So, I was almost on board with this friend. When I was a kid, angel hair (or maybe normal spaghetti cooked past al dente) was the only pasta I liked for a while. The reason was a texture thing – I don’t like the sensation when my teeth are cutting through pasta. It’s hard to put a finger on, but it’s unpleasant to me in a similar way to undercooked potato or stale bread.
Then I got to the last sentence and I can no longer relate. Bow tie pasta is the WORST for this. Because of the shape, it’s never cooked uniformly and I’m always hyper aware of that chewing / cutting sensation. Even now, when I can appreciate most types of pasta, I still won’t voluntarily eat farfalle.
My mother. But she isn’t a good example of anything.
I’m a vegetarian because I don’t like the taste or texture of meat. The smell of meat (especially beef) cooking smells like farts to me, so I imagine that meat tastes like, well, what produces the fart scent.
When I was a kid, I spent a lot of evenings sitting at the table until bedtime, because I wasn’t allowed to get up until I ate my meat, or until it was time for bed.
There are a few tofu fake meat things I like, but I’d be fine never having them. My husband is an ethical vegetarian, and he likes all the tofu hotdogs and sausage and burgers. I do like tofurky, but it really doesn’t taste anything like turkey-- at least, if memory serves.
The thing I hate most is gefilte fish. I can sit at the table while meat is being served, and ignore it-- I just eat the other stuff. But gefilte fish looks like tumors, and I hate watching other people eat it.
Fairly common (in my observations, at least.) My guess is some folks get so used to underripe, flavour-challenged grocery store tomatoes, they tend to find the acidity/tang of a garden-fresh tomato to be too overpowering.
Crazy, I tells ya! Nothing quite like a fresh-picked tamater eaten like an apple/orange with intermittent sprinkles from a packet of salt.
My mother makes real oatmeal. Still horrible. She also tried the butter/brown sugar thing. I’d eat the teeniest bit of oatmeal with all of the butter and brown sugar (which were delicious!).
I think I can survive my remaining years without hot cereal.
I’m not a breakfast fan in general – I like to have buttered toast, coffee, and quiet when I first wake up.
That’s odd because most places won’t cook a hamburger anything BUT well done, do to safety regulations. She must like it seriously burnt or something.
Me. I absolutely loathe celery, at least raw celery. All those nasty little threads. Ick. If it’s in something cooked, I don’t mind it, since it’s just used for flavor. But you’ll never catch me eating a celery stick.
I used to love raw carrots and veggie dip as a kid, but then once when I was about 11, I ate some and then later on I got horribly sick (I probably had a stomach bug or something), and was up all night puking. And since then, I can’t even eat a raw carrot without gagging. Cooked carrots are fine, and I love carrot cake. But even after all these years, I still can’t touch them raw.
Hate that, too. But I just remove the slimy bits if I’m served raw tomatoes. (I’ll admit, a home-grown tomato with homemade mayonnaise…heaven. I’ll work around the slimy bits.)
Heh, well, sounds like you’ve covered your bases. As long as she’s making steel cut, not ROLLED oats (that’s the normal “real” oatmeal). If it didn’t crunch when you ate it, it weren’t steel cut.
I must be the pickiest eater to read the thread. Pretty much a meat and potatoes guy although I do like corn if it has no seasoning other than salt, pepper and butter. I can eat green beans with no seasoning, but only one brand. It’s hell to eat at a restaurant because often just the smell of some foods, like raw onions, will turn my stomach. And god forbid any vegetable on my plate… if so, I’m done. I’m in my 60’s and eating is a pain.
When I was growing up, the rice I always had was Minute Rice, which I would eat but didn’t particularly care for. That was before I discovered basmati rice, which is the very best - and no, I don’t eat the Minute Rice variety. I’m not big one kitchen gadgets, but I love x3 my rice cooker.
Steel cut oats are NOTHING like quick-cooking oatmeal! I make it in the crockpot, cooked on low overnight. You definitely have to grease the pot well or you’ll never get it clean; I was warned about that in advance.
I think there’s a distinction to be drawn between simple dislike of foods, and crazy stuff like not being able to tolerate the feel of actually chewing pasta, or extremely outsized reactions to otherwise normal and ubiquitous foods.
For example, I don’t like summer squash & zucchini. There’s nothing inherently wrong with them and I don’t gag when I do eat them or anything like that, but they basically taste bland, vaguely like dirt, and are watery. That’s not crazy… just a preference.
Crazy is more like not liking “white sauces”, and then lumping mayonnaise, Alfredo sauce, bechamel and cream gravy into that category, despite those having no common threads between all four sauces beyond the color. (and yes, I’ve known two people who have said this very thing).
That’s crazy; I could see someone saying they don’t like mayonnaise, or don’t like cream gravy/bechamel, or don’t like Alfredo sauce. But saying they don’t like all 4 because they’re “white” is just strange and probably mentally ill.
The cheese aversion is weird but the rest are not. Olives are gross, liver is disgusting and cilantro does taste like soap. A whole lot of people feel that way though.
Assuming you’re being serious, why is cheese aversion weird but it’s understandable to find olives gross?
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Crazy is more like not liking “white sauces”, and then lumping mayonnaise, Alfredo sauce, bechamel and cream gravy into that category, despite those having no common threads between all four sauces beyond the color. (and yes, I’ve known two people who have said this very thing).
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And now you know three I’ve said this very thing but the things I don’t like about each of these isn’t that they’re white. I do think their white creamy appearance is fairly unappealing, but I like clam chowder and all kinds of light colored ice cream. Are you sure these people *actually *dislike them because of the color and aren’t just using shorthand for light colored, cream based sauce?
Boy, this is me in a nutshell. I won’t eat any cheese, except for mozzarella in pizza, and even then, it has to be minimal. I never even had a pizza until I was in my 20s, in the Air Force, and went out with a bunch of friends to a place that only served pizza.
Also, no yogurt, no sour cream, no cottage cheese, no cream cheese. I don’t like milk, but I’ll eat it in cereal. I will eat ice cream, though.
And no mayo. It just has a bad taste to me, and it’s strange that that is so, because I know that its ingredients are things that I will eat individually.
That would be Miracle Whip, actually. Mayonnaise is God’s way of telling us he doesn’t want us to choke on that sandwich, so here is some heavenly Jiffy Lube for it.
That’s a type of conditioning, and it has a name: The Garcia Effect. You eat a food, and vomit within a certain time window, whether from the food or not, and then can’t eat the food again. It’s the reason that controlling nausea in cancer patients is such a big deal. In addition to obvious concerns of keeping sick people nourished, people who go through chemo and recover often end up with lots of food aversions because they had so much nausea and vomiting caused by the chemo.
I remember the name “The Garcia Effect,” because I developed it to a certain style of pizza served by a restaurant called, coincidentally, Garcia’s; I’d picked up a stomach virus while visiting my cousins in Chicago, and gotten sick back home a couple of days later, and the last thing I ate happened to be that pizza.
I’ve said this very thing but the things I don’t like about each of these isn’t that they’re white. I do think their white creamy appearance is fairly unappealing, but I like clam chowder and all kinds of light colored ice cream. Are you sure these people *actually *dislike them because of the color and aren’t just using shorthand for light colored, cream based sauce?