The heartland of Japan is certainly becoming the envy of the nation with their recent offerings of unusual foods. First the crunchy sweet mushrooms of Chubu region turned heads on Twitter. Now out of Tochigi Prefecture, emerges fruit-flavored hotdogs!

What chemical witchcraft went into making these sticks of pork(?) colored and flavored like lemon and strawberry milk is a mystery, but they do look intriguing, and dare I say delicious?

Tweets such as the following have brought word of these wieners to the rest of Japan.

▼ “I stumbled onto the darkness of Tochigi.”

A holistic beauty and aromatherapy blog happened to come across “the darkness” as well. Only they went the extra mile and bought a pack of lemon and strawberry milk hotdogs priced at 200 yen (US$1.85) each.

Images: Holistic Beauty Suzu No Oto

These particular hotdogs were found in the Hasuda Service Area on the Tohoku Expressway not too far outside Saitama City.

They mentioned that despite the shocking impact of the package, both wieners had a firmly sweet and milky taste in the meat that was pleasant and good for either children’s snacks or as something to nibble on while having a beer.

However, those far away from Tochigi with only the image to go by had this to say:

Not everyone thought this was an utterly disgusting abomination though. There were a few comments to the effect of “Let’s go to Tochigi right now!” with which I’d have to agree. Sure, they look just shy of deep-fried chocolate bars in terms of nutrition, but I could imagine those flavor combinations turning out pretty well.

Source: Twitter, Holistic Beauty Suzu No Oto, Hamusoku (Japanese)