Someone explain to me why 4kids...

If I remember right, One Piece was taken away from them.

yes it was and thank god!
it is actually a decent dub!
now if only they do that with 5d's T_T

Because they don't expect the young American viewers to understand what a riceball is,Nor do they want to try to teach what it is!

4Kids is lazy, and a shitty dub company, what more can we expect?!

Well not only did they edit alcohol, guns and smoking out of One Piece, they also edited out things like crosses, Roman numerals on books, Luffy's mouth being open (they 'shopped it shut in certain scenes), people's lips (like if they're puckering up or pulling a face that make their lips stick out), certain anime things like the flash people get by their head when they're surprised and they even edited out Ace standing in the foreground in one scene. They basically take away anything they consider "Un-American" and anything that may blow the minds of their evidently simplistic and fragile target audience. Still no idea why they took Ace out of that one scene.

Another funny thing is that, as you may know, they edited Sanji's cigarettes to be lollipops... Well in one scene they also edit the little cotton ball thing that Zoro uses to treat his sword with; they change it into Sanji's lollipop and even insert dialogue of Zoro saying it's Sanji's lollipop. I mean, what the fuck?

LOL @ that scene. So even cotton is too much for kids now? Holy shit.

I remember the dubbed Yu-Gi-Oh! The guns that were edited out made all the guards that were holding them look like they were pointing. YGO: TAS made a lot of jokes about that.

Although 4Kids suck, I must say that they select good people to make opening songs.

Actaully yes lol. I never really considered that but now that I think about it that is true.

I guess everyone realizes by now that the reason was to westernize it. That isn't entirely stupid either. Japan does it with western shows because it keeps the show moving along more smoothly as opposed to having this unfamilar cultural reference stop fluidity. It isn't the shows job to build cultural awareness in kids watching pokemon. Not to say that 4kids isn't responisble for bad editting, but in this case I don't think it was a bad descion.

This is odd to me because I clearly remember seeing rice balls being made by Brock when I watched the show.

Maybe this edit started after season 1, cause i haven't watched past then. It looks like most of those Pokemon are later additions, so I'm sticking with that.

4kids has some serious skills. They turn shit into other shit! Can you turn a riceball into a fuckin' cracker? No, I didn't think so.

its an evil plot of 4kids for world domination, as explained by Bakura in Yugioh Abridged