What will positively send me running and gagging is the taste and texture of a fresh tomato. Oddly enough, I love any tomato based Italian sauce and can slurp it right up, but sliced, diced, or smashed fresh tomato ruins the entire dish for me.
perhaps it has something to do with my getting my butt torn to shreds multiple times at one meal for declining to eat room temp tomatoes sliced and salted, swimming in tomato juice. thanks mom - love you too.
Jello. Every so often I think, hey, maybe I’ve grown out of that, it’d be nice to have some Jello! I mean, it tastes like solid Kool-Aid, right? And I eat one bite and think, hey, Jello! And then I eat a second and my brain figures out what that texture is and I have to fight to swallow it and not throw up.
Oh, and bananas. Used to like them when I was a kid, but now I can’t stand the texture.
I’ve never eaten sardines, but they just don’t look edible, so I’ll probably live my entire life never having tasted them.
I haven’t eaten a cooked carrot on purpose since I was 14 year old. If they’re swimming around in the chicken noodle soup and they’re tiny, I’ll eat them. Otherwise, I won’t let them near my mouth.
Mayonnaise - can’t even think of it without gagging. I briefly had a boyfriend who put mayo on his eggs. Put me off eggs for a couple years.
Also cooked zucchini - nasty, slimy stuff. Probably a holdover from my childhood when my mom grew the stuff by the ton and it got involved in at least one meal a day for a few years.
Canned herring or sardines. Just the smell of them turns my stomach.
Canned peas are just plain gross. They also smell like dirty socks when you cook them. Give me fresh or frozen ANY day.
Brussels sprouts. Ew, ew, ew, ew!
I’m not getting the eggs thing. But, hey, different strokes for different folks. I love boiled eggs, and especially love them soft-boiled so I can chop them up on buttered toast. It’s kind of a comfort thing when I’m feeling sick.
As one who will eat virtually anything and enjoy a large subset of foods tried, the only one I can think of is artificial watermelon flavoring. Watermelon Jolly Ranchers or Bubble Yum make my skin crawl.
I’ve overcome a few sickness-inducing flavors. Brown liquor (whisk(e)y, Scotch, bourbon, etc) used to be intolerable. Fish sauce still smells pretty foul but tastes great. Dark meat from a chicken or turkey is now my favorite.
I bought and tried durian (the fruit, not the deadly typhoon) a few weeks ago. Not pleasant but not retch-inducing, either. I can almost see learning to enjoy this weird fruit.
I’m like this with cole slaw except I crave the stuff intensely. It’s been so bad before that I’ve gotten out of bed at night, got dressed, drove to the grocery store, asked an employee to get me a bucket of cole slaw from the deli (which is closed), then brought the stuff home and spit out the 2nd bite after forcing myself to choke down the first.
I have never liked cole slaw and I probably never will but I try it every couple months. It’s weird.
Bananas here, too, but I like the smell of them. And I like banana-flavored stuff. I adore banana bread. I’ll even eat banana chips. (I might even enjoy banana chips if they didn’t have the texture of poker chips.) But I can’t choke down a fresh banana. Something about chewing that gooshy fruit makes me gag.
I like everything in the first six posts except for the licorice. (But cilantro needs to be used in moderation.)
Wow, so much hate for the cilantro. It warms the heart. I can’t stay in the kitchen if someone’s cutting it, let alone eat it in my food. Saying it tastes like soap is too kind, IMO. Cilantro smells and tastes diseased to me. It tastes toxic. Why the first person who ever bit into it decided to classify it as edible is beyond me.
I can’t stand cumin, either, but it doesn’t make me want to die and I can choke it down if I have to (I used to live with friends who loved the stuff). Cilantro – no way, no how.
Bananas, especially if they’re mashed, are nausea-inducing. As are runny eggs. GAH.
Guinastasia, I feel you on the hard boiled egg thing. A couple times a year, I’ll have an inexplicable craving for one of them, and then the experience puts me right off the taste or scent of eggs for a few months.
Spam will get me to airmail every time I smell it. Tomatos are a combination of fruit and animal. Cut them in half and you see intestines ,veins and organs. They should be illegal.
I love things like spaghetti and salsa, but not with chunks. “Chunky” salsa? Forget it. I like the local Mexican restaurant that has a nice thin very hot salsa.
Once my dad convinced me to try a bite of a fresh tomato. Straight from his garden (“not one of those insipid store tomatoes, son; it’s not the same–you’ll like this one!”).
I threw up. The only food that will make me retch.
I do love every seafood I’ve ever had, and I’ve had some really weird stuff (my wife is Korean). Except oysters. Can’t eat those, even deep fried.
You folks do realize there’s a whole entire thread devoted exclusively to cilantro already?
Me, I don’t like organ meats. They have a narsty little kinda bitter-ick quality to them.
And then there’s the whole category of ‘icky slimy fishy things’ - which is mostly seafood. I can bear some fish as long as it’s not fishy tasting but seafood is A) gross looking and B) gross. I remember going to an ‘authentic’ Chinese New Year meal which featured things like sea cucumber and some ghastly oval grey rubbery thing on a bed of what looked like slimy green thin seaweed. No way I was going to taste it, especially when the confirmed seafood lovers proclaimed it unpalatable.
Then there’s food that doesn’t like me. Iceberg lettuce and cucumbers will make me ill (but I happily eat all other lettuces). Basil and bergamot make me belch. And if I eat allspice, the flavour stays with me for DAYS. Ew.
As for hard boiled eggs, they’re yummy. They are one of the foods (many of the foods mentioned in this thread belong in the group) that smell bad but taste good. The hands-down winner of that category is honey which smells like bee vomit (I guess) but tastes nothing like its smell.
