"Jelly filled donuts are my favorite!"

• Brock

That they were. I was so confused as a kid, because I was a big fan of donuts but had never seen one with a rectangular hole coming out the side (how would that even work?)

It might have been easier to learn about if shows didn't censor it out from the start. How are people supposed to talk about something if it's deliberately removed? It's like people went, "Americans don't already know about this food, so let's make sure they don't learn about its existence."

I remember 1997 on The Simpsons, when Marge wanted to open a franchise. One of the options (which her rivals took) sold pita. I was a kid, and this was the first time I had ever heard of pita and tahini. They were simply described as "pocket bread" and "flavor sauce." The introduction of new foreign food items didn't upset or confuse the audience.

It's simply bizarre that riceballs are treated like some particularly incomprehensible thing.

Also, research may have taken longer (and involved trips to the library), but anyone who wanted to learn about something in the 90s still could've done it. It wasn't pre-literate, just pre-internet.

But Pokemon was a show about a fantasy world of made up animals with magic powers. 4Kids felt kids would be able to grasp that, but not rice balls.

Kids could accept a weird yellow mouse that could shoot lightning bolts, they would have accepted some weird food they hadn't heard of either.

Let's not forget the time Yugi and a magician were chained to the floor with buzzsaws inching closer each time they lost life points that would "send them to the shadow realm"