I’ve never met anyone who does this to the extent I do, but Dopers are weird, so:
I was reading a book on Friday night–The Shadow of the Torturer–when I suffered an acute attack of food poisoning from some chili I had eaten earlier. (I am a damned fool for eating it.)
I’m finally feeling better, but when I went to pick up the book earlier today, I felt a wave of nausea at the thought.
This happened to me years ago with the book Memoirs of an Invisible Man. I caught some bug while I was reading the book and couldn’t bear to finish it once I felt better. To this day, the thought of that book makes me feel ill.
Foods also have this effect on me. Mint and honey were both involved in separate incidents in my lifetime and I can’t bear the thought of either.
Does anyone else form this type of association or am I a lone loon crying in the wilderness?
I read a study once (which I haven’t tried to Goolge yet) that animals have a stronger aversion/avoidence of foods they associate with nasuea than they associate with pain. It’s a deeply ingrained reaction.
Anyway, I wasn’t able to eat cheesecake for years because of a really horrible food poisoning incidence (that landed me in the emergency room) that started after eating a slice. (the cheescake didn’t give me the food poinsoning, it was just the last thing I ate before it hit)
For some reason, when we were sick, my mom made us drink Sprite or 7-Up. For some reason clear soda had some sort of healing power.
So, when I’m sick I want Sprite or 7-Up.
I have never heard about books doing that but taste aversions are very real and powerful. It is believed that they are a critical survival mechanism so that a person or animal won’t eat something that made them sick even if they encounter the same thing again years later. The problem with this is that someone can become sick from something else and the taste aversion latches onto the last foods eaten. It could be anything from fish to bananas. It can also be very difficult to get rid of the aversion but there are some psychological treatments that can be tried if the aversion is inconvenient or bothersome.
I don’t believe I have any food aversions (other than to foods I just don’t like :)), but I do do something similar: when reading about a bad smell being described, I’ll unconsciously begin breathing only through my mouth before I realise I’m doing it.
Oh, wait, I do have a food one: vodka. When I first drank it, I swigged it neat in large quantities and enjoyed it. Needless to say, that made me very, very ill, in embarassing fashion, in front of my family. Since then I don’t like the taste of it (but still drink it with Coke etc.). A close friend of mine has experienced exactly the same thing.
Last year, I was adventurous one Friday night in the cafeteria and tried some of their eggplant/squash creation. Woke up at about four AM wanting to die, and spent the next thirty hours or so unable to even keep water down.
Haven’t been able to even look at squash since without feeling a wave of nausea.
This might sound a little crazy, but when I was a kid I was at the doctor’s office getting a shot there was a song playing on the radio…not sure of the title exactly, but the main lyrics were “my momma told me…you better shop around”. I know it’s a famous song but I am music-stupid.
Anyway, every time I hear even a snippet of that song I cringe and butt-clench.
Conversely when I get a shot, I do not think of the song, but that’s another matter.
It’s “Shop Around” by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Just in case.
I understand. I had minor surgery some years back and America’s “Tin Man” was playing when I came out of the anesthesia. I now associate that song with the procedure.
Of course, it might have been the Captain and Tennile version.
I celebrated my 21st bday by buying a big bottle of Southern Comfort as my first legal alcohol purchase. I then proceded to get really drunk, complete with projectile vomiting and passing out for several hours. Can’t bear to think of that taste now, 25 years later. Seeing the label isn’t very pleasant, either.
OTOH, I also have pleasant food associations with books. Nearly every time I read LOTR, I begin to crave hot buttered toast. I first read Tolkien when I was in junior high, usually after finishing my homework in the evening. Often I’d have toast as a bedtime snack while I read.
I have the same thing with Jell-O. When I was a kid I ate some Jell-O and for some reason or another I threw up. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the Jell-O but to this day I can’t even think about eating it without getting nauseous. In fact I haven’t eated Jell-O since. No, there isn’t always room for J-E-L-L-O.
Oh yeah, I have the reverse thing- like Tolkien and Toast. When we first moved where I live now, we were in temporary accomodation with no kitchen. So before work I’d head to Au Bon Pain and sit with a book, eating a danish for breakfast. The book was about the history of computers and the development of the computer industry. Whenever I think about ENIAC or punch cards, or anything at all to do with legacy computing systems, I automatically smell/taste cheese danish. It’s sort of fun.
I do this too. As a child, I read Heidi and ate a hunk of cheese while I was reading it (guess I was trying to be authentic since everyone was eating hunks of cheese in the book–I was quite a strange child), and now I associate the book with eating cheese. Whenever I reread Gone with the Wind, I get an tremendous craving for lemonade, as I used to drink a big glasses of it while reading the book out in the porch swing when I was a teenager. In fact, the GWTW book-reading experience doesn’t feel quite complete unless there’s a porch and lemonade involved.
Wow, that was way off topic. I do the food aversion thing also–my mom used to make me drink 7UP whenever I had an upset stomach, and to this day I can’t see or smell 7 UP without getting a little queasy at the memory.
When I was about two years old, I had a hearty dinner of Alphaghetti (about the same as Spaghetti-Os), then my father took me with him to the grocery store. As he drove, I kept telling him, “Daddy, gonna be sick. Daddy, gonna be sick.” As a new father, he sounded more annoyed than anything, and told me to stop being a big wimp, sit up straight, and stop whining. Hee. I leaned forward and horfed all over the car floor. Take that, new papa. He always took me seriously after that.
To this day, I still cannot eat Alphaghetti. However, any other brand, of the exact same thing, like Scarios, Spaghetti-Os, any Chef Boyardee? No problems at all. It’s the same crap! But if you call it Alphaghetti, I feel ill.
16 years ago I had a killer flu and cold and took some Tylenol Flu 'n Cold green liquid. I then ate some biscuits with gravy over them, then proceeded to spew liquid cold medicine, biscuits and gravy all over the dish drainer full of (previously) clean dishes.
To this day I can’t take liquid cold medicine nor eat biscuits and gravy. Even thinking about it makes me feel seriously nauseated. I can, however, eat biscuits and gravy separately . . .
When I was a kid, I had a serious bout with scarlet fever.
At one point, my mother had left a glass of water sitting on a chair by my bed. I had a very difficult-to-describe fever dream/nightmare, where all my attention was focussed on this glass of water, and there was a sense not of personal illness, but intense malice emanating from the water-glass. (Yeah, I know. Weird.) Overwhelming terror, and an inability to look away.
Something of that feeling tends to creep back in whenever I see a tableau that is too close to that – a tumbler on a wooden chair, with a hardwood floor. Thankfully it doesn’t happen too often, but it’s kind of weird to be a party and suddenly feel like everything’s coming unglued because someone set their drink down in the wrong place.
In 2nd grade we had bologna sandwiches for school lunch, and I came home and threw up. I attributed it to the bologna, which I didn’t really like, but knew better than to refuse. My mom, the nurse, told me that was ridiculous (and it is), but ever since, I’ve thought bologna kind of tasted like being sick.
I can’t eat onions or rye bread (or caraway seeds because the rye bread had the seeds in it) due to childhood vomiting instances. My sister has a similar aversion to Golden Grahams, and my husband to Lucky Charms.
The Sandman series are forever associated in my mind with the theme song of some Chinese soap my mother was watching during the week I was reading them (yes, I read them all in a week). The Shadow of the Torturer is more associated with crushing existential dread. I don’t think I associate books with food.
There is this Asian snack, though, made with puffed something-or-other - kinda like Rice Krispies but more soft and sticky. I discovered them when I was 7 or 8 and I LOVED the things, then one day while eating one I was suddenly overcome by nausea and had to spit it out. It was as if someone had flipped a switch in my brain from “I like this food” to “I hate this food”. To this day I can’t even look at them without feeling nauseous.
