It's not uncommon for anime to see some changes when dubbed, and that's as true for Pokémon as it is for anything else. In fact, Pokémon sees a lot more changes than usual when it's dubbed, but one of the weirdest will always be how 4Kids, the original dubbing company, handled food in the series.
As a Japanese production, set in a fantasy area inspired by Japan, the characters in the Pokémon anime have often eaten Japanese foods, with one of the most common being rice balls, or onigiri. Rice balls (especially in the show) are generally triangular, and have a square piece of dark-colored seaweed applied to it to hold. Brock in particular would prepare these a lot, and on many occasions where Ash and the Pokémon gang stopped to take a break, they could be seen eating these rice balls--or at least, that's the case in the Japanese version of the series.
Pokémon Tried To Say Rice Balls Were Jelly Donuts
4Kids Entertainment wanted to ensure that the Pokémon anime was as relatable to American kids as possible, and since rice balls aren't anywhere near as common in the US as they are in Japan, these little triangles posed a bit of a problem. The dub handled this in a variety of ways, with the simplest being just straight-up lying about what they were. In one infamous episode ("Primeape Goes Bananas"), Brock refers to the tray of rice balls he's holding as "jelly donuts," even though the artwork was unaltered. This was no doubt confusing to a lot of kids, who had never seen a triangular donut before.
But just calling them something else wasn't the extent of it. In other episodes, 4Kids would paint over the original animation, replacing rice balls and other Japanese snacks with more common American food, like sandwiches. The sandwiches stood out as looking different in style, and were often ludicrous in their scale compared to the characters, causing them to be very unpopular with fans, who could tell something was being altered or censored. While it was fairly common in those days to change background signage that was in Japanese by repainting it into English, this sort of change was much larger than even what other anime aimed at American children were doing. 4Kids would do the same to other anime series they dubbed, such as One Piece, which notoriously saw Sanji's cigarette changed into a lollipop.
These days, the 4Kids era of the Pokémon anime is looked upon more fondly, due in large part to nostalgia, but making big changes to the original like this, or just outright lying about what's on-screen as with the jelly donuts, are what earned them the ire of fans in the first place. Big changes to the dub (at least in of art) more or less stopped once the dubbing of the anime was handed over to The Pokémon Company International in 2005, but these early episodes remain as a reminder of a different era of anime dubbing--one where Pokémon feasted on "jelly donuts."
