Probably not. Hershey’s is just cheap on the ingredients, so it doesn’t taste very good. But people latched onto the butyric acid explanation because butyric acid is in vomit. Even though the taste of vomit isn’t created by butyric acid, not alone.
And Hershey’s hate is a more recent phenomenon, caused by declining quality over the years. Butyric acid’s been part of the recipe from the beginning, ever since Hershey first tried reverse engineering Swiss milk chocolate.
I wonder if anybody would even equate the taste of Hershey’s to vomit without the influence of the internet. I agree it tastes bad, but nothing like vomit
I agree, though it could possibly be explained if there was an issue with the dosing across batches or if some people are really sensitive to butyrate compounds etc etc
I thought it tasted like vomit the first time I tried it, which was before the Internet was a thing. The very first time I went to the US we had quite a lot of food that was good but the chocolate was awful.
From NZ, so we have Whittakers here (which is really good), although we didn't have that when I was kid.
I tasted it long before I read anything about it on the internet and it did taste like vomit to me. I had no idea that it was possible to make chocolate taste so wrong.
You had a different expectation for its taste, your body triggered a defensive reaction to an unexpected stimulus. This is very common and applies to everything from taste to visual stimulus to auditory stimulus. It's why we enjoy musical scales because your brain is rewarding you for accurately predicting the next sounds to why it is extremely common for people to hate how they look in photography when they are used to seeing themselves reversed in mirrors. It's why musical preferences are generational and normally lock in around teenager years. Your brain is always rewarding and punishing you invisibly based on expectations which by design, are subconscious.
Your experience certainly isn't wrong, but it also is always subjective to the individual.
UK person here, it does in fact taste like vomit. It isn't overwhelming, and I can see how you could become habituated to the taste to the point that you don't notice, but absent that it's very distinctive thing. And smell/taste memory tends to be very reliable so... Yuk...
I have never tasted the same thing in other dairy products, but much more habituated to eating those.
I'm also from the UK and I 100% agree with you- I never read about it on the internet before I tasted it, I tasted it back in early 2000, and I was not anticipating that it would taste like anything other than regular chocolate. It was a horrendous revelation that chocolate could even taste that bad.
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u/just4browse 6h ago
Probably not. Hershey’s is just cheap on the ingredients, so it doesn’t taste very good. But people latched onto the butyric acid explanation because butyric acid is in vomit. Even though the taste of vomit isn’t created by butyric acid, not alone.
And Hershey’s hate is a more recent phenomenon, caused by declining quality over the years. Butyric acid’s been part of the recipe from the beginning, ever since Hershey first tried reverse engineering Swiss milk chocolate.
I wonder if anybody would even equate the taste of Hershey’s to vomit without the influence of the internet. I agree it tastes bad, but nothing like vomit