Until the age of 18 or thereabouts I had a fish aversion, but loved fried shrimp and fried clams, lobster and crab. Mostly I didn’t like the smell of fried, fresh, fish and its taste. Don’t know if that’s TMA or Colene aversion, or what?
(What exactly gives cooking fish that smell/taste, anyways? It’s not really characteristic of the chemical TMA, because this is in all very fresh fish that don’t have a chance to make this breakdown chemical, but they still have the characteristic smell.)
I learned to like some fishes and their muscles better than others by their inherent mildness of this elusive fishy tastes. Love Grouper, swordfish, tuna, mahi and other firmer fleshed fish much better than the flaky fleshes. I learned to like it and then just sort of loved it after having it cooked and prepared different ways.
I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, which is about 30 miles from Dallas. So yeah, I didn’t grow up near a coast. HOWEVER, every year my parents would drive up to Gloucester, Massachusetts, to spend a couple of weeks with my father’s family. I had the opportunity to eat very fresh fish and shellfish. I don’t like ANY shellfish, and there are only a few kinds of fish that I like. I was given all sorts of fish or shellfish that had been caught that day and kept on ice until it was cooked. No, I don’t like it, and I had to eat quite a lot of it. Aunts, in particular, were bad about forcing me to “just try a taste” even though I hadn’t liked it last year and I really didn’t want to eat it this year, either. But a kid isn’t allowed to refuse food that’s pushed on her by her aunts.
One of the freedoms that I really enjoy as an adult is the option to refuse food. I don’t care if it’s your specialty, I don’t like shrimp in any form and I won’t eat it if you put it on my plate, or even hold a piece to my lips. And I don’t care if I hurt your feelings when I get up and fix myself a bowl of cereal or a peanut butter sandwich after I refuse your offer, because I’ve TOLD you that I don’t like to eat that stuff.
While I can appreciate your feelings, you ARE making it harder for those who have actual allergies to be taken seriously.
I grew up in Louisiana, the grandson of a commercial fisherman. I don’t like fish, or most seafood in general. I’ll make an occasional exception for a dish with fresh shrimp or crawfish, or for a bit of lobster, but I don’t seek them out. I used to like tuna sandwiches, but only heavily seasoned and with lots of other stuff in the mix; I find that I don’t care for them even like that now.
It’s not allergies, or a violent aversion, really. I just have no interest in eating the stuff.
I used to eat a little tuna occasionally, but haven’t for years. Other seafood doesn’t appeal to me even that much; I don’t like the smell, and I don’t like the idea of eating giant bugs or lumps from shells.
The Pacific Northwest. Ever seen that picture of Seattle where they’re throwing fish? I walk by that at least once a week.
I’ve had fresh fish and other seafood cooked by experts. I don’t like it. I’m ok with that. Every so often I try it - when I was in Alaska during salmon season, I made sure that I tried some. I’ve dug for clams, had fresh caught crabs, and picked up oysters from a place that calls itself “the oyster capital of the world” (which is marketing, but they do produce a lot of oysters). And still, I don’t like it.
I love fish, but I don’t like anything else from the water. And it slightly annoys me that they are lumped together. You don’t see chicken, beef, and pork on the same dish, so why is it that they think fish automatically goes with shrimp?
I’m less clear though, on the difference between fresh and sea water fish.
My wife won’t eat “anything from the sea”. Neither will most of her family. They are from a fishing town, which either explains it or makes it even more baffling. She also won’t eat lamb unless she is home because the lamb we have in the states doesn’t compare to what she grew up on (their lamb was exceedingly fresh - they killed it and then they cooked it).
It sucks because the best restaurants around here all serve fish. The non-fish dishes tend to be lamb, duck, and very expensive cuts of beef. So she ends up having to eat the chicken dish they throw on to appease people like her. It makes no sense to pay $30+ for a chicken breast that she could prepare at home for $2, so we usually don’t bother going to good restaurants. Lower-end places don’t serve good fish (you can have cod or shrimp, generally), so I hardly ever get to have fish.
I don’t care for fish. Even really great, fresh fish is barely passable – “It hardly tastes disgusting at all!”
Fried shrimp or garlic shrimp I like, though. Crab is okay, sometimes. Other seafood I’ll eat if the ratio is 90% tasty sauce, 10% seafood, but doesn’t that defeat the purpose?
I’ve tried plenty of fresh and supposedly ‘good’ seafood. All of it has an underlying fishy taste to me. I wish I did like it, but all in all it’s generally not a problem. My Wife will sometimes pick a seafood restaurant, and I have always found that they will have a nice steak, chop and or prime rib for people that don’t like seafood.
I love tuna (the canned kind) and New England clam chowder (as long as the pieces of clam aren’t too big), but otherwise I don’t care for most fish/seafood. I have never ordered it as an entree, and can’t imagine ever doing so. Heck, last night the restaurant sent out tiny pieces of salmon tartare as an amuse-bouche and I let one of my friends have mine.
When I was young, I liked shrimp. I clearly remember going to Long John Silver’s with my mom and getting shrimp there regularly, but then one day I ordered the shrimp and suddenly I didn’t like it…and I never got a taste for it again. That happened back in grade school. (I’m 39, FWIW.)
I grew up mostly in the Baltimore area, and crab feasts (as described by Antigen) were common among my friends. I can tolerate the taste of crab, and can eat crab dip or a crab cake in an emergency, but I am sooo not going to bother with cracking shells and getting messy and digging out tiny bits of meat per crab. So, I was always the one who brought McDonald’s to the crab feast.
I also used to be able to eat my grandma’s scallops. She’s been dead for over a decade now, and last year I tried some scallop at a Japanese steakhouse: it was ok, but not the same and nothing I’d order for myself.
Because I hear so much raving about fresh lobster I’d be willing to try it someday, but I’m certainly not going to order a whole one for myself: I’d have to be out at a good restaurant with someone who would let me try some of theirs.
My husband doesn’t eat seafood- nothing from the water. It makes him barf. He wishes he could, though. He doesn’t think it’s gross or stinky necessarily, he just associates to with being sick to his stomach. Now that I think about it though, people do insist that he try things when he says “I don’t eat fish.” When he mentions barfing they usually lay off.
When we go out we can’t ever get tasting menus because invariably they’re 50% fish. We were planning to go somewhere on our 1st anniversary and had set aside a whopping $200 so we were looking at really fancy places. So much fish!
You all should stop worrying that seafood is hogging 50% of your restaurant menues. There’s plenty of good hearty manly red meat and lotsa chicken on the other side of the menu. The oceans are dying, the fisheries have decimated the fish population. Pretty soon any kind of fish or shellfish will be so expensive only the ultra-rich and/or the Japanese will be able to afford it. And then someday there just won’t BE any more fish worth catching or eating.
To each his own, but I don’t understand people who say “I don’t like anything that comes out of the water.” (Meaning any fish or shellfish). I have to believe it’s a mental thing and not really a taste/texture thing, because there is sooo much variety.
There is firm, steak-like fish and soft, flaky fish. There is mild fish and strong-tasting fish. White fish and red fish. Saltwater and freshwater. A walleye, which I love, tastes nothing like salmon, which I hate. Tuna does not taste like talapia, which does not tase like hallibut.
There’s just as much variety in shellfish. Clams, mussels, oysters and scallops are all bivalves, but scallops have a different taste and texture than the other three. Shrimp meat, crab meat and lobster meat are all very different (I love the former two but don’t care for lobster).
So I can totally understand if you turn down clams, someone offering you talapia. Those two foods are more different than beef and chicken are to each other.
I grew up in Oceanside California and used to spend my summers in Cape Cod. There was always an abundance of fish. I hated it. I usually tell people I don’t eat anything that lives in water. My grandmother used to force me to eat it as a child, even when I didn’t like it, so now that I make my own decisions, generally. No seafood for me. I am pretty good about trying it when people say, but you haven’t had it cooked properly, and I can usually even recognize when there is an exceptional piece of fish or seafood, but I’d still prefer not to eat it.
Except, oddly, the Slippery Shrimp at Yang Chow in downtown LA. Someone had me try a bite of theirs. Amazing. Weird, I know.
