Ask Lemmy

Okay so during halloween, there are these weird eyeball gummies that are not only unsettling to look at, but they also taste like sugary plastic. It's by far the worst tasting candy I've ever experienced, including low quality black licorice and some weird wood bark candy.

NECO wafers. Like cardboard they taste

Lucas Limon - I never understood how kids could eat. Even before they found lead in it.

Durian candy and sour milk candy share the top spot.

Swede here.

Some American candy, mostly bad chocolate

Can't stand corn fructose and palm sugar based snacks. Terrible everything - engironmental impact, texture, health impact, flavor. It's just the cheapest possible option that ruins everything it touches.

The cheap no name "chocolates" that taste like eating oil solids disguised as chocolate

Peeps. I've never like marshmallow anything, really, and definitely not those abominations. Most cinnamon-flavored things. Edit: forgot one: chocolate-covered cherries. I don't know why. I have a cherry tree and will eat the cherries off it and don't even mind most artificially-cheery-flavored things. I also eat other fruits covered in chocolate (even durian).

I tried Hershey's (American chocolate) before and it tasted absolutely disgusting. it will never ever come remotely close to Dairy Milk or Galaxy

Salted liquorice.

I had a Norwegian friend who waxed lyrical about this stuff. So when I saw it for the first time in a shop, I grabbed a packet to nibble on while waiting for my train.

Plain black liquorice is delicious and salt makes everything taste better, and the Norwegian seemed like a nice, relatively normal person who enjoyed other things I liked. This was a low risk choice of mid morning snack, I thought to myself.

I was wrong. So very wrong.

This stuff tastes like it was peeled off the bottom of a shoe after walking through the city all day. It's not salt either, it's freaking ammonium chloride.

To paraphrase the Wikipedia:

The mineral is commonly formed on burning coal dumps from condensation of coal-derived gases. It is also found around some types of volcanic vents. It is a product of the reaction of hydrochloric acid and ammonia.

And Scandi's put this on liquorice and like it. Even the kids. Madness. It took my all not to heave into a bin after trying it and like six cups of black tea to get the taste out of my mouth.

I gave the Norwegian the rest of the packet and he laughed at me while I watched him eat it because I looked so horrified.

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

Hands down absolutely nothing worse than peeps. They somehow manage to make twizzlers taste like ultra gourmet candy.

Twizzlers.

I tried them in the US and it just felt like I was chewing on a piece of plastic.

On the other hand, unlike most of the people in the comments, I love licorice.

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.

Hersheys "chocolate". I spit it out, and a bit embarrassed, asked "could it gone bad during the flight?"

Well, obviously this stuff does taste like vomit, and Americans seem to be OK with that. Explains a lot about American behavior. If chocolate here would taste like that, we probably would have more mass shootings, too.

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.