Vote up the dishes and drinks whose recipes you didn’t need to know.

Maybe it would be better to just not know. That seems to be the case with some of our favorite things; they lose their magic when we learn how they’re made. This is especially true with food. But sometimes learning the process can be enough to turn us off completely. What was once enjoyable – or at least a decent little treat now and then – is downright gag-inducing.

These are the foods that people liked until they learned how they were made.

From Redditor u/corsaiLucascorso:

Cranberry harvesting. There are a lot and I mean a ridiculous amount of spiders especially wolf spiders everywhere. They crawl up the machines, they crawl up the people harvesting them, it’s a nightmare.

From Redditor u/H00k90:

My wife’s aunt made a mushroom soup that she had me try, supposed to be super healthy and tasty. I tried it, it was ok and then she showed me the mushrooms.… […] caterpillars that had cordyceps [a parasitic fungus]. I’ll see y’all later as Patient Zero.

From Redditor u/petitechapardeuse:

Is she Chinese? It’s a popular ingredient that is believed (traditionally) to be sort of strengthening/healing to your body, like if someone you were close with was in the hospital it’s something you would bring for them to help them feel better. Pretty expensive too. I can see why it seems strange though, haha!

From Redditor u/brachiocephalopod:

Imitation crab. It’s fish paste with eggs, a bunch of additives and colorings. Which makes sense. The weird part is watching the two colors of extruded paste get stretched out and wrapped around each other, like fish taffy.

From Redditor u/Forwardbase_Kodai:

I manage a meat department and when customers ask me about our imitation crab meat, I always say it’s a “fish hotdog” and the people who were already going to buy it love the description, and those on the fence usually opt out.

From Redditor u/briannarosepierce

Gummy bears (or just gummies in general). Took me 19 years to find out that the way they’re made is with pig carcasses and bones.

From Redditor u/PrinceAzTheAbridged:

Fun fact: Snack Pack brand does not contain gelatin!

From Redditor u/shying_away:

Orange juice (the kind in the refrigerator aisle) not because it is disgusting or anything, but because it is basically old frankenjuice. All the labels such as “fresh squeezed,” “not from concentrate,” and “pure” are only true in the most obtuse ways.…

Unfortunately, some of the FDA and other state laws to protect food also require a lot of the processes that destroy the juice.

From Redditor u/Adddicus:

I don’t even know what parts of what animals are turned into an extruded rectangular paste to make scrapple, but damn that […] is delicious.

From Redditor u/cordial_chordate:

I saw it being made in a large cauldron, outside at the Adams County Apple Festival. I can 100% confirm that my wife and I did gag seeing/smelling it being made. My wife’s a west coast girl and Pennsylvania’s delicacies very much concern her.