Food You Don't Like...
photo of "uni" (sea urchin) by Inside-Japan
You know how there's some foods out there that people have a hard time with? I'm not talking about the "weird" stuff we usually write about. Stuff like ... dried coconut. I know so many people who just can't stand it. They won't even eat German chocolate cake (one of my favorites) or Mounds candy bars, because of the coconut. Then there's stuff like, oh... licorice, cinnamon, kimchee or sea urchin (uni), that many people refuse to try. Or they try it once and give up. Imagine if they did that with sex -- which is always bad the first time.
photo of kimchi
My dad has this thing with rye bread. He can't eat it. No rye bread. Could never figure that one out, it's just bread! The whole family picks on him because of it. He eats everything else though. Maybe a bad childhood experience involving rye bread?
Other people have problems with cheese. Some people don't like fish. I knew one guy who refused to eat anything green. (I have the opposite problem -- if there's nothing green on the table I get grumpy and my appetite shuts down.)
So, I'd like to start a list here of foods people don't like. The more non-logical the better. Don't like spinach, or pickles with peanut butter and bananas, or licorice chewing gum? Have you ever met anyone who doesn't like pizza? Tell us about it ... comments below.
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posted by Michael @ 5:14 AM
70 comments
70 Comments:
Start here: Wikipedia: Acquired taste
Texture always does it for me: bananas with sugar spots, mushrooms, baked eggplant. The mushiness just ticks my gag reflex to no end.
The only thing I can always name off the top of my head as a "won't eat" is marmite...ecccch.
I've been a vegetarian since I was eight, so meat is right out. However, even when I ate meat, I would never eat fish. That sucks, 'cuz I live in Japan.
saffron, truffles, caviar. guess i'm a cheap date!
Fish Eyes, the taste doesn't bother me. The combination of the lens being in my mouth along with the goo makes me instantly spit it out.
uni and kimichi, YUM!!
you blog is thoroughly entertaining. keep it up!
I absolutely hate mushrooms, olives, truffles, and salmon roe.
i can't deal with licorice twirls ... or whatever they are called. Basically those long, spiraled licorice candies. They just taste awful every time I have one.
I've been a vegetarian for over a decade now, so obviously, I'm not at all fond of meat of any kind. The taste and texture has just never appealed to me.
Also, I absolutely despise ketchup. The smell of it makes me gag. Tomato soup, marinara and BBQ sauce, and salsa doesn't bother me, but for some reason I just can't stand ketchup. Bleh.
the seemingly inoffensive taste of cucumber will make several people i know gag, which i will never be able to understand because it practically doesn't even taste like anything.
i eat almost any candy but i will not touch black licorice or anything black licorice flavoured (e.g. goodies). bleughhhh!
Rye bread is great, but the caraway that it often contains is horrible.
Let's see...I don't really like eating paper or wood but I don't know if that counts since those aren't foods. But even toothpicks make my tongue recoil. As for edibles there's not much that I won't eat.
Apart from a giant sea snail at the age of 12, the terrors of which I got over a couple of years back when I consumed a plateful of the stuff in Beijing, I find it pretty difficult to stomach the Beijing fermented mung bean milk, which can be found in some of the smaller restaurants.
I guess that drinking this must be akin to eating cheese for the first time. I've tried three times now and it becomes marginally more palatable on each attempt.
I've had uni a few times and I don't see what the big deal is yet. It's ok, but it's nothing special.
As a kid, I hated pizza, boxed macaroni and cheese, and grilled cheese. On the other hand, I loved spinach, stuffed zucchini, baba ganoush, and hummus.
As an adult, I'll eat it all and I now love all of the above. The only food I won't touch is a raisin. I freaking HATE raisins, they're disgusting. I also have a phobia of insects so I can't bring myself to knowingly eat them, but I'll eat any strange cut of meat thrown at me otherwise. Maybe one day I'll be able to eat chocolate covered ants or meal worms, but that day is far away for now.
I also have a fascination with foods that people don't like. Of course there are obvious foods that people like, but the ones that they don't like are really interesting. Also, it helps me out if I ever have to cook for them or eat with them.
There are foods that I don't like, but I've read that if you eat something 10 times, you will acquire a taste for it. I loathe blue cheese but have probably eaten it about 5 times in the last 10 years. So I still have 5 more times to go until I can prove my theory.
It amuses me to watch people suffer when they eat something that everyone else loves to eat but they just can't stand the taste of. I wonder if it's a matter of different tastebuds?
Foie gras, caviar, artificially-flavored banana candy, steamed chicken feet, and durian.
Love the blog! Your posts on Shanghai cuisine helped me out while I was there.
I look forward to finding a food I don't like! But I'm not one to give up after the first time - perhaps that's why I'm such a food slut!
FYI, I wasn't sure if I liked Uni the first time I had it. Now it is one of my favorites..
I'll eat most things considered edible by someone. Obviously there are foods that I prefer above others, and there are foods that I wouldn't personally choose but will eat if they are served by someone.
But one thing that I refuse to eat is mashed rutabagas (or swedes, if that's your preferred term). I did like them as a child until one day when I got violently sick after eating it. I don't think it had anything to do with the food itself, but the association between rutabagas and throwing up has proven itself impossible to shake off.
Licorice seems to be a common food people don't like.
I've never heard of someone not liking pizza -- in any country.
My younger brother wont touch anything having to do with candy or any chocolate lower than 70%
celery!!! i love vegetables, but celery makes me throw up in my mouth. i thought i'd give it another shot a few months ago because my buffalo chicken was too little green, and i just had to spit it right out.
also - my life motto is "say no to mayo". though i do like it in potato salad or tuna salad or chicken salad or pasta salad. anything else makes me gag.
hmmm, radishes are not my fav and the salty black licorice candies the swedes I used to live with ate were distinctly gross. besides that, it's all order of preference...
whenever I hear of someone who really doesn't like x, y or z food, I always want to picture them in a desert island situation where their culinary nemesis is the primary nutrient source.
maybe I am a bad person.
I can't eat peas. I just can't.
Epic champion fail.
you know who this is, M!
I absolutely hate the texture of onions. Whenever I fail to properly de-onion my plate and crunch into a piece it sends shivers down my spine. This is made even worse by the fact nearly everything contains onions. Dishes at restaurants that contain onions often do not list it as an ingredient. It's so cheap too that many places load up on it.
Just thinking about onions makes me grimace.
Yeah, over-use of raw onions is all too common. Note to restaurants -- stop filling our dishes with cheap, raw onions.
Raw Scallion (Green Onion) taste makes me gag instantly, it's simply horrible!
I have eaten lots of weird stuff (like flying fox/fruit bat) but I won't eat oats (porridge), innards or licorice!
I can't stand the texture of cooked eggplant. And I really do not like the texture of fat. Fatty meats for me are out if they're a plain cut. If sauce hides it or if they are in meatloaf, I'm fine. And I love dill pickles and vinegary things but any kind of sweet pickle of relish makes me gag.
I am a lover of all sorts of offal...liver, heart, etc. I could live happily eating nothing but foie, uni, well cooked tripe, sweetbreads, and chicken liver pate.
What I hate, will never eat, and makes me gag?? Melted Mozzarella. And I LOVE cheese, but once its melted and stringy....YUK!!! And yes, I scrape the cheese off my pizza!
Not technically a 'food' but Hefe-Weizen beer makes me want to kill somebody.
Due to my multi-cultural background, I've had the pleasure of sampling a variety of cuisines and oddities, and there is very little I won't happily gulp down: seaweed, uni, raw sea cucumbers, tripe, tongue, bitter melon...all eaten with relish. That being said, there are a couple of things I wouldn't rush to eat again. The main one is abalone guts. I had mine in a sushi restaurant where it was served in a shot glass with a generous drizzle of sesame oil. Just talking about it has made my tongue remember the uber-fishy, greasy taste and texture of that shot. It slipped down rather quickly but left a thick coating on my tongue that tasted like rotting fish on hot concrete. Blech!
Here I am - the one person in the world who absolutely abhors pizza!
For me, it's the sauce. To me, tomato sauce is just vile. My grandmother is Italian and would probably cut out my tongue if she knew I felt this way, but I just can't do it. Especially on pizza.
I have put up with decades of ridicule, comments like "how can anyone NOT like pizza?!" Even if I scrape the sauce off and eat the crust, there's always little bits of sauce that somehow find their way to my taste buds - and I somehow can always tell. Even the smell grosses me out... which made college a tougher experience, I can tell you!
i'm a very adventurous eater and i love trying new things but i can't stand mashed potatoes or chocolate ice cream. they're like nails on a chalk board, just unnerving. something about being both mushy and gritty, it's like trying to eat mud.
i know a lot of people who won't eat cheese and so they won't eat pizza. maybe they would eat a cheeseless pizza but is a cheeseless pizza even pizza?
EWW TO EGGS. THEY SMELL LIKE FARTS.
I avoid them unless the taste is completely masked by something else. Even then, I have a strict 2-egg limit. Any more and I'm sick for the rest of the day.
artificially peach flavored things, Papa Beard puffs (just the smell of them!) and Shanghainese food.
Canned spinach is nasty.
I don't like Ragu spaghetti sauce it has chunks of onions in it makes me gag. I don't like onions. I like onion rings, but I only eat the breading. Just looking at Ragu spaghetti sauce with onions in it makes me gag. Now I don't like spaghetti.
I'll second the ketchup aversion - no idea why, but the combination of tomato/vinegar/sugar does something bad to my sense of taste. Yet I have no problem with ketchup-based BBQ sauces (as long as there's enough other flavors in there). I think it's the chili powder/smoke flavor that "fixes" it.
Also not a fan of beans - it's a texture thing.
BELL PEPPERS! They are the worst! I love spicy peppers but bell peppers have the worst, most overpowering flavor. I also don't like cilantro because I think it tastes like soap.
WHen I was about 8, I had a dream that my mother was stuffing a very boring piece of cheese in my mouth. It didn't have the zing and kick of aged cheddar or the wondrous smelliness of parmesan, or the nuttiness of gruyere or swiss. It was plain "coon (not so) tasty" and reminded me of putting a great gob of butter in my mouth. 30 yrs later, boring cheese makes me shudder, badly made, cheddar, all chewy and springy sends my gag reflex into over time.I also love 2 slices of battered fried onion rings but after 2 I feel like I will vomit. What's with that? heh heh heh.
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AND corona beer, yuck, bleh, ick. Beer IS food :D What is guinness if not a complete meal in a glass? MMM, guinness.
I didn't like pizza as a kid - I know, so weird! At my friends' birthday parties instead of eating pizza with the others I asked their moms to make me a sandwich!
I am happy to say I have outgrown my childhood pizza hate and am now thoroughly obsessed with pizza!
Oh and as for present-day foods I will not eat, they most certainly fall more in the "condiment" category: Sour cream (the smell of it makes me wish to die), mayo and ranch dressing.
Tinned tomatoes with egg - I'm fine with real tomatoes fried but tinned? Yeukk
you can definitely find a lot of chinese that don't like pizza.
what always surprised me is the number of people that hate raisins (in cakes mostly)
I have to hide anything suggesting the mere existence of coconut from my wife. Just knowing that such a thing as coconut exists in the world makes her turn green. Except Thai curry soup. She first had it without knowing that it was made with coconut milk, and loved it. But she has to eat it in a restaurant. No homemade allowed!
For me, it's broccoli and cauliflower. Even the smell of cooking broccoli makes me run outside!
Im amazed at the things people refuse to eat. I have been trying to think of something ordinary that I dont like eating and am stumped. I guess I just love food! Pizza is great..raisins,coconut and tomato sauce are yum too!
black licorice, maraschino cherries, and plain bananas...ewww!
Undercooked eggs. The white part in particular, if not done, is gooey translucent like a body fluid. That's just gross. And I know lots of people who have no problem with raw eggs. eeeewww
Oysters are a problem now too. I used to love them but you could die trying them in Shanghai. I nearly did die twice so I give up. I guess it wasn't meant to be..
I don't like carrots. I used to like Campbell's chicken noodle soup, but now it has carrots in it makes me gag. Same way with the cup of noodles has carrots in it makes me gag. One day I was at my friend's house for lunch, he was making chicken noodle soup, I was eating the soup until I saw carrots in it, I started gagging my friend ask me if I'm alright, and then I threw up. It's so embarrassing I threw up all over myself, my friend, and his wife. After that I missed work and went home for the rest of the day. I was so embarrassed. My friends still forgave me. Few days later we were laughing about this. I hate carrots!
Ahh just found this journal and found it instantly fascinating! I love food, and cant wait to try more things.
But ya can't like everything right?
For me it's always been olives, mushrooms (more like a fungus allergy) and anything with a chewy middle and hardish but slippery skin... like smoked salmon. baked is fine though! haha
And cooked artichokes. in dip or anything else I'm starting to like them, but the actual veggie itself is so weird to eat!
I won't eat cucumber, raw onions, or mayonnaise. Or squishy chicken. I have massive issues with texture. And if I find bone or gristle in my food, I gag and usually can't down the rest of whatever it is I'm eating.
Coriander. It doesn't disgust me, it just tastes like something that shouldn't be eaten - like soap, or detergent.
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It was really wonderful reading the blog. I guess I am a novice here in this discussion; having tried only snake despite being in bangkok for more than 1.5 months now.
It's weird to see coriander and ketchup on the list of foods people don't like. In India, every dish would have a sprinkle of coriander in it.
On top of that it has such a harmless flavour!!
For the foods I won't eat.... Nothing... Everything is worth trying at least once!! :)
I don't like raspberries or lamb.
Cantaloupe and honeydew tastes like Formula 409 cleaning solution to me.
NASTY!
personally, I cannot stand black licorice (though I can tolerate anise in smaller doses, such as Jaegermeister or pho) - or capers. the mere smell of capers trips my gag reflex for some reason.
I will eat them - but I could happily live without tomato sauces (ketchup, marinara, pizza sauce). I like my cheese sticks undipped, and my pizza "dry" (or just olive oil).
I don't eat pork, which is mostly personal preference; but I hate ham and I don't care for pork otherwise.
I used to know someone that ONLY ate boxed mac & cheese, fast food burgers, and pepperoni pizza. I once got him to eat a piece of breaded chicken breast and he said it was "weird" and "disgusting." it was pretty amazing.
#1 food I cannot under any circumstances suffer: Mayonnaise (due to a then painful but now hilariously pathetic childhood occurance)
#2 black licorice (my only question is, 'why does this even exist?' No disrespect meant to those who enjoy its decidedly numbing effect joined with rancorous flavor upon their palates
#3 while I love pizza, especially traditional rustic Italian-style cooked with a thin crust in a wood-burning hearth, I unfortunately just cannot bear the stand alone flavor of Marinara sauce that I see some people dip their string cheeses in, or bread, or even when it is sauced too liberally in a pasta. White sauce on pasta, in my opinion, rocks.
#4 wet bread. Bread that has become wet for any reason, perhaps because that competitive food eater can down it quicker, or because someone wants to "sop" up those last remaining juices on their plate with it is just the devil. Even the thought of such will make me gag quicker than the visual of being tortured with an oozing-out-the-sides mayonnaisy sandwich
Lastly, for some reason, the post by the person with a aversion to carrots made in September 2009 made me LOL. Poor person, but great friends!
I usually love everything. BUT...
Mayonaise is disgusting.
Raw Snap Peas make me gag. Tastes like grass.
Bacon=SICK (Basically anything 'piggy' makes me sick)
Certain chicken is nasty. LIke frozen fleshy 'microwavable chicken' Nasty.
Goat Yogurt.
But I LOVE FISH. all things ocean are good. And stinky cheeses and arugula, and coconut, and licorice. I guess I'm weird.
There's very little I won't eat but mushrooms are one of them. I'm a total foodie and love to cook anything and everything I get ideas for and know I could do so much with mushrooms but I just can't bring myself to like them. Weird considering I used to eat them raw as a kid! Maybe it's something to do with the texture... Disguised on pizza I don't mind but they are the devil incarnate elsewhere. I also recently discovered I don't like chicken livers when they're not in paté form, tried some in a batch of jambalaya and it just didn't work for me. Hot it was okay but cold the next day the flavours just didn't seem right. Anything else though, bring it on! Including salty liquorice that everyone else seems to hate!
I don't like the pizzas from Subway restaurants. The pizzas taste like cardboard. I like pizza, but not Subway pizza.
I don't like goaty stuff --> goat cheese, lamb, sheep, goat, sheep's milk, lamb cheese, etc...
I find that people often sigh and say "just try it" if you say you dislike a food, so rather than face their judgmental eyes, I just say I'm allergic, and then they can't say anything.
I usually don't like food that is dry, my preferred food is fruits, however to much flavor or to little flavor (bland) is also a problem for me.
I am highly picky and almost never eat, I like potatoes but they are always dry and have to go with pure water...
My dislikes include Cinnamon (no matter how much I have tried to eat Cinnamon Rolls, Cinnamon Apple Sauce, or French Toast, etc..), most vegetables except for Broccoli/Califlower, Ham, Onions, Peppers, and even Cherries, among countless others...
As a child I always tried to eat Onion Rings, and despite the popular myth, I never ended up liking them despite how many times my food ended up having onions in it.
Oh yeah, I also hate the smell and taste of BBQ sauce and Coffee/Teas.
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Licorice, escargot/calamari/sushi and exotic foods that I won't even try once, and all leaves such as cabbage/lettuce/spinach I hate due to their lack of any flavor and overall blandness/bad texture.
Even though I do love fish, I hate peas, sour cream, mayo, coconut, olives, artichokes, asparagus, cucumber/squash/eggplant, lamb/veal, melons/cantalope/honeydew, and goat/goat cheese/goat milk/sheep's milk,
Yet, I do love cheeses especially melted stringy mozzerella cheese and marinara sauce !! *yum* !!
About two years ago I wrote here about how the Ragu spaghetti sauce has onions in it makes me gag. I forgot to tell y'all this, just looking at the jar of Ragu sauce makes me gag lol. Everytime I go grocery shopping, I have to look the other way by not looking at the Ragu jar. If I look at it in the store, I start gagging and throwing up. It happened to me before it was embarrassing. The people who work at the store had to clean up my mess. It was so embarrassing lol! I still like onion rings, I only eat the breading. This is weird and I'm a man.
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