Beets of any variety, no matter how they are prepared.
When I was growing up, my Mom was fond of serving sliced red beets straight from the can (like this). She likes them, and they were one of the few vegetables that my Dad (a pathologically picky eater) would eat. I never liked the taste or the texture, and I had many unhappy dinners where I ate everything else on my plate and argued with my folks about having to finish the damn beets.
To this day, I can’t stand beets, not even the roasted golden beets that cwSpouse loves. He swears up and down that they’re delicious, but despite my best efforts, I cannot confirm that.
For me, it’s beets. I was in pre-school at the time, and not feeling particularly well that day. (As an aside, like several people on my mother’s side of the family, I have an unusually low body temperature, normally somewhere in the mid to high 96 degree range. 98.6 degrees for me is running a temperature. Try explaining that to school nurses.) When we were served lunch, I told the staff I was feeling sick and didn’t want to eat. They thought I was just being picky and insisted that I eat. I warned them that if they made me eat, I was going to throw up. They had no patience for my willfulness and insisted that I eat. I don’t remember what else was on my lunch tray aside from the beets, but I vividly remember the purple vomit that followed promptly thereafter. I still can’t even consider eating beets thirty years later.
We had creamed tuna on biscuits for dinner the night I went in to labor. During labor I threw up creamed tuna all over the monitors, the nurse, everywhere. I’m think it was good 5 years or more before I even allowed it to be cooked in our home again. Kiddo is nearly 15 and I haven’t eaten since that night.
Cantelope.When I was about 4 or 5, I ate some cantelope and right after, got sick and threw it up. No idea if the cantelope made me sick or if it was just a bug. But to this day, and I am 53 now, I cannot stand the smell of it. Yuck.
Vietnamese curried beef. Something I know that love but cannot get over the time I got horribly sick from the flu that I didn’t know I had. High temps outside (104F) and a broken water main that rendered our workplace air conditioning useless. The temp inside, as we tried to get the next morning’s newspaper out the door, was over 120F. I didn’t know I had a fever.
Any cruciferous veggie served in a cheese sauce. These overcooked, watery veggies always made me gag at family gatherings as a child. I like the veggies the way I prepare them, but I never prepare them with a cheese sauce. Too many bad memories.
I would have been 7 or 8. My grandparents house was next to the school so every day I’d go there for a 2 course lunch. One day was cantelope and ice cream for desert. I didn’t make it back to school, throbbing headache and vomiting came from nowhere.
Can’t stand the smell of the stuff and haven’t for the last 40 years.
Graham crackers and tangerines. We were kids; Mom and the 3 of us took a train from Fla. to Pittsburgh. They had no money, so bought a bag of tangerines and a box of graham crackers to feed us. The motion of the train, and 3 kids-yep, we all puked. Cannot stand the smell of either. Forget eating them.
I associate spearmint flavored trident with taking long trips with my mom. Whenever we drove to doctors appointments, to see accountants, or whatever, either she would chew a piece, or give me one to keep my mouth busy.
I will forever associate it with hot, uncomfortable cars, and waiting for thousands of hours (a child’s hyperbole) in office buildings. I get a headache whenever I smell it.
Kiwi and any kind of drink that has more than two fruits mixed together. As a very young child, I got sick after eating too much kiwi, and then carsick after drinking some kind of canned fruit punch, haven’t been able to deal with it since. I’ve had a few more temporary food aversions that arose under similar circumstances (beef stew, fried chicken, mandarin oranges) but got over those after a few years.
I also cannot eat honey mustard pretzels. Which sucks, because I actually really like them. But for about 15 years now, they unfailingly make me vomit. It’s gotten progressively worse: I used to be able to eat about half a bag, then I’d be up in the middle of the night throwing it up. That happened four times in a row over about a year, with fewer and fewer pretzels each time. I’ve attempted to eat them very sparingly a few times since and could only manage about 4 pretzels before warning nausea set in. So I’ve reluctantly had to give them up completely. I eat honey, mustard, and pretzels in other contexts with no issues, but with this it’s a 100% fail rate. So in this case, it’s two warring associations: “this tastes good” versus “this will absolutely positively make me sick.”
Blue cheese salad dressing. I used to love it. But then I went to work for a restaurant that made its own dressings, and their recipe for blue cheese dressing called for celery seed. I absolutely loathe celery and its parts. Disgusting stuff. So I simply could not eat this place’s blue cheese dressing.
That was almost 25 years ago. To this day I cannot taste blue cheese without also tasting celery seed, even when I know damn well the dressing in question is uncontaminated with celery. I make the salad dressings at my current job and I know exactly what’s in the blue cheese dressing, and yet I can still taste celery seed even though it’s not there.
Umm, I assume you are referring to Kiwi Fruit, aka chinese gooseberry?
You may want to be careful saying you ate to many Kiwis, or Kiwis make you sick. Apart from being a small flightless bird, it’s also a colloquial name for people from New Zealand (where the bird comes from)
I am entirely grateful that my parents didn’t have this damned hangup when I was growing up.
Perhaps it is also because of the style of table service - instead of prepared plates coming out the food came out service a la russe or a la francaise/family style instead. [depending on grandparents house with cook and servants, or at home with amish origin mother:D] My brother and I got to pick what we were going to eat and serve ourselves. The main caveat was that if there was a new food we had never had before we had to at least try it once. We grew up actually liking vegetables, I actually have trouble understanding how there are people who absolutely refuse to eat vegetables, or will only eat chicken nuggets, french fries and wash it down with coke.
You may have the same issue that I have with bivalves - they all cause varying forms of gastric distress - from the mild [scallops only give me diarrhea] to extreme [clams, oysters and mussels cause projectile vomiting] Have you had clams in any other way/time? [we figured it out because any time I tried clams or oysters it ended badly, and I tried a mussel at a friends house many years after giving up on bivalves and have now sworn off tryign any new type ever again!]
And pork - I am still ambivalent about pig products even after being off byetta now for 5 years. If we are cooking it in any form it still may take me careful thought before deciding to taste it, even if it is something I normally have liked before. Any time we make any form of pork/pig now we also have something on hand I can eat instead as it has actually happened that something is fine right up until I get it up to my mouth and I get a smell and my stomach starts churning.
Anything with peach flavoring that isn’t actually a peach. Many years ago I did some taste-testing for an anonymous brand that starts with a “yo” and ends with a “plait” that involved peach. Except that the flavor was mostly chemical. They were looking for the peachiest one. Ewww. I OD’d on it in one evening and that’s been enough to last me over 20 years now.
When I was a teen, I worked at a restaurant, making the salads. Pretty fancy place - baked our own croutons, made all our dressings. So I made up a five gallon bucket of the blue cheese dressing and carried it to the walk-in to put on the shelf. The upper shelf.
The whole bucket wound up tipping onto me. I had no other clothes, so I had to walk a mile back home, reeking of blue cheese dressing.
I have avoided all exposure to blue cheese in any form, especially as dressing, ever since.
When I was a child we used to drive to visit grandmother, over an hour away, on weekends. My father frequently wanted blueberry pancakes for breakfast on weekends. I was always made to eat breakfast. And I always got car sick on the drive to grandma’s. The result of all this being that I couldn’t eat blueberries for over thirty years. I like them now but I avoided them for so long that I usually don’t even think about getting any, they just don’t register. What do blueberries even go with?
I tried a corndog once, when I was a kid in Culver City. It wasn’t very good and I didn’t try one again for 15 years; then I tried one at Hot Dog on a Stick, and it was much better. I was never interested in trying one again.
I don’t mind fish, but if the **fish has bones **I consider it a nuisance! And if the fish still has the head on it (as I got once in a restaurant in San Francisco) that’s even worse!
My Mom used to make salmon cakes—and left the vertebrae in! This even though I sometimes put the patty in a sandwich, with tartar sauce and cheese.
I’ve tried churros—forget it. The sugar they’re slathered with is not the worst part. Chewing on a churro is like trying to eat a bicycle inner tube. Rubbery. Tofu is gross. It has a squishy texture and worse taste. I sometimes go to a Chinese restaurant where every patron is served a small bowl of egg drop soup that has some tofu in it; I just swallow the tofu instead of biting or tasting it. Ick.
When I was a kid I liked **boiled eggs **and hated fried eggs. Now it’s the other way around.
Our parents insisted we eat all kinds of vegetables, including sweet potatoes. I never liked them, and haven’t eaten them in years.
The night before I had an aneurism/brain hemorrhage, I ate a whole Korean fried chicken, drank a pitcher of beer, and had a little side dish of sliced-up cabbage with thousand-island dressing. I will never touch sliced-up cabbage with thousand-island dressing again as long as I live.
