Urgh. Sorry, JohnT, I loathe the taste of chicken, any chicken. Terribly un-American of me, I know. I also dislike plain rice (though I’ll eat fried rice with Chinese or Japanese food), and the taste of plain water. I may be a bit of a downer in this thread. 
I’m glad you’re done here, but in the interest of accuracy, I stated quite clearly that the person I know who hates chocolate STILL LIKED MY CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES.
Look, as the one who started this thread I think I’m uniquely qualified to know what it is that I meant at the time. And thrilled as I am to know you won’t be returning (no really, I’m thrilled–don’t take that as a challenge to return) in the interest of making it clearer for everyone else, let me try to clarify what I apparently didn’t do a good enough job communicating in the OP.
So here goes.
First, as stated about a billion times already, obviously there is no food that literally everyone likes. So now that is out of the way…
I think most people would agree that generally speaking… say, more people like pizza than, oh, goat brains. So if it were possible to create some great hierarchy of liked foods in the world, pizza would be higher on that list than goat brains. What I’m looking for in this thread is to try to figure out what foods might be closest to the top of that hierarchy.
Now, can I definitively say that millions of people dislike chocolate chip cookies? No. In my experience, I’ve never personally met anyone who does, and in this thread one person has said they knew one person. So far as we can tell, so far that’s a tally of one that we KNOW doesn’t like chocolate chip cookies (the recipe on which can be tweaked to make it acceptable to various diet limitations, such as vegan or even wheat allergy). On the other hand, we do absolutely know that there are millions of people who are vegetarians. So on the grand scale of foods in the world, meat would drop lower than a bunch of other things, because we absolutely KNOW that a specific and large group don’t like that food, in addition to anyone who may not like it for other reasons. Thus it has already fallen far enough down the hierarchy as to have made itself irrelevant in this intellectual experiment. Burgers were mentioned, by which I think most people would think some sort of bun, a burger patty, condiments, etc. Buns can be made with oat flour instead of wheat. Burgers can be made with soy. There are ways to make this food “acceptable” to most of the groups that we already know might disqualify a food from consideration. Thus, burgers are considered. The same goes with pizza… it’s a flatbread (again, can be made without wheat) with a usually tomato based sauce, with various toppings… it’s a specific enough food to qualify IMO as “a food” (versus trying to lump, say, “Chinese food” as one thing) but I think that a version of pizza can be made that at least most people we know would like. So pizza is a pretty good choice.
Chicken? As I said, it’s already fallen off the scope because we know even before we start asking around that huge populations won’t eat it.
“A vegetable”? Well, we’re not talking about some ingredient. Most people that hate vegetables still like pizza, and that’s made with tomato which is a vegetable. You seem to be so dead set on finding a way to “invalidate” the idea that what I started the thread for can be discussed… yeah, I’d call it threadshitting.
So to clarify: a specific food that you can’t think of any major groups objecting to and don’t know any people (or maybe just that one freaky guy at the office) who don’t like it? Those are the kinds of things we’re looking for. I’m just curious what that top group of food might be… the group that gets the most votes if it were possible for the whole world to vote on every kind of food. I’m sorry some people are so argumentative that they refuse to be able to think in those terms.
raises hand me and the millions of other vegetarians on the planet do not lurv your fried chicken.
But it has LAYERS! Parfait might be the best thing on the whole damn planet!
I say spice (capsaicin) and coconut are a universal flavor sensation. The oils are balanced and cooled by mutual interacrion. The fat and the sugar are perfect foils. a philosophy of mine is that spice is better offset by natural sugars. Fruit and nut.
I came in here to mention french fries. Whatever you call them, and whatever you put on them, they’re so very tasty.
Minor hijack: I once read that corn is relatively unpopular in China. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Yanno, once you’ve got someone to piss off out of your thread, it’s really bad form to yell at their back as they go. :rolleyes:
I know a lot of people who dislike chocolate, probably because I dislike it myself and remember those who don’t like it either. Dark chocolate tastes very bitter and nasty to me. I don’t see how people can just eat chocolate chips straight from the bag. It makes me gag just remembering their taste. I know that chocolate changes brain chemistry and lifts the moods of most people (better than kissing), especially women, so I wonder if whatever makes me have clinical depression prevents me from getting that chocolate high.
My three most disliked tastes are coffee, peanut butter, and chocolate although I mostly dislike peanut butter because of years of braces rather than anything against its taste. I read somewhere that those were the three most popular tastes for Americans. I’ll eat almost anything else though, including a lot of foods that the majority of people won’t even go near.
Fucking Christ. Are you always this high strung?
(billions - millions) = billions
billions ~ “darn-near universal”.
And for what it’s worth, chocolate has no appeal to me. I don’t “hate” it, but it has zero, zilch, nada appeal.
So, since apparently one person here doesn’t like it, that means it’s disqualified. Or maybe if Opal doesn’t like it, that means it’s disqualified. Anyway, what is the purpose of a CS thread where the OP jumps on people who dare suggest foods the OP doesn’t like?
Well “capsaicin” isn’t a food, per se. And a lot of people don’t like spicy foods. Tons of people. I think that bumps it off the list. And I also know a lot of people who hate coconut.
:rolleyes: As I said, I wanted to clarify for anyone else who didn’t understand the point I was going for if, as this person said, it was oh-so-confusing the way I said it the first time.
Why do you want the terrorists to win? 
No, it’s just that I had a very specific point when I started the thread, and it wasn’t “what’s your favorite food?” I attempted to clarify it. I’m trying to figure out what things almost nobody can find someone to dislike. By the nature of the quest virtually everything will be disqualified. If this was an easy list of tons of food there would be no point. I was figuring that by the end of the thread we may have found 2 or 3 things, total, that virtually nobody here knew of anyone disliking. Anything that has whole organized groups disliking it is automatically disqualified–for example, things like religious issues (pork, etc). If there is something that most people know people who dislike it, well, it should probably be disqualified. If several people in this very thread dislike it, then it should probably be disqualified.
There is no need to get offended by it, it’s just that what I was after with the thread was a search for a very specific and probably hard to come up with list, that would probably be pretty small.
A good friend of mine hates beans. She makes beanless chilli. I just can’t rap my head around the idea of beanless chilli. She’s odd, that one.
Anyway would it be safe to make a stipulation for vegetarian equivalents when talking about a specific meat? For example a hamburger, there are plenty of vegetarian hamburgers, as well as patties made of any animal imaginable.
So I agree with bacon, there is veggie bacon, turkey bacon, and good ole pork. Appealing to the masses.
Yeah we already decided to accept burger because of veggie burgers.
Clearly, the OP is convinced that ‘chocolate chip cookies’ is THE answer to this question. People who attempt to support other theories are accused of shitting on the thread.
It’s not likely that there is any such thing as a universally-liked food. Or even a ‘darn-near’ one. For every group of people that like one thing, you’ll find another bunch that hate it. I’ve known people to hate all the things mentioned here; yes, Opal, even chocolate. Plenty of grown men I’ve met hate all vegetables. Other folks hate milk, rice, pastas, and some even don’t want anything to do with pizza. Big chunks of nations dislike meat. Funny about that when you try to find something common to six billion people scattered over a whole planet.
Um. All that is is a means of cooking something, not a ‘food’. That’s the same answer as ‘BBQ’ since now you’ve expanded ‘burger’ to mean ‘anything fried in flat form’ so that every manner of vegetable fritter is also acceptable. Meat burgers are not anything the same as veggie burgers except they’re flat and fried. :rolleyes:
> BLAM!!! BLAM!!!< ::: Moderator pounds fist on desk for attention :::
Opal: First, your comments about “thread-shitting” are out of line. It is not your business to make that call. If you think “thread-shitting” is going on, the proper response is to hit the REPORT BAD POST button (the little exclamation point in the red triangle at the upper right corner of the post) and let the Moderators make that decision. Are we clear on this?
Discussion about what is meant by the OP seem to me to be perfectly legitimate inquiry.
Second, just because you started a thread does NOT allow you to decide what comments are allowed and what are not. Threads often go in interesting directions that the OP did not intend or consider, and that can be just fine. Again, it is up to the Moderators to decide whether a tangent or aside is “thread-shitting” or simply an interesting tangent.
Playing “junior moderator” is not good form. Please cool it.
Aesiron: personal comments are out of place in this forum. If you think a poster is too high strung, your proper response is to REPORT BAD POST, the little exclamation point in the red triangle etc etc. We clear on this?
:rolleyes: No, I just used chocolate chip cookies as my personal example to get things started. And I also said I knew people who disliked chocolate, so you can keep your condescending “Yes, Opal, even chocolate” bullshit to yourself, thanks.
Again, just trying to see if there are any foods that we on the SDMB can come up with that have virtually no detractors in our experience. Or as close to that as we can come. I figured it would be hard and there wouldn’t be very many, but thought it might be an interesting exercise to see if we could think of any. What I have seen are a few people who want to believe that the goal of the thread was X when I intended it as Y and when I try to clarify what Y is they insist that I’m wrong. People who want to think the goal of the thread was something else and seem to get offended when I try to clarify what it was that I meant.
For the nine gazillionth time: I realize there will always be people who dislike any given food. Maybe I should tattoo that somewhere prominent so people don’t keep bringing it up. Would you disagree that if it were possible somehow to have the entire planet do a taste test and vote that it’s highly likely that french fries would come out as more popular than, say, haggis? I think there are foods that are more universally liked than others, and I’m just wondering what the tippy top of that group might look like. Sue me for wondering.
I did no such thing. I’m talking about things like Boca Burgers, you know, the ones that are supposed to be just like hamburgers except they’re soy?