Imitation Foods and Flavors (That You Like)

- I like krab but have never bought the stuff. Mrs. Snape doesn't eat seafood, so that's out. These days I really only encounter it in sushi, but back in the day it was the main ingredient in Subway's seafood and crab filling, which was a serious acquired taste and I loved it.

- Burger King has the fakest seeming eggs I have ever encountered, scrambled and then formed into a disc for use in their Crossanwiches. I don't believe they're actually imitation eggs. I think they're real, just prepared in an unnatural way, but damn it do I love them. I remember many years ago (but still as an adult), I ordered a similar sandwich at Sonic and ended up complaining that the eggs were "too real." I missed my fake-ish scrambled egg disc.

- I've always loved truffle oil. I've had enough of it both in restaurants and at home to safely assume that I've had the fake stuff. It has never come across as acrid or gross to me. I've also had real black truffle. Truffle oil does not taste like black truffle. It's its own thing, and I like it as such.

I love fake crab. I wouldn't eat it all the time or anything, but I like it once in a while with some avocado and lemon juice for a light summertime lunch.

Taco Bell's "ground beef" tastes just fine to me and I've never understood the fuss about it.

So a number of years ago, McDonalds used to fry their fries in Beef Tallow, which resulted in super tasty, but also incredibly-unhealthy-even-for-fries levels of saturated fats and cholesterol fries. They switched it out back in the 90s to a mixture of vegetable oil with natural flavor (which by the way is pretty much exactly the same chemically as artificial flavor, the distinction is really mostly semantics). Since McDonalds remain the only fries I actually enjoy (the rest vary from terrible to okayish), they've definitely done something right.

Oh yeah, and Gumbercules is absolutely correct. For some reason whenever I think about Jolly Ranchers, the only flavor that comes to mind is Watermelon. They somehow knocked it out of the park with that one.

If we're talking flavored chips, then so, so many:  cheeseburger flavored, reuben flavored, ketchup flavored, dill pickle flavored, cheddar bacon mac and cheese flavored, maple bacon flavored, kansas city prime steak flavored, wasabi flavored, baby back ribs flavored .... do I need to go on?

I would straight-up fucking murder a bitch for a lifetime's supply of Herr's Creamy Dill Pickle chips. They taste like sour cream and onion, but with the onion flavor replaced by dill and garlic.

Finally, my people!!!  Green sour apple flavor is an abomination and nobody in my 5th grade class would listen to my rants about how awful caramel apple suckers actually are. They didn't make green apple better, they just made caramel worse!

The only thing worse than when Skittles replaced lime with green apple was when Cornnuts reformulated their BBQ flavor.

it was even better than that with McDonalds fries. Before they were fried in yummy, yummy beef tallow, they were sprayed with a sugar solution. I know this from my training as a McDrone in the 70's. This was an era when McDonalds proudly advertised their Non-Dairy Shakes, yet actually fried burgers from actual uncooked meat.  For the last few years, on those rare occasions I go into a McD's, I have never seen anyone cook a hamburger. I see them take precooked patties and stick them into some kind of warming oven for a couple of minutes. 
HERESY! When I worked there, they might have been a coronary in a bun, but dammit, you could get a burger hot and fresh off the grill. Why isn't there outrage about this turn of events???

Honestly, as long as food smells and looks and tastes okay, it's generally fine for you to consume. "Use by" dates don't really have any formal meaning.

Fun fact: We have expiration dates on milk because of Al Capone.

Yes, seriously! The apocryphal story is that one of Capone's young relatives, a niece or nephew, became ill after drinking milk at school that was expired, so he went on a crusade to provide safe milk to Chicago-area children as at the time there was no regulation in that industry.

It's a nice thought, but really, the milk business was perfect for a bootlegger who wanted to go legit, because the equipment is more or less the same and he already had trucks and personnel available to deliver it. Capone got Chicago to pass a law that required a visible date stamped on milk cartons, and then he acquired a milk processing company that - surprise! - was in charge of stamping dates on milk cartons. So he tried to monopolize that business, but three months later he got thrown into jail and never really saw the profits.