Lots of women are the same way after, shall we say, similar events while they’re pregnant. My pastor’s wife cannot eat pepperoni pizza 20 years after the fact, and Krispy Kremes make her turn green too (although there are a LOT of people who can’t eat KKs for the same reason, due to sheer overindulgence!).
People on chemo (pregnant women, too) are often very sensitive to smells and food textures.
I’m the only person I know who has that conditioning to two foods… and one book.
The foods:
Mint, after “The Mintcident.” My best friend and I ate a whole box of Thin Mints on the schoolbus. Much barfing ensued. I can’t even use mint toothpaste.
Honey, after being served honey drenched biscuits while I was fighting nausea already.
(There’s a common theme. I actually didn’t much like mint or honey BEFORE these incidents.)
And the book:
Memoirs of an Invisible Man, by HF Saint. A friend loaned it to me in highschool. I had a stomach bug. I couldn’t finish the book. Ten years later, I saw it on my then-fiance’s bookshelf and felt the most intense nausea. Years after that, I forced myself to read it. Intense nausea the whole time and, even now, thinking about it makes me queasy.
Oh that’s definitely a thing.
I once got “food poisoning” from Popeyes Chicken. Years passed before I ate it again.
Then a similar thing happened with sweet tea. I have no idea WTF my mother did to that batch.
And then there was the time I ODed on golden raisens because they were just so damn good.
All three incidents took years to wear off. And it wasn’t a conscious mental choice like "no fucking way am I eating that every again. It was the opposite, where I would really want to eat that again and would start and something in my body would go “uhh, no way boss…”
At least those FINALLY subsided.
It’s a defense mechanism.
We’ve evolved with a mechanism that assumes that if we eat something and then get sick, it may be poison and should be avoided. This produces false positives, but evolution doesn’t care about that.
Believe it or not, the psychologist, Garcia, who first studied this, had to gather a lot of data before people would believe him Science turned down his first paper. Conditioning, whether classic or operant, was well-established as requiring many exposures, and instantaneous pairing. The single exposure Garcia effect works only when food is paired with nausea. It doesn’t work when food is paired with electric shocks, for example (the experiments were on mice), or when nausea is paired with visual stimuli. The Garcia Effect requires only one exposure, and the nausea can follow consumption of the food by several hours. It can persist for years in animals with long lives (this part didn’t come out with the mice) without any re-exposure.
I was eventually able to eat the Garcia-style pizza again, but it took about six years, and it probably helped that I didn’t end up with an aversion to all pizza.
I once got nausea without even puking from a liquid antibiotic for which my mother gave me orange juice to chase, and I couldn’t drink orange juice for years. I could still eat oranges, but I couldn’t drink frozen or bottled juice for five or six years, and before that, I had loved it. Fortunately, I also loved grapefruit, so, no scurvy.
Of course, but all conditioning is a defense mechanism. It’s just interesting that Pavlovian conditioning (classical conditioning) and Skinnerism (operant conditioning) were studied first, so that when Garcia came forward with data on instantaneous conditioning with food and nausea, people were skeptical.
There seems to be a contradiction here. There may be more to this than Garcia realized. (Granted, one anecdote proves nothing, but it’s interesting.)
I got sick after peanut butter cookies (you know, the weird ones shaped like peanuts?) in 1988 and haven’t been able to look at them since and usually can’t think of them without gagging.
I ate a bad M&M once and it was years until I could eat them again.
I have a ton of weird food things, but the one I thought of the most reading this thread is the opposite of what a lot of people wrote: I hate spaghetti. I’m ok with linguine sometimes. I love fettucine. I just hate spaghetti. I don’t think there is another normal pasta shape I don’t love. I think that the texture is just too weird, that it can’t hold on to sauce well, more work to eat it than it’s worth. I’d eat it before starving to death, but I’d literally buy any size or shape of pasta in the grocery store before I’d buy it for myself on purpose.
Yes- I had a college roommate who made that very claim that he didn’t like “white sauces” and lumped all those things in together. My point was that I could see maybe the bechamel and cream gravy being lumped in together, being fundamentally similar, but the other two (mayonnaise & alfredo sauce) are as different from bechamel/cream gravy as they are from each other, with the only similarities coming in color and to a much lesser extent, consistency.
And I can buy the Garcia effect; I know enough people who have eternally crossed some food or other off their list because they think they got sick from that food, and they’re so repulsed by it now that they can’t stand the sight or smell of it. My mother is a perfect example- she won’t touch the Olive Garden salad or salad dressing because she’s convinced she got sick from it like a decade ago. Whether or not it was the salad is open for debate, but she won’t touch the stuff with a ten foot pole a decade later. And she’s NOT a food weirdo in any way, shape or form.
I can attest to the Garcia effect. I remember vomiting on a plate of macaroni and cheese when I was a child and can’t eat it now. Funny enough, I like pasta and cheese.
I don’t know if this is also due to the Garcia effect, but I loathe eggs. I can’t stand the smell of them cooking, commercials with breakfast sandwiches make me gag, and I will completely lose my appetite if an egg touches my food. I can stand them in cakes and cookies, but I’m a wary of the custard desserts, with a heavy emphasis on eggs.
Nutter Butters? I haven’t had those in ages! Thanks for reminding me of their existence; I do see them for sale. I’ve always loved them.
Sorry about your experience. 
How’s this for a crazy food aversion: human breast milk! Why does the idea of drinking human breast milk gross just about everybody out, when most of us were fed nothing but as infants?
And yet, we’ll happily slurp up the breast milk of other (oddly specific) species. Cow’s milk, good! Goat’s milk, kind of weird to me but some people drink it. Horse milk, WTF? Cat’s milk, no way, you’re insane! Rat milk in schools? Scandalous! 
Why are we so weird about milk?
You got that right. Liver is Satan’s spawn and cilantro is the devil’s dish soap holding it all together
What happened to Jsgoddess with the book isn’t the Garcia Effect, because that specifically refers to food and nausea. JSG may very well have developed an aversion to the book because it was paired with nausea, and I know people who have developed other aversions to activities or non-food things because they were paired with nausea (I heard of someone who wore a “lucky” hat to chemo, and then after chemo, could never wear the hat again without feeling sick, but it took many exposures over a period of time), and the experiment in A Clockwork Orange was based on attempts to use nausea and then gay porn exposure as a means to make gay people straight (or, that is, this was done-- I actually can’t say that the experiment was truly based on this, but it was something that was attempted in the 60s and 70s). It made gay people aversive to watching porn, and sometimes to watching movies in general, and occasionally made then aversive to having sex with the lights on, but it didn’t make them aversive to gay sex, except occasionally temporarily, and it didn’t make them desire straight sex instead, more to the point.
But anyway, while nausea can cause all sorts of aversions, and there are other ways to cause a food aversion (if your family dinners were always very unpleasant, because of your family dynamics, you might be aversive to some of the things that were served very often). However, “The Garcia Effect” refers specifically to nausea and food pairings.
Several years ago, there was a You Tube video that went viral featuring two young women on the Mongolian steppes (interestingly, both wore Western clothing - jeans and t-shirts) milking a horse. After they took the pail away, the colt showed up, and a lot of people were hoping there was something left over for it. 
What’s the big deal? Those are the animals they raise there; people also use donkey milk, sheep’s milk, camel milk, and I’m sure there are other species whose milk is used by people too.
Mare’s milk is used to make a product called koumiss that I’ve heard is very good; it’s fermented for a day or two and is fizzy.
For me it’s tomato slices.
I love tomato sauce, marinara sauce, salsa, pico de gallo, bruschetta. All yummy. But stick a round slice in a burger or sandwich, and as far as I’m concerned, you may have well have taken a dump on it. I think it’s something to do with the texture.
And cherry tomatoes are just vile. I think that comes form having them grow like weeds in our backyard when I was growing up. My mom planted them once, and they came back every single year. The rabbits would devour my carrots and cabbage and ignore those damn things. And they attracted very large ugly hornworms. As kids, we thought the tomatoes would be fun to throw at each other, but they’re too small to splat; they just hurt. All in all, a worthless “food” item.
Funny, I got sick after drinking too much amaretto --but I don’t have a problem there. 
Oatmeal is good whichever kind it is, as far as I’m concerned. I like it with brown sugar and cinnamon, and then just a splash of cold milk.
Yes, mayo and Miracle Whip are both disgusting.
Your comment on defaults reminded me that I don’t like bell pepper on pizza. It’s not something that comes up, now that I’m back in California, but when I was young and newly married I lived in Ohio. In Ohio, bell pepper is (or was - it’s been awhile) a default part of any pizza. A pizza with no toppings will include the crust, sauce, cheese, and a significant dose of bell pepper. I learned quickly to ask that it be left off.
No one was ever willing to let me trade the bell pepper for another topping. It just wasn’t thought of as a topping. Both Ohio and Michigan offer hamburger as a pizza topping. Odd, but easy to adjust to. One place in Michigan would give you green olives if you ordered olives. No warning, just green olives. I have no idea how widespread that was.
Green olives were something I hated as a child, but learned to love as an adult. I was transitioning when I got them on the pizza. So it was OK, just not what I was expecting.
Liver has to be cooked properly to be edible. My mom did not know how to do that. She was also bad at cooking oatmeal, or just liked it flaky and chewy. It didn’t help that “eating healthy” at our house meant no or little salt and no sugar. Garlic granules (not garlic salt) were allowed.
The liver was beef liver, cooked in a first gen teflon pan with no butter, oil, or grease. Definitely no bread crumbs. Either because it would stick anyway or to hurry it, she’d add a splash of water and put a lid on the pan. So it was essentially steamed. It was grey and tough. The meat of the virtuous.
I no longer avoid liver, but I don’t seek it out. I hate cilantro and can’t handle hot things. I probably used to have a Garcia effect going with the taste of baby aspirin. If an orange soda’s taste got too close, I couldn’t drink it.
I don’t remember saying that I hated the taste of baby aspirin, so I must have been very young when it started. I do remember my Mom giving them to me in a teaspoon, crushed and mixed with water. One time I asked her why she did that and she said it was because I didn’t like the taste and wouldn’t chew it. After that I swallowed them. The slurry in the spoon left bad tasting guck and bits coating the inside of my mouth. Much worse than chewing and much, much worse than swallowing whole.
I definitely have a Garcia effect going with the tast of pepto-bismol. My first taste was when someone in the dorm gave me some to soothe an upset stomach. Within five minutes it rather spectacularly failed to soothe. Probably not its fault, but definitely enough to set the effect. After that, if my stomach was even a little upset, it would act like ipecac.
Definitely not my experience growing up in Ohio. Which is good, because I don’t like bell pepper.
Runny egg yolks.
Meat that “bleeds” onto the plate.
Turkey tastes weird.
Frog legs (blarg)
Most seafood/fish
Oysters (ick)