Just today in the candy aisle at the local Walgreen’s I spotted a pack of Necco wafers.
This always serves to elicit the reaction of: “Ewwww. Necco wafers! Get 'em away. Get 'em AWAY!!”
The reason? When I was just a tyke, I remember the occasional visit from my great-grandmother. This was always an odd experience in and of itself since she had to be, like 150 at the time.
Anyway, she would always send me -ME and never one of my siblings- to the corner store to get her a pack of Necco wafers. I would trudge alone over to the store, fetch her candy and upon bringing them back she would open the candy with really old old-lady hands, offer one to me which I would grudgingly accept and then promptly disappear from sight and spit the candy out.
The whole experience has left me with the faintest remainder of -literally- a bad taste in my mouth. Such that to this day when I espy the slightest glimpse of this most dreadful of bottom-tier candies, I still shout out, “Aaaahhhh, a Necco wafer! Everybody run!”
Surely I am not alone in this. (Well maybe with the Necco wafers but somebody has to have an equally bad association.)
For me it’s champagne. I’m not a real fan of sparkling wines to begin with, but we decided that the New Year’s after our engagement needed to be special. So, nice room in Vegas, good bottle of bubbly…what could go wrong?
The worst case of stomach flu I’ve ever had, that’s what could go wrong. About 2am I awoke with the worst cramps. I made it to the bathroom just in time to experience what can only be described as “projectile” vomiting. Laid me out for the next three days. Worst Vegas trip ever. I know the champagne wasn’t the cause, but it will always be associated with that disaster in my mind. No more bubbly for me, ever!
Corndogs. I do not eat them, and they do not enter my home.
In second grade, it was corndog day at school. I bit into mine–just the cornbread part–and it tasted terrible. When I looked at my newly-revealed sausage, I realized that somehow, the dog part had spoiled and turned dark green. The inside of the cornbread had become green as well. So I spat out my cornbread and did not eat the corndog.
Most of the other children also avoided the green corndogs, but a few ate them, and of course became very ill indeed. So I don’t eat corndogs–they’re too sneaky. You don’t know what’s lurking inside those things.
If anyone knows how exactly hot dogs can become dark green, I would certainly like to know. It’s still a mystery to me.
I looove Necco wafers. Always bought them as a kid because you got so many for your nickel.
But for thirty years I couldn’t get them. Now that the one local chain out of three carries them I buy some every week.
The ones that creep me out are coconut Jelly Bellies. I never see them coming and over react gagging.
Canned salmon. Once in grade 2 a kid threw up his salmon sandwich and it really smelled like hell. I can’t even remember the smell of canned salmon without feeling queasy. Argh I’m going to barf just thinking about it. The smell of salmon with barf and the sawdust they used to put on the barf so that they could sweep it up with a broom. Yuck!!!
Individually they are fine. But when served together, my mind flashes on the time I got a bad case of food poisoning during a conference. I’d eating waffles and sausage for breakfast, and five minutes later I was bent over a toliet, yakking out my brains. I spent the whole day in that position, missing all the talks and networking sessions.
Was hot dogs and orange crush. Got sick on them when I was little. Could be because I had one unheated - grabbing dogs out of the package and munching on them was my aunt’s habit (my house never had hot dogs) and one might have been bad. It was a long time before I ate dogs again and I never really regained an appreciation for orange crush.
Got sick on orange pineapple juice once because I drank it while I was still not over a stomach ailment For some reason, the antipathy extended to the orange but not the pineapple. I’ve only started to drink oj occasionally. And I got narsty heartburn from Orange Julius once and won’t go near that.
Green peppers and stewed tomatoes. When I was a kid, my brother and I were often babysat by this family that was normal on the outside and crazy/abusive behind closed doors (where my brother and I were), and the mother canned green peppers and tomatoes in their basement. The smell alone brings back a flood of memories; no way am I eating them.
Apple pie does it to me. I got sick on it one time as a kid. I think I actully had another thing, like stomach flu going on, but I still asscociate the apple pie with the getting sick.
To this day, even the smell of anything apple turns my stomach.
I’m the only person I know who cannot eat or smell white rice without feeling nauseous. I hate how it smells, it gives me a heady feeling that makes me want to puke. I don’t mind the smell of brown or wild rices, but every time I eat them I vomit. Rice and I are NOT friends.
Also, I have an aversion to artificial blueberry flavor. I ate a blueberry nutrigrain bar one day and, like many here, came down with the flu an hour later. Gross.
Yeah, I also feel that way about Chinese food; got food poisoning right after eating a very nice Chinese lunch. It wasn’t that at all–something I’d had the day before was to blame–but I almost never eat Chinese now, which is kind of too bad.
Hubby and I both loved the flavor, but both times we consumed it, we were violently ill all night. The first time we figured was a fluke.(Maybe something else we ate . . . maybe a flu bug.) After the second time, we weren’t willing to give it another chance.
Every time I see that product on the grocery store shelf, I shudder a bit thinking of how horribly sick I was-- the kind of sick where you’re not only thinking that you’re dying, you’re hoping that you’re dying just so the misery will end.
Dairy Queen chicken strips. I ate them and suffered one of the worst gallbladder attacks I’d ever had. (At that time, I still thought it was my stomach, didn’t have a clue as to the real trouble.) My husband went and bought me some Mylanta. Took a dose and then I puked (which finally did ease the terrible pain).
Since then, I can’t stand the smell or the taste of those things at all. Blech!
No one in Alaska could understand my aversion to salmon. Practically sacrilege. Until I explained that while I was flying over the Atlantic to Europe frequently, I sat in business class. They invariably served some kind of salmon as an appetizer. (Then chicken and broccoli inevitably as one of the entrees. One flight it was in both entrees!) So salmon reminds me of long, boring, uncomfortable air travel.
Shrimp is completely different. In high school, I worked in a store in downtown Charleston, SC. Being a coastal town, there were many seafood restaurants. Walking to work, I’d pass by their Dumpsters festering in the hot, humid southern days. To my nose, there’s not much difference in smell between those garbage cans and cooked shrimp. Just having a runner carry a shrimp fajita past my table at Chilis is enough to start the reverse peristaltic reaction. The smell and the steam…stop stOP STOP!
Broccoli will, literally, make me gag. When I was a kid my parents got on a ‘eat everything on your plate’* jag. Thankfully it didn’t last long. I had to eat broccoli once or twice, Iall of it, and now I gag if I eat it. I had the same issue with tomatos for a bit but out grew it.
Slee
*This did not last long and it is about the only truely stupid parenting move I can remember my parents making. They are good people and were great parents when I was growing up. This one was really stupid though.
When I was a kid, my older brother had three goldfish in a bowl in his room. That summer the family went on a week-long vacation, and nobody gave any thought to the goldfish until about halfway through the week. When we returned home, I was the first to go check on the goldfish. Of course they were dead and mostly decomposed and really disgusting looking and smelling.
That evening my mother served egg custard for dessert. I took one look at it, and *just knew *that she had made it from the dead goldfish. Now I’ve always been able to enjoy every kind of food, but nothing would make me eat that custard. In fact it was several decades before I was able to eat it again.