Last month I got food poisoning from a breakfast sandwich from a local bagel place. I was nauseous, achy and had a fever so bad that at points I think I hallucinated. I am not going back to that place any time soon but today I tried a breakfast sandwich from a different place and a couple of bites in I started to feel queasy and I couldn’t finish. I am sure the sandwich was fine but my experience seems to have turned me off them.
Another one, when I was a kid I loved Oatmeal. I would eat it all the time and it was one of the few hot dishes I could make myself. One day when I was 12 or 13 I made a nice bowl of Oatmeal (always Maple and Brown Sugar flavored) and ate a few spoonfuls without really looking. When I did look down I realized the bowl was full of mealworms. I threw the entire bowl and spoon and everything into the garbage (not the best idea I know but I freaked) and I have literally never had a bite of oatmeal since.
Anyone else with experiences like this. Foods you once liked but can never eat again because of something bad happening?
Apple Juice: I suppose I liked it enough as a kid. I had my appendix taken out freshman year in high school, 1985. After the surgery, they kept on giving my apple juice, 20 minutes later it reappeared. Over and over and over again. I don’t even want to smell it since then.
Onions, as a little kid - I threw up a lot, probably from some random stomach bug or food poisoning, and all I tasted was the onions (I think there was an order of onion rings in that meal, IIRC). It’s taken me years - after just avoiding the taste/texture of onions for many years - of very careful reintroduction to get to the point where I can eat finely-chopped, well-cooked onions in food. Raw onions still taste overwhelmingly sulfurous.
I’ve had some severe allergic reactions to food that sent me to the ER on two occasions. This has convinced me not to eat those foods again because, ya know, there’s just no food so good I’m willing to risk death to eat it.
A new trend is to sell these foods in the regular (non-frozen/refrigerated) aisles which are hermetically sealed in foil/plastic packages. I tried a Thai noodle concoction about a couple of years ago-and got violently ill afterwards. All it takes is a small pinhole somewhere…
Champagne. It really wasn’t the fault of the wine. I had contracted a stomach bug that just happened to manifest itself at 2am on New Years Day. Can you say “projectile vomiting?” I spent the next three days in bed too weak to move. Since then I’ve been unable to even contemplate a glass of champagne without shuddering.
I had a bad experience with some imitation crab meat back in the day. It just did not agree with me. So I have pretty much decided that, from here on out, I’m only going to eat it if I’m ripping it out of the beast with my own two hands. Sadly, given the state of my finances, that means I wind up going many moons between opportunities to partake. Oh, well.
Baklava. My dog snitched a newly made pan of it off the counter. Her vet had me give her an emetic and so for several hours I was cleaning it up. Everywhere. I used to love the stuff and now I can’t even bear smelling it.
In college, after a night of drinking screwdrivers, I was talked in to going to a White Castle for a round of sliders. I managed to get back to the dorm before it all came up, and spew I did. It was epic.
I’ve never had one of their sliders since then, and it took me a good long time to overcome my orange juice aversion. Funny, I never did shy away from vodka, though.
About a year or two ago, I’d had lunch at Sizzling Wok (one of those fast-food chinese places, where they have stuff like stir-fry, ginger beef, S&S pork, rice, noodles, etc, under the glass, and they scoop what you point at). That night, I was in a hotel room, sitting on the toilet, with a garbage can in my lap. I can’t eat that type of food anymore.
10+ years ago, I got wasted on Fireball. It was the only time I’ve ever been sick from drinking. I still hate hard stuff. Turns my stomach.
My husband and I both almost threw up the foie gras appetizer at Prime 112 in South Beach this winter. Really, as in holding napkin over faces, closing eyes, and swallowing our vomit. Nothing wrong with the foie gras, we just hadn’t had it before and both had queasy stomachs from traveling. I did it first, and watching me set him off. I think we have both given up organ meats altogether, after that.
Unfortunately the fatty steaks, truffle-oil fries, and bleu cheese creamed spinach that came after didn’t make us feel any better.
Cornflour pudding. I was very seriously ill in Ghana when I was 9 - I almost died - and couldn’t eat anything fibrous. So every dessert for the rest of my stay out there was cornflour pudding. And I had cornflour pudding when I got back too. I’ve never had one since.
Blueberry pancakes. Had some one morning, got some kind of stomach bug 12 hours later and was sick as a dog for about two days. Don’t even think there was a connection, but I haven’t had a blueberry pancake since (ten years, +/-).
Coffee with blood mixed in. I never really liked coffee to begin with but would sip it to be polite prior to that incident when I was served this foul concoction by a friend whom we did not realize at the time was mentally ill. Since then I haven’t touched coffee in nearly two decades. I just mentally can’t.
I don’t consider it to be an incident that stopped me from “eating certain foods ever again,” though. I consider it to be the epiphany that made me understand that oysters aren’t actually food.
I was about 10 years old, I think, and in school we were learning about foods from other countries. I was upset I hadn’t tried any of them (gee, small town in Illinois, I wonder why?).
That Saturday with my mom at the grocery store, on a lonely shelf, was a can of tamales. The can was covered with dust and it had probably been there since 1945. I insisted my mother buy them. She did.
Nobody else in the family had any interest, but mom followed the directions and I had my first (canned) tamale.
Tasted weird but I had made such a big deal out of it, I ate two of them.
Dry heaves, head in toilet, for two days. Thought I was going to die. Pretty sure in retrospect it was botulism or some really bad food poisoning.
There was a distinct odor of some spice…and I have never been able to set foot in a Mexican restaurant ever since. The minute I smell (whatever that is), I want to throw up.
This was not great when I moved to Los Angeles and everybody there loves going to Mexican restaurants. I missed many parties and after work functions. I couldn’t even go in for drinks - the smell stopped me dead in my tracks at the doorway.
I even have to leave my office if someone heats up certain Mexican foods in the microwave. Pretty powerful reaction after all these decades, but my body seemed to have decided “no more, never again, this will kill you, run away” in a big way.
