Last week, we asked you, the members of the Consumerist Hive Mind, what prepared food items you’ve abandoned or fallen out of love with due to a recipe or ingredient change. What we learned from reading the responses: Consumerist readers love their junk food almost as much as Consumerist editors do.

The two most common complaints: The new recipe of Domino’s pizza, and the sea salt incarnation of Wendy’s french fries. demona667 started things off:

Wendy’s french fries. I’m not sure what they changed besides the salt (now sea salt) but the texture is all wrong.

nugatory:

I don’t eat at Wendy’s anymore due to their fries. Is it even possible for them to put more salt on the fries? I might as well just eat a handful of salt as eat their fries.

You know, they make products like that, but not for humans. Sad.

AtlantaCPA had an astute observation:

I hate them too, and have only ever met people who hate them. Funny thing is their sales of fries have gone way up since making the change so I guess we’re all in the minority?

chatterboxwriter takes the controversial position that trans fats might be terrible for us, but darn it, they’re delicious.

I hate to say it, but cupcakes and crackers taste terrible to me ever since they moved away from using trans fats. I used to love Tastykake peanut butter candy cakes and the chocolate cupcakes with the creme filling, but now they are gross. I also used to [love] Turkey Hill ice cream, but I have noticed a very chemical-like aftertaste after eating their mint chocolate chip flavor lately. I haven’t bought their ice cream since.

madgrigal concurs:

I feel the same way about girl scout cookies. I used to be able to eat a box in one sitting, and now I can barely finish a box before they go stale. This happened after they stopped using trans fats.

Of course, polishing off a box in one sitting isn’t necessarily a good thing.

incident-man stole my avatar has taken to making his or her own trans fat-laden goodies at home.

Trans-fats! Dammit I miss my trans-fats in everything! Life is going to kill you so you at least get to enjoy it!… I now make my own Oreo’s at home…. Crisco and powedered sugar for the white stuff.. yum!

Oh, my.

Pete the Geek and other commenters rhapsodized about the deep-fried McDonald’s pies of yore.

McDonalds apple pies. They used to be deep fried in real grease and the warning “contents may be hot” was to be taken seriously; if you bit it open to cool it down and accidentally got some of that hot fried apple pie filling on [your] lip, you would have a burnt lip! Now McDonalds apple pies are baked and have enormous vent holes, so they are at best room temperature. I keep trying the new ones, but the are never quite as good as the original ones!

Josh longs for the old Famous Amos recipe, and may need to rethink his priorities in life.

Decades ago they changed the recipe for Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies. My life has never been the same since.

ct_price longs for old-fashioned ice cream that only contains simple, basic ingredients like “ice” and “cream.”

Nearly any ice cream brand that contains guar gum or carrageenan. Haagen-Dazs is the only one that uses a pure ingredient recipe. Even Ben and Jerry’s uses it. Shoot, they carry Graeter’s in Kroger now and they talk about how it’s made the old-fashioned way – you can watch them make it in-store in Ohio and I don’t think the old-fashioned recipe called for drizzling in guar gum. Sad. My love of black raspberry chip has ended.

Comment threads about Coke, Pepsi, New Coke, and high fructose corn syrup led keepher to a realization decades in the making:

Huh, until I read this about the Coke/Pepsi and the replacement of sugar and the timing I hadn’t realized why I quit drinking it back in the mid 80′s.

AtlantaCPA shared a change in one food on this list that was almost healthy. Or used to be.

Purely O’s from Cascadian Farms. It was awesome, it was a less sugar, organic version of Cheerios. Then one day they change the ingredients to have MORE sugar than Cheerios (like twice the sugar IIRC) with nothing like “new recipe” or anything on the box. People just had to notice on their own. Usually once you vet a food you don’t have to worry about going back to recheck the ingredients over and over.

Very shady change and there is huge uproar over it in the groups of people who have noticed.

samandiriel is already looking ahead to Easter:

Cadbury Easter Cream Eggs.
They used to have yummie soft goo in them, and then they switched to some kind of horrible semi-crystalized frosting nastiness.

Ew. It’s true. If you’ve thought of any other disappointing recipe changes since last week, please do share them in the comments.

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