Welcome (belatedly) to the Brussels Sprouts Appreciation Society. We have a special membership offer on for converts who previously only knew the mushy brussels sprouts characteristic of cafeteria steam tables.
I didn’t drink coffee until I was past 40. Then it became a breakfast staple. Haven’t gotten into iced coffee yet, though.
Still can’t abide the thought of bleeding purple beets, hot or cold. I learned to dread them when they were inflicted on me at school. Other colors of beet, fine, though I don’t seek them out.
I didn’t like cheese as a kid. Now I eat a lot of it. Of course, when I was a kid, it was American cheese, which still tastes awful. I’ll go with swiss, cheddar, boursin, or anything but American.
I also discovered I like bluefish, which I avoided as a kid.
True story: I got a stomach virus and barfed up fish and chocolate cake when I was 10 years old (sorry for the graphics). It took me 5 years before I’d touch either again.
One time when I was about four and had some sort of childhood respiratory infection, my Dad gave me a shot of whiskey to drink. I found it the worst thing I’d ever tasted in my short life.
Never liked cream cheese, avocados, green olives, sweet pickles, onions; ah hell, I was a picky kid. I now like all of the above, especially homemade pickles, and Castelvetrano olives.
I still won’t eat beets or Brussels sprouts, and don’t see that ever changing.
Never liked coffee or scotch, for 40 years. Then I started teaching (emotionally draining during the day, staying up late grading and worrying at night)… Suddenly they’re both comfort food.
But I still think they’re both too bitter, especially the cheap stuff.
So I’m cursed with needing coffee, but only the good stuff.
I wasn’t a big fan of rice or mashed potatoes, although I would eat them. I know now that I was served Minute Rice and Potato Buds; the latter are really meant to be a thickener for soup or casseroles, and Minute Rice? UGH! Use a rice cooker and prepare the REAL thing.
I used to not like mushrooms primarily because some of them are poisonous and that scared me. I have overcome the fear and do now quite appreciate them.
By contrast, I used to adore tomato juice. Drank it all the time. Then one day, my mother made a tomato aspic. Which might not have been a problem, except, it had green bell pepper in it. I hated those things back then, though now they merely make me gag convulsively. Needless to say, tomato juice lost its appeal and it has not gotten better.
As a kid, I disliked being served fish because it involved meticulously removing tiny bones. (I would have to flake the fish bit by bit to remove each bone, and even that wasn’t foolproof, leading to a lot of messy work with my tongue, lips, and fingers to eject bones from my mouth.) Once I grew up, moved out, and started cooking for myself, I realized that it was just my parents, or whoever they were getting the fish from, who weren’t properly fileting the fish. Most of the filets I bought already had (almost) all the bones removed, and most of the whole fish I bought I was pretty adept at removing the bones myself en masse.
Dark beer, i.e. stouts and porters. When I was a college student, people at parties overwhelmingly drank cheap macro brews: Miller Lite, Budweiser, Coors, that sort of thing. At one party somebody was drinking a stout, possibly Guiness - and the rest of us were in shock. Other folks - including me - were trying it and all laughing at how awful it tasted. Fast forward ten years, and dark brews had somehow become a major part of my beer palate.
Milk:
When I was a little kid, I used 2% or whole milk. My older siblings had moved on to skim milk, but I was disgusted by how watery it looked; I actually cried one morning when I accidently poured it (instead of my usual 2%) on my cereal. As an adult, I pretty much exclusively use skim milk on my cereal. 2% seems rich, and whole milk feels like drinking paint.
I’m a picky “plain eater”. There are a lot of things I don’t like, but there are a few foods that I’ve decided are ok to good in the last 15 years or so. (A lot of the foods I say I don’t like, I have never tasted!)
I wouldn’t eat tomatoes unless it was spaghetti or pizza sauce. I especially hated hunks of cooked tomatoes in soups and sauces. Now I love raw tomatoes and have recently decided that I can handle a hunk of cooked tomato.
Spinach always seemed nasty to me. I never even tried it until maybe 10 years ago. Now, I love raw spinach and I’m good with cooked spinach in soup. I don’t think I’d eat a glop of mucky canned or cooked spinach on its own though.
I finally tried broccoli about 5 years ago. I like it both cooked and raw.
I finally tried stuffing about 15 years ago. I was convinced I wouldn’t like it. But I do!
There’s still a very long list of food items that I claim I don’t like even though I haven’t tried them. At this point, I don’t think I will ever try or like them.
I’ve never been a picky eater (even stuff I don’t like, I’ll eat again), but a few things took a few tries for me to get down and truly enjoy:
Cilantro – I was one of those “soapy” tasters, but after about four or five goes at it, I got used to it and it’s one of my favorite herbs. I still taste the “soapiness,” but it doesn’t bug me.
Marmite (& variants)- hated it the first time I tried it, but it’s because I was expecting something Nutella-like based on its appearance and context (served on toast for breakfast.) That said, I was strangely intrigued by it and, like above, after a few goes, I goddamn love the stuff. Just received four jars of its cousin Vegemite a couple weeks ago, and I’m almost through the first jar.
Capers - weird tasting, briny ingredient the first few times I had it, and now a staple of my tuna salads.
Sushi - just never really seemed like “food” to me initially. I had a girlfriend who loved sushi, and I’d go out, eat some nigiri and maki, complain (to myself) about it being “cat found” and then want to go out to McDonald’s to get something that felt substantial to me. (Oh, how different I am now – sushi can fill me up easily.) Then I had a wealthy Japanese student (back when I taught English on the side) take me out to basically unlimited otoro (fatty tuna) nigiri (in addition to anything else I wanted) and I was hooked.
TRC4941, some would say you should try more foods on your long list. You’re probably missing out on many yummy treats!
Anyway, I’ll always try something once to see if it’s good.
I think I read on this board that acquired tastes are Stockholm syndrome for the taste buds. I find this works best if the beverage in question has a strong visceral/psychoactive reward to mitigate the initially unpleasant taste, such as with coffee and beer.
There are foods or combinations thereof I hated when I was a child that I like now or maybe just don’t hate as much. Brussels sprouts are one of them. If they tasted like wee cabbages all would be fine, but they never did. Now, they aren’t as bad and sometimes even taste quite good. Onions used to ruin a pizza but now they’re fine (this is a certain combination thing- I like onions, they just didn’t work on a pizza for me). One bite of a sweet potato tasted so bad it would would make me vomit when I was young. Now it merely tastes gross.
Unless my taste buds wither and I become anosmic, cilantro will forever be vile and despised.
