I loved pears so much I ate a huge can of them in one sitting. Got terribly sick, rarely touched them again.
Grandmother’s chili: the last meal I ate before the onset of the flu in fifth grade. (The flu that year was bad/ widespread enough to shut down the local schools for a week.) That was 33 years ago, and I still get a little queasy thinking about it.
And I’m very prone to motion sickness. It was even worse when I was a kid, and too small to see out the windows of a moving vehicle. When I was about 7, Daddy bought me a “treat” on the way home from the dentist. That was the first and last banana split I ever ate. A few years later, my mom bought me the last chocolate milk shake that I’ve ever had. Similar circumstances.
I’m also not allowed to drink tequila ever again. Not because it made me sick, but because it made me bulletproof. When your rugby- playing friends are dragging your 110-pound ass away from the bar fight, it’s pretty much A Sign From God that Jose Quervo is not a friend. 
Does being poor count?
When I first left home, and was living with my girlfriend, we ate a lot Chef Boyardee-type junk. Spaghettio’s, ravioli, that disgusting canned spaghetti or goulash. We ate it because it was cheap: a local supermarket usually sold it for 30 or 40 cents a can, which was the going price for top ramen. We figured it was a good deal; we both could eat and spend less than a buck on dinner. After a year or so of mostly neon orange sauce, pasta and mystery meat, we finally wised up and started eating real food, which cost the same. Now, ten+ years later, canned pasta / sauce of any kind makes me gag.
KFC came out with a slider-sized chicken sandwich a few years ago- nothing special, just a palm-sized piece of fried chicken breast with some lettuce and mayo on a bun. I had one (it tasted/smelled just fine), and ten minutes later was spewing everything I’d eaten in the past month or so. Worst part, I was at work…with an hour drive between me and the house. I pulled over several times along the way.
Haven’t touched one since then.
When I was a kid I poured a glass of what I thought was Hi-C fruit juice. I just about gagged, and after looking at the can more closely I saw it was V-8 tamato juice. I’ve never even attempted to drink V-8 since.
Not exactly on point, but I’ve had food poisoning twice in my life, each time from food at a different Dennys. I will never eat at one again.
Natto. It’s japanese fermented soybeans. I don’t even know how to describe the flavor other than awful. I actually spit it out which I normally don’t do in restaurants.
I was never a big fan of lobster… a bit too rich for me, but I could enjoy it in small doses. Until…
There was a lobster feast organized by an association we belonged to way back when. After everybody pigged out, the dirty plates were taken downstairs to the kitchen of the hall. There, one of the ladies sat down and picked clean the shells on the dirty plates. She was covered in butter and lobster muck. It was right out of Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote.
I will never eat lobster again.
Aidell’s Mango Sausages. Loved 'em. Then, the morning after having a nice dinner with some, I came down with—totally unrelated, the food itself wasn’t to blame—a nice case of Panamanian Insanity Flu™.
Worst stomach flu I ever had. Kind of a “bazooka with backblast” effect going on, repeatedly, which I was (IIRC) mostly able to confine to the bathroom. Fever, could barely move, and I couldn’t keep so much as a sip of water down. Which was doubly unfortunate, as I was repeatedly vomiting up every trace of the last night’s dinner—the oily, spicy, meaty, acidic, slightly-overcooked remains of it, filming my gorge and palate, which I couldn’t even wash out.
I eventually felt well/brave enough to nibble down a strawberry frozen juice bar—which I ended up puking up, as well. But the extra water and change in flavor washing out the previous vomit-aftertaste was such a relief, it was almost pleasant.
To this day, I still haven’t been able to bring myself to eat any more of those sausages. But juice bars? A-OK. And I always try to have some around.
Next time, I’ll tell the tale about why I never eat at Arby’s anymore. And would, in fact, be fine with burning every last one of them to the ground. With everyone still inside. :mad:
Fucking Arby’s…
I’ve had a couple but only one of them persists.
The first and worst is Pastel party mints. When I was 5, I fractured my skull by falling out of my bed (top bunk, stuffed rocking horse - I was a stupid child). I was unconscious for no one knows how long before my mom and sisters found me (I was supposed to be sleeping while they were on the porch watching New Year’s Eve fireworks). Anyway, when I came to, I was sitting on a chair in the middle of the kitchen and my middle sister was trying to make me eat these things. I had liked them, a lot. I loved how they melted on my tongue. Unfortunately, as a side effect of the fractured skull, I had a bit of a vomiting problem (it lasted over a week and so traumatized me that I brainwashed myself into not being able to throw up at all). So, me being in excruciating pain, totally confused, barfing, and having my 7 year old sister force feed me mints while my mother called the hospital led to me having a 27 year and still going strong aversion to these mints. I can’t even look at them without my stomach turning. I love other mints, even ones with the same texture. It’s just the pillow shaped pastel ones I can’t deal with.
Other food aversions which I’ve outgrown:
Twinkies: When Twinkie was celebrating an anniversary, the local radio station (WFTQ) had a contest. You had to call in and sing your own version of Happy Birthday. My mom came up with 4 different versions and my 3 sisters and my mom and I each called up with one of them and we all won a box of Twinkies. My middle sister and I picked them up after school and when we got home, we decided that we had each earned our own box so we should be able to do whatever we wanted with them. So, we sat down and proceeded to eat an entire box, each, before our mother came home. My sister got off light. She puked up all her Twinkies and was fine. I can’t puke though. I spent 2 days feeling absolutely atrocious and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I didn’t eat another Twinkie for about 20 years. Even now though I can eat them but don’t actually like them much.
BK Whopper: Not too long after the Twinkie episode, my mother bought me my first ever Whopper. I loved it. It was awesome. While we were in BK, my middle sister and I had a breath holding contest. After repeated rounds (all of which I won), I finished my Whopper but noticed that my throat hurt. I assumed it was from all the breath holding and didn’t mention it. Less than an hour later I was in Urgent Care with a fever and a raging case of Strep. Unfortunately I associated the Whopper with first sign of strep and I couldn’t eat them for years. I can eat them now but I don’t. If I eat at BK or McD’s, I just get a regular cheeseburger. Whoppers and Big Macs are just too excessive.
I may have alluded to this before but I have a 6 year and going strong hate-on for peanut butter.
I was travelling from southern Ontario home to Thunder Bay and my travelling companion, my two year old, and I stopped at Hawk Junction ON. This is a settlement of about six streets and a hotel/gas bar. There are no stores, there is nothing there, but a playground with one of those really scary round -abouts that I thought had long been outlawed anywhere there is value placed on the lives of children.
My travelling companion stayed up all night drinking with his sister at the bar. Someone had to stay home with the baby, and being the mom and the non-relative, that would be me. So at 6 am I had a wide awake toddler to entertain. And feed, while staying quiet for the other adults. We had been camping and had some wonder bread type bread and peanut butter. I made a few of these sandwiches and we headed out to the playground.
We played on the swings and playground equipment for hours. Finally that got old so I started giving my son pushes on the round about. Not fast, understand, because I didnt want him to get dizzy. But I made MYSELF dizzy, then walked away, fell and landed on my head in the gravel, and we went back to the house to wait for everyone to wake up. We had a few more pb sandwiches in the mean time.
By the time everyone woke up and we finally headed out I had a roaring migraine headache. What should have been a roughly 6-7 hour drive ended up being a 10 hour marathon where every half hour or so I told my companion to pull over and let me out to vomit. Peanut butter Over and over, for 12 hours. Almost nothing was open in the towns we passed through on a Sunday, it was a good 4 hours before I could buy Gravol, which I promptly threw up.
I cannot endure the smell of peanut butter to this day.
(On rare occasions I will crave a frozen treat with reese’s peanut butter cups in it. It has to be frozen though, so I cannot smell the peanuts.)
My husband absolutely refuses to drink Pepto Bismol liquid, because when he was a child, he had a tummy upset, he was given Pepto, and he promptly had a massive puking session. Yeah, I know it’s not really food, but it was a bad experience.
And over the years, I’ve kept food diaries, where I write down what I eat, how much, and whether any symptoms appear and when. It’s a pain.
I’ve also quit going to certain restaurants, if I observe some unsanitary behavior. If the servers or bussers are willing to do this stuff where I can see it, what happens in the kitchen? I probably don’t really want to know.
The first time I lived in Korea, I regularly ordered a big pitcher of beer and a whole order of Korean fried chicken (which is intended to be eaten by 2 or 3 people) at a nearby restaurant. One night I went to a different restaurant and ordered a big pitcher of beer and their chicken salad. That night I had a brain hemorrhage and spent two weeks in the hospital, complete with neurosurgery.
I haven’t touched Korean chicken salad since.
After eating Chinese food one night, I had a reaction that was just unbearable. My face was insanely itchy, I developed a terrible headache, I was nauseated, my lips and mouth went numb. It was 24 hours before it began to settle down, and 48 hours or more before it went away. I have had an aversion to Chinese food ever since.
When I was pregnant, I had some cantaloupe and soon after that, I had the dry heaves. I’m sure it wasn’t the cantaloupe, it was just “morning sickness” which for some reason I always had in the afternoon. Still, years later, I can’t stand the thought of cantaloupe.
Flax seeds. I used to grind up flax seeds and put them in my protein powder shake until one day I OD’ed on flax. My body rejected that much fiber by blasting it out both ends. Ugh.
This is mine, too. I still cannot eat onions unless they are cooked to oblivion and I do not know they are there. Crunching into a piece of raw onion will make me gag for sure.
When I was a child, we went to Florida for Christmas several years with my aunt, uncle, and cousin, and rented an efficiency-type motel that had a kitchen. The first night of one of these visits, we hadn’t bought our groceries yet, so we all went to Arby’s. First and last time in my life I’ve ever been to Arby’s. That was more than 40 years ago and I still remember the epic vomiting.
When I was three we went to a wedding with a big cheese platter at a reception. I overdid it and threw up and now when I smell havarti it smells like throwing up when you were a kid and I can’t eat it. I love the rest of the cheese world, though.
I haven’t eaten eggs (hard-boiled, scrambled, fried, whatever) in over 40 years. When I was in my 5th grade science class, we hatched chicks. That was it - no more eggs for me. If you hide them in baked goods, I can eat those, but not just eggs.
When I was little, on Sundays after Mass, my father would cook the whole family a big breakfast - eggs, toast, sausage and bacon. While he was cooking and the family was eating,I’d sit outside (away from the smell) with my dog. When the were done, I’d come in for cold toast, bacon and orange juice.
StG
Sadly, TEA.
I was about 12 years old and came down with horrible strep throat. My friend’s mom noticed I wasn’t looking well and gave me tea.
I keep trying to drink & like tea, but it really isn’t happening. Maybe 2x a year, at a reliable Chinese restaurant (and aren’t they hard to find these days?!?!?!?)