amusing to see people sampling candy I liked when they weren't used to the ammonium chloride branch of flavors.

And once I brought this:

Everybody who weren't Norwegian, Swedish, or Finnish (sadly we had no Danes on board) absolutely hated it. Especially the Americans and Brits.

Everyone except Mario, that is; a Croatian geophysicist. He loved them. His voice still lives rent free in my head over ten years later, saying "Sweet candy is for kids"

A few trips later I brought one of my favorites for basically the same result, but this time with Jim (from Illinois, iirc) complaining that it made his mouth physically hurt:

Mario loved that one even More.
The only thing everyone on board liked was the obscene amount of chocolate my navigator brought every trip.

But to answer the question: Twizzlers. I bought some when visiting the US a couple of years ago. It tasted like oily sweetener (as in, clearly not actual sugar). That's when I learned that American and European wine gum are flavored very differently.

Footnote: Durian and durian chocolate is quite alright once you get used to the slight farty smell from each packet you open.

I got a monthly food box for my wife a number of years ago. Each month they sent snacks from a different country.

I can't remember which country it was from, but one month we got some round, hard candies. It was one of the most unfortunate things I have ever intentionally put into my mouth.

I don't even remember the flavor (licorice, maybe?), because my brain attempted to bleach it out.

Everything else was usually tasty, though.