Foods (seemingly) everyone likes but you

Celery. People who don’t hate it think it’s this completely innocuous thing and liberally add it to literally everything. Those people are very, very wrong.

I think I’ve submitted this list before in another thread! I call myself a Plain Eater.

Mayo - and any salad made with mayo (tuna, chicken, etc)
Ketchup
Mustard
Pickles - all varieties
Olives - all varieties
Seafood
Fish - unless it’s one of Minnesota’s freshwater fish and it’s been battered and fried (but I can take it or leave it)
Sushi
Coffee
Tea
Mt Dew/Mello Yello
Green peppers
Raw onions
Mushrooms
Anything with fennel or caraway seeds
Coleslaw
Rhubarb
Hard liquor
Wine
Hot wings (actually wings, in general, are a waste of time)
Chip dip or salsa (I do like cheese dip even cheese dip with salsa!)
Salad dressings - not a fan of the creamy variety. I’ll eat oil and vinegar Italian style. But even salad is not a favorite of mine. I like the individual veggies or lettuce on a sandwich, but I don’t need them mixed up and drenched with mayo - y stuff!

I avoid:

Beets
celery
cauliflower
Green peppers (red, yellow, orange, purple, etc. are fine. WTF??)

I try them again every few years to see if my tastes have changed; they haven’t, not for those 4 items. But retrying stuff regularly got me to fall in love with previously detested foods like mushrooms, Brussel sprouts, and spinach. So I’ll keep re-trying.

Oh, that reminds me of a couple:

I don’t like most commercial barbecue sauces. They have an acrid smoke flavor to them that is not my favorite. Whenever I make barbecue (like smoked meat), I look for barbecue sauces that don’t have liquid smoke in them, or I make my own (and this is almost always served on the side, anyway). This might also be the reason I just hate barbecue chicken pizza and the like–because of the sauce. I’ll tolerate the flavor in small doses, though. And it’s fine in something like Chick-Fil-A sauce, where it’s cut with basically mayo and honey mustard.

Ranch dressing. I just don’t understand its ubiquity and almost universal love. I can take it in small doses, but I don’t get people dipping their food into the stuff. I like salads, but I’m an oil-and-vinegar-touch-of-mustard-and-garlic kind of guy.

Liver - I’d rather swallow a spoon of castor oil than eat that junk! I can’t acquire the taste of squash, asparagus, okra, turnips and eggplant either. I can pretty much handle everything else. Cous cous - is some nasty ground up? Something? Give me some nice seasoned up rice pilaf. Thank you…

Sweet potatoes, pecans - southern delicacies, but I gag when I look at them
Coffee - tastes like ashtrays to me
Cilantro - tastes like somebody pounded chalk erasers on the food
Mayonnaise - it oozes and spills, soaks into the rest of the food and turns it into more mayonnaise, and tastes like glue

No sweets for me: desserts, soft drinks, candies, cakes, cookies. Even something as lightly sweetened as a fruity chewable antacid tablet has me dry chewing just enough to wash down the chunks.

I virtually never order steak or a steak-containing thing like a burrito or steak sandwich.

Cous cous is just very tiny beads of pasta . . .

This is a big one:

Most Mexican foods. I like ground beef tacos, the way I make them at least; most restaurants don’t season the meat much, so it’s just bland beef in a shell, which is blech. But most other things, which are universally loved by everyone around me, just don’t appeal to me at all. Enchiladas, nachos, burritos, rice and beans, meh. It’s the same stuff in different shapes, and what taste there is doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t like capsaicin heat. Don’t even get me started on tamales.

Also, eggs. I can’t eat eggs, no matter how they’re prepared. I tolerate their presence in fried rice.

49 posts so far and this is the only one I agree with. Even then it’s just large chunks of fat, little bits like on a pork loin chop are no big deal.

I used to have a decent number of things I wouldn’t eat, but the older I get, the more that list dwindles. Sitting here right now, I can’t think of anything I wouldn’t eat besides a big hunk of fat.

Coffee, beer, coconut.

Pop-tarts. Doughy and disgusting.

Sweet Potato, pumpkin, and yellow/orange fleshed varieties of squash. But zucchini is okay. They all taste the same to me, and they all taste nasty. I won’t eating anything made from them either, including pie.

Cumin. A lot of Indian and Mexican food is right out.

Beets. They taste like dirt. That is apparently part of the appeal for some people. I wonder why they don’t cut out the middleman and just eat dirt.

Most people don’t eat large chunks of fat, though. Or am I living in an alternate universe where everybody loves fat? I mean, isn’t that why chicken breast and tasteless meat like that is king here in the US? Because everyone hates fat?

I’m aware of quite a few folks who don’t particularly like a particular fish or even a class of seafood (e.g. sushi, shellfish), but I don’t know of anyone but me who despises seafood in any and all forms.

I’m glad I’m not the only picky eater here.
There are many more popular foods I won’t eat:
melons have a weird, bitter aftertaste
avocados are just slimy
popcorn don’t live up to its aromatic hype
bell peppers upset my stomach
carbonated beverages: too sweet, and I don’t like the after effects.

I did ask for foods that most people seem to like, but some have strayed from the OP.
I don’t think beets or liver really qualify. :smiley:

Yeah, I forgot that one. I’m not quite as strict as you - I can manage a little dab of sweet/creamy salad dressing if I have to, though I prefer my salad plain - but oil & vinegar dressing makes my tongue curl.

It’s not that I don’t like sour things - I do - but the combination of vinegar or lemon juice and leafy greens creates a bitter, astringent sensation that is extremely unpleasant.

My son should be in this thread too. He doesn’t like bananas, despite having been raised in the tropics so having access to really good ones. And from toddlerhood he did not like pasta. I was the only mother in my cohort who didn’t have the option of turning to Kraft macaroni and cheese for a quick kid-friendly meal. (He’d eat it, but only reluctantly, if I dressed it up with pesto, ham, real cheese, and tomatoes, thus missing the entire point - might as well make a good dinner from scratch if you have to go through that extra work.)

At age 21, he has allowed Asian pasta into his life - both good Japanese ramen bowls and cheap Indomie pass his personal taste test. But god forbid he should have to eat Western pasta like spaghetti or lassagna. No way. Yeah, he’s always been a weird kid.

Strawberries, first & foremost.

At Benihana they give everyone two dipping sauces. A pink type “yum-yum” shrimps sauce and a ginger sauce. Everyone seems to go bonkers over the yum-yum sauce (especially females for some reason) and 9 out of 10 people I see eat there request to have 2 yum-yum sauces instead of one of each.
I’m the odd one who takes 2 ginger sauces instead and gets evil stare downs from everyone at the table like I just broke wind.

Cinnamon rolls. The only people that actually believe me when I say that is my wife and kids because they know firsthand that I’ll go hungry before eating a cinnamon roll. (well, used to. I’m diabetic now so it’s a moot point.) Same with cheescake. Just no.

Shellfish. I tried, I really did. I live ~50 miles from the sea and summer bbq’s at friend’s houses usually included clams or oysters. Gag. Me. I’ll eat sea fish, halibut and salmon and tuna. But no shellfish except clam chowder. And no crab or lobster either, although crab is plentiful here.

Interestingly, things I used to despise like mushrooms I’m becoming more tolerant of as I get older. I’d really, really like to learn how to cook better and being more adventurous with a wider variety of ingredients is pretty much a prerequisite.

Me too. Even as a child. Watermelon and Cantaloupe look great, smell okay, but the taste is just awful.