I first encountered the stuff when I visited South Korea. Korean food had been described as the hardest for Westerners to get used to, and I was living in Japan at that time. I’ll second that. But I only fell ill in Korea - and really ill - after I got tired of chilli with and in everything, and had some fried chicken that turned out to be underdone.
Japan has a lot of Korean restaurants, so I ran into kimchi again and again. Initially I though it was awful, but finally I got used to it, and up to a point I like it. But it was a long journey.
Many of the posts cover sushi and fish. I discovered sushi in Japan, and loved it. One thing is that it does not smell or taste fishy, and fried fish does. I’ll eat it, but I’m not wild about most kinds of fish, despite the health benefits. Anyway, I appreciate that many don’t like sishi, or fish for that matter.
Ohmigawd, that is one thing that haunts me from youth. Sandwich spread, Heinz salad dressing and fish paste. The latter was used to make disgusting sandwiches.
I have happy memories - NOT! - of Brussels sprouts and cabbage as a child. Later my tastes changed and sprouts were OK, but it helped if they were properly cooked. Try very salty water and then fry them briefly in butter.
Cabbage - I only changed my mind about it after encountering cuisines that know how to cook vegetables. Many people don’t like spinach. Same thing, it depends how you cook it.
It’s funny what people like and dislike. Sometimes it’s an age thing. As a kid I was very picky. Now I eat just about anything. I have encountered some weird things over the years, especially in Asia. Some of the fish products are unbelievable. And Japanese natto is just something else - it was described as “rotted soya beans”, and I won’t argue with that. The taste is something like a Camembert that is about two weeks too old. The texture is truly disgusting. Most Japanese girls say they like the slimy texture. I’ll omit the obvious comment.
Not being a Murrican, I find peanut butter truly awful. And I dislike canned tuna. The stuff sometimes turns up on pizza, unfortunately.
Roast anything is probably the national disk in the UK, but I increasingly dislike the smell of meat cooking . I eat it, but dislike the smell.
Ethnic food? I love most of it, but not okra. The taste is fine, but the slimy texture makes me think the cook (male, of course) played a practical joke.
One odd thing is that I love chocolatae and coffee but but don’t like things with a coffee flavor and am not wild about chocolate cake.
I seem to have acquired an allergy to some nuts and there is a cross-allergy to apples, which is a nuisance.
I have had escargots (snails) once or twice, which took some effort. If you think of them as land shrimps then it gets easier.
For a long time I hated a runny egg yolk and always had hard-boiled eggs and fried eggs done really well.
I truly hate anything with anise or aniseed in it. So no ouzo, raki or Pernod.
Agreed! I eat tongue, liver and kidney, don’t want to eat heart, and will not even look at brains, intestines or testicles. as for eating a penis - ???
I am not yet Mr. Organic but I find it hard, if not impossible, to take some of the really synthetic-looking and tasting goop that gets served up as processed food or fast food. And I reserve a special place in hell for some canned vegetables, such as peas and spinach. Book another slot for a good deal of commercial baked goods, such as Twinkies (yup, I managed to find them, and wished I hadn’t.) Pringles chips; like some other varieties of chips, either tasteless cardboard or cardboard with a searing chemical flavoring.
I don’t touch sodas of any kind unless I have no choice, I find them repellent. Coke or Pepsi? I prefer my teeth the way they are. Why drink something that dissolves bloodstains?
Post-WW2? In the UK there was a phase of “feed the proles right” that was still going when I was young. Two things stand out in my memory: the concentrated orange juice that was more like a sticky, sweet syrup with a horrible chemical back-taste. Almost as bad as the other half of this dynamic due: cod liver oil. Yeeeech.
Huh. I had never really thought of that–it seems to be a popular mainstream Asian cuisine here, and especially common now with hipsters and their fusion food trucks. I can see some of the banchan and I guess the kimchi being a bit weird (though my Polish dad never really flinched at kim chi, coming from a sauerkraut eating culture.) But the popular Korean dishes, like their barbecue, bulgogi, bimbim bap, etc. seems to work fine with mainstream tastes. That said, maybe once we stray beyond the mainstream Korean items in America, it is trickier. I’m wondering what world cuisine I would describe as being more challenging for an average Westerner.
Fresh tomatoes, usually. We had a huge garden growing up, and all the tomatoes we ate were either canned by mom or fresh from the garden. Pick them early in the day before it got too hot to work in the garden, chill them in the fridge, slice them, sprinkle on some salt and eat. Wonderful. Now that I don’t have a garden, and few of my friends do either, fresh tomatoes, whether at someone’s home or a restaurant are terrible. Not only do they not taste good, they turn my stomach. So they get picked out of salads and left off sandwiches.
Peppermint. I think this one can be attributed to association. What is the first thing I think of when I smell or taste peppermint? Pepto Bismol, and all the reasons for taking it in the first place.
[QUOTE=pulykamell;21489562 I’m wondering what world cuisine I would describe as being more challenging for an average Westerner.[/QUOTE]
What’s an average Westerner though? Most every Western country has their own adopted foreign food style, or some sort of fusion/creole derived from somewhere else.
England has curries, France has Maghreb food, the Netherlands has Indonesian food (rijsttafel), Germany has Turkish, the US has all sorts of stuff- Creole, Cajun, Tex-Mex, Cal-Mex, and unusual fusions like Viet-Cajun in Houston. The common thread as best as I can tell, is that they’re all Eurasian, more or less (I’m counting N. Africa and the Middle east in there)
If I had to guess, I’d think that sub-Saharan African cuisine would be the most foreign, as it seems to be a culinary tradition that’s not quite as Eurasian, either directly or via colonization as the rest.
Tomatoes. Ketchup and pasta sauce are fine, though.
Strawberries. I don’t mind them, but they do nothing for me.
Watermelon.
Coffee.
Alcohol.
Seafood.
Powers &8^]
Nope, didn’t like refried beans either. And ranch style beans ™ are basically pinto beans with BBQ seasoning.
I try to eat a little of the beans when I get Tex-Mex because beans are actually good for you. But I never get more than a taste or two before noping out.
I’m curious- have you ever had fresh blackeyed peas? They’re very different than dried ones, at least to my taste buds. They lack that weird earthy taste (dirt-like to me).
