Can I develop a taste for raw tomatoes?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I just find it odd that I am completely unable to eat this food item that seems to be so universally enjoyed. I don’t think there was any “incident” that sparked my dislike of tomatoes, I’ve hated the taste of raw tomatoes for as long as I can remember. I used to despise lasagna, ravioli, spaghettios, and other such tomato based items as well, to the point of having to wear nose plugs while eating at the same table as my brother who seemed to love them. Spaghetti I ate with just butter.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to enjoy spaghetti sauce, and to tolerate lasagna and the myriad of other Italian foods with tomatoes in them (though any combination of tomato products and cheese still seems a bit unpleasant). I’ve even learned to enjoy big chunks of tomatoes in chili (a favorite dish of mine) and other foods, as long as they are cooked.

Still, I cannot stand the taste of raw tomatoes. Sure, I can recognize most of the time when there’s raw tomato in an item and remove it, but usually the juices have soaked into surrounding food items. This means I either have to rip out half of a sandwich and look like some insane tomatophobe, or just eat it with the juices that completely ruin the taste for me.

Occasionally I’ll bite into some sandwich or taco only to find myself gagging and fighting to control the involuntary spewing forth of my meal from the unrecognized presence of raw tomato. Being the analytical sort I’ve looked back on these moments and determined that the strong gag reflex occurred well before I had identified any unusual taste, so that I don’t believe it’s an “Oh my god I just ate tomato, I hate tomato, I’m going to hurl!” conditioned mental reflex, but a biological one.

I tried for an entire semester at college to eat tacos with just a few chunks of tomatoes to acclimate myself to them, but at the conclusion of the semester some 50 or so tacos later, I found I still couldn’t eat a bite with a few chunks of tomato and not gag a bit.

Is it hopeless? Is there actually some biological revulsion my body has for tomatoes that I’ll never be able to overcome? How could I end up with such a condition when tomatoes seem so universally loved? I just feel like some kind of mutant when I complain that a sandwich on the menu lists like 8 different items it contains, but fails to mention the tomatoes in it, and the server just responds with “of course it has tomatoes, everyone loves tomatoes”.

Just one more question I ponder as I looked over the 10 different types of free deli sandwiches we were offered at work today, every last one of them with a big juicy slice of tomato right in the middle. sigh

2

I’m pretty much in the same boat as you, except I always thought cooked tomato was OK. But I loathe the taste of raw tomato.

I think I could probably oversome the revulsion, and maybe you too. I suspect that we would grow used to it if we ate a little every day. But I never felt the need to, so I don’t.

3

Have you ever had home-grown tomatoes? That might be a last chance. We stopped on the side of the road yesterday and bought some out of the back of a farmer’s truck. Tonight we had bacon and tomato sandwiches with salt and pepper and mayonnaise on bread. They were so good they brought tears to our eyes. If you don’t like them that way, you probably never will.

As a child I was taught to eat tomatoes like apples. I had to eat them outside because of the messiness and I sprinkled salt liberally, but those were real tomatoes. Totally different from what you find even at health food stores.

4

You are not alone in not liking tomatoes. My father used to grow them and everyone loved them, except me. I can be seen picking the chunks out of food and off of sandwiches. But the funny thing is I have a daughter who will eat them like an apple and love them but no matter how I try I do not like raw tomatoes. Now on the other hand, fried green tomatoes are out of this world.

5

I love tomatoes.

…

But I cannot eat any type of seafood. Can’t stand it.

I’ve tried, and gave up. Enjoy what you like.

6

I’m not a fan of sea food either, but I can at least tolerate it if a host sets it in front of me.

I’m considering another experiment to develop a taste for tomatoes, but I want to be a bit more clever than just “keep trying it”. I think I’ll go research a bit on the internet.

7

I have weird things like that too. Like onions. I love the taste, the flavor of onions and will liberally douse my cooking creations with onion powder (and even flakes), but any kind of actual onion (or even a piece of onion) and I own’t eat it. Same with tomatos. Tomato sauce is fine, tomato soup is fine, but otherwise, no. And I, too, hate seafood.

8

Guy at work eats his BT sandwich with sugar on the tomato. We gave him a hard time once, but seeing as he’s the boss…

9

Well, it took a few more minutes than I expected, but it seems it has at least been done once, though it seems it took a bit longer than a semester:

http://www.megnut.com/life/000168.asp

Maybe I can prod for details and get some ideas.

10

I have loved every kind of tomato product I’ve ever encountered. Except for fresh tomatos. 3 or 4 times a year I try again to see if things have changed. They never have. Even with the freshest, ripest home-grown tomatos.

Rather frustrating, really.

11

I absolutely love home-grown tomatoes, but can’t stand the store-bought varieties. You’d never know they were they were the same kind of fruit; to me they taste like plastic.

12

I have to add my name to the no-raw-tomato roster. To me it tastes a little briny, like pickles. (And I do love pickles, such as in combination with cooked meat or liver paste, which makes me think that raw tomato might work well with that – a horrible thought, really.) Cooking removes the salty flavour

Interestingly, when I was around 4-5 years old my mother grew tomatoes in the garden, and I couldn’t get enough of the stuff. There are other foods, typically fish-shaped things, that I have learned to dislike. I have a theory that a childhood spent gobbling unnatural candy coated with all sorts of acidic compounds has somehow corrupted my taste buds.

GMRyujin, it may be onion in a technical sense, but onion powder is a far cry from fresh onion. Quoth Gernot Katzer in his most excellent spice encyclopedia:

The heating process also significantly alters the flavour of vegetables and fruits; garlic, for example, undergoes a rather dramatic transformation when subject to heat; indeed the same can be said of our favourite veggie, the tomato.

To me, onion does not work well as a spice except in particular spice mixes, and is certainly not a substitute for fresh onions. Dried onion tastes definitely nothing like the sweetness roundness of fried, fresh onion. Have you tried pulsing the onions in a blender? Peel, disintegrate in blender at high speed for 20 seconds, and you get a nice pulp you can pour into a pan. (No crying necessary.)

Sorry about the somewhat off-topic aside, but you know, this is important. :slight_smile:

13

It’s a really odd thing about tomatos. The few people I know who don’t like them REALLY hate them. I personally love them raw or cooked.

One thing you might want to try is eating them when they’re a bit unripe, still orange in colour rather than red. That way they are firmer, don’t have the same mushy texture, and they taste a little bit sharper.

Also, try slicing the tomatos very thinly at first and eating them in a sandwich with a fairly strong cheese (or in a BLT with lots of mayonaise - my favourite use for raw tomatos), then increase the thickness of the slices later on.

14

for all my life i have hated onions in every form. there was not a single instance where i liked them.
just accept the fact that you can’t eat tomatoes. nothing wrong with it. there are plenty of food stuffs that are just as nutritious.

besides, i have never met anyone who wouldn’t have one or several food things that he disliked. anyone who claims that he eats everything is either a liar or not very honest with himself.

15

And they put those people to the test every week on Fear Factor :slight_smile:

Until now I have take that attitude towards my dislike of tomatoes, just chalked it up to that’s the way I am and worked around it. But I love sandwiches, and I hate that every time I order one I have to specify “no tomato” or my whole meal is ruined, or even when I do specify that I often end up with it anyway. I hate to encounter a glorious bounty of yummy sandwiches only to find that all of them are spoiled with my nemesis. Think about your favorite foods and how you might react if every food preparer in the world spread a thick layer of rat excrement over it because “that’s how everyone else likes it”. It’s a bit much to ask the whole world to change to accomidate the few, so perhaps you might start thinking “maybe I could learn to like rat excrement…”.

16

Add me to the list. I like tomato sauce and ketchup, but I can’t stand fresh tomatoes (the slimy red Osama bin Ladens of the al-Qaeda salad network, oozing with pus and seeds). Cooked tomatoes in soup are tolerable if I don’t know they’re there, but I try to eat around them if I can.

17

Onion pulp? Gleh! I’ll stick to my powder, thankyouverymuch.

18

I have had a similar distaste for tomatos and tomato products (except for ketchup, which is really a red sugar product anyway), and learned to like and love tomato sauce and such.

I am arriving to where I kind of like tomatos, but only if they’re really good fresh meaty ones. They used to cause a gag reflex in me (as did squash and zucchini), but no longer.

There is hope. :slight_smile:

19

I’ve always disliked raw tomotoes, too, with one exception. If you get the right kind – a nice Jersey tomato, home grown, fresh from the garden – well, it doesn’t begin to fall in the same category as what you get in the supermarket or even most roadside stands. The commercial ones are bred to transport well, with the result that they really taste more like the box they were transported in. The good ones are too thin-skinned and perishable to make it to the market. Certainly they’d never survive a trip to the deli.

OTOH, I can sympathize with the fact that sometimes there are just foods that you can’t stand. I’m that way with any kind of pepper, especially the mild bell peppers that turn up in everything. The taste is repulsive to me, and to make it worse, they “repeat” for hours afterwards, even if there were just a few little pieces in a dish. It doesn’t help to pick them out of the food, either. Whatever it is that disagrees with me is in there and can’t be removed. The funny thing is, I have no problem with the pepper flakes you sprinkle on pizza, or spicy chili, or Thai food. It’s unfortunate, too, since they are so very pretty, and nutritious as well.

20

petre, not only do I not like tomatoes, I can’t stand mustard or mayonnaise. Eww, eww, EWWWW! The smells alone make me feel ill. My mom thinks I’m a freak, but she’s the same woman who claimed mayo doesn’t smell. snort Yeah, right, suuuuuuuuure, Mom.

And once tomato chunks have been in something like a salad, there will be raw tomato juice and the occasional seed. Yeech.

Tomato sauces are fine, if they are chunky I don’t eat the chunks, but otherwise I loathe tomatoes.