My father looooves SPAM. Maybe it’s an old guy thing. I never ate it until I was in Miami when Hurricane Andrew hit and a five year old tin of it that I kept for kitsch value was all I had left to eat. Not great, but surprisingly not as bad as I thought it would be.
Peas have been mentioned, but deserve to be mentioned again. Disgusting little mushy balls of grit.
Also, the alarming number of foods involving blood. WTF?
I find the amount of hate for parmesan interesting, too. Of all the available cheeses, that doesn’t seem like it would be anywhere near the inedible end. Muenster is great, and mozzerella, swiss, maybe cheddar or havarti. Everything else: unwashed feet. Especially the bleu cheeses. How the hell does anyone eat that?
Heheee…
Let me answer first by wat of a preamble re Vegemite (it’s important later). I know that Americans are A) strangely fascinated by the stuff B) Think it tastes like refried bat vomit, and C) tend to worship peanut butter.
Okay…
Here in Australia, people don’t give Vegemite that much thought. Along with jam (jelly), and yes, peanut butter (which is readily available here), it’s just another sandwich spread. We just don’t find Vegemite any more interesting than, say, sausages, or a glass of milk. It just is. Some people like it, some dislike it, most don’t care much…
Now, I tend to love Vegemite. I was a Vegemite kid. Australian mothers often smear some on rusks for babvies who are teething, so it goes way, way back…
The Vegemite angle is important in this context because when my sister and I burst in the door
Heheee…
Let me answer first by wat of a preamble re Vegemite (it’s important later). I know that Americans are A) strangely fascinated by the stuff B) Think it tastes like refried bat vomit, and C) tend to worship peanut butter.
Okay…
Here in Australia, people don’t give Vegemite that much thought. Along with jam (jelly), and yes, peanut butter (which is readily available here), it’s just another sandwich spread. We just don’t find Vegemite any more interesting than, say, sausages, or a glass of milk. It just is. Some people like it, some dislike it, most don’t care much…
Now, I tend to love Vegemite. I was a Vegemite kid. Australian mothers often smear some on rusks for babies who are teething, so it goes way, way back…
The Vegemite angle is important in this context because when my sister and I burst in the door at 3:30pm after school, my mum would make us a snack (open sandwiches). My sister loved peanut butter, but was ambivalent towards Vegemite. On the other hand, I liked Vegemite, but you couldn’t say I was ambivalent towards PB. On the contrary, I’d rather have my flesh flayed from my bones with rusty blades than be forced to endure eating that Satan’s fare.
It got to the point that I’d have to ask my mum either to make my sandwich first, or to use a fresh knife for mine., If she made the PB one first, then washed the knife and made mine, mine was rendered inedible, despite Vegemite’s strong flavour.
Strangely, I love peanuts in all their other forms: raw, satay sauce, etc…
Okra is very slimey and unpleasant.
Also, I don’t know if you can still buy it, but Heinz used to make stuff called “Sandwich Spread” which came in a jar and was meant to go in, well, sandwiches I guess. It was a sort of vinegary mayonnaise/salad cream base with bits of multicoloured vegetable in it. It looked exactly like vomit, and it tasted – exactly like vomit! In fact it may well have actually been vomit in a jar.
Ah, this is the stuff.
And this looks like similar stuff, in all its vomit-inspired glory. Blech.
If you’re the Torah-readin’ type, according to Leviticus DocCathode would’ve been cut off from the people of Israel long ago. But it would’ve been his parents’ fault until he turned 13, at which point he would have had a big ceremony which transferred the fault to himself. Kind of like getting busted by the cops at age 17 years and 364 days vs. age 18.
That’s the highly oversimplified, huge-major-details-glossed-over Reader’s Digest version.
:eek:
…
…was it pan-fried, by any chance?
Stuff that’s repulsive:
Organ meats.
Licorice.
Eggplant.
Squash.
Sweet potatoes.
Marinara sauce. I love tomatoes, and regular tomato sauce, but there’s something about marinara that makes it smell like vomit.
That said, I love seafood, mushrooms, mayo, and peanut butter.
This is interesting…
There’s only one food that I’ve actually eaten that brings out the gag reflex in me, and that’s celery. While I don’t like it’s flavor, it’s the texture that actually gets to me.
As for foods that I haven’t eaten that I’ll neve try due to looking disgusting, we can talk about pig’s feet, chicken feet, tripe, and all the other things that just look wrong.
Holy crap… I used it’s instead of its… sorry.
I forgot about celery! I hate celery. The taste, the texture, all of it. That’s one food that will bring out the five-year-old in me, and I will actively pick it out of whatever it’s hidden in. Casseroles, chicken salad, turkey dressing, whatever.
Ick, ick, ick. Celery is gross.
cmyk, I believe we were separated at birth. Except for the seafood thing. I love me some seafood. The only thing I would add to your list is bananas. Gaaaaaaaack!
Eggplant - no it isn’t - it’s nothing like an egg. The colour alone makes me want to chuck. Bad memory of a subsistance diet living on these revolting things in Greece. Oh bluuugh, the farmers used to give them to us - we all know why - they couldn’t sell 'em. They do keep you alive I suppose so there’s something in them. I was a migrant farmworker waiting for the cucumber season to start … now there was a job, cleaning them up and down with a rough piece of cloth then sorting them into sizes! I can still tell a number 8 from a number 10 in the supermarket. Still love cucumbers!
Organ meats. I was soooo happy when, in the 80s, my mom found out that liver is full of cholesterol, so we didn’t have to eat it any more.
Anything involving blood (includes bone marrow). This predates my going kosher, but I’m really glad I have a really good excuse now not to eat anything made with blood.
Ham. Again, predates my going kosher. I could tolerate thinly sliced deli ham, but a slice of baked ham- yuck. Double yuck if there was a sweet glaze on it. My grandmother made ham with this absolutely revolting gelatinous (see below) cherry glaze. OK, I might not be able to eat lunch today, just thinking about that. Again, glad to have a good excuse never to touch the stuff again.
Pretty much anything with a gelatinous texture.
Pretty much anything with a squishy, juicy texture when you bite into it, like a tomato. I like tomatoes, but only in sauces and the like, where the juice has come out of them somewhat.
Stewed tomatoes. They look like bloody vomit.
Miracle Whip. It tastes just like mayonnaise that is 6 months past its expiration date. I know this from experience. I don’t care much for mayo, either (which probably has to do with the six-month-old-mayo incident when I was 15), but I like flavored mayonnaise sauces like aioli.
The fat on meat- I have to cut it off before I eat the meat.
Overcooked anything in the cabbage family. If you don’t cook them for very long (and get fresh ones), Brussels sprouts can be good. But cook them too long, or buy the abomination that is frozen Brussels sprouts, and you get that essence-of-old-sock taste.
Okra. It’s slimy.
Winter squashes. I like them if they don’t have that stringy texture like what you scoop out of a jack-o-lantern, but that stringy texture makes me gag.
Unmelted butter spread on bread. I like butter, but only if it melts completely. If it doesn’t, it has a greasy texture that I can’t stand.
Bananas, and anything banana-flavored. Yuck.
Beef brains, or brains of any animal. My grandfather ordered them in a restaurant once, 20 years ago. When I heard about the first mad cow case in the US, I thought about that, and almost had to go home sick from work, the thought made me so nauseated. I suppose they count under “organ meats”, but the revulsion that eating brains makes me feel is so much worse than the organ meat one, I needed to include it as a separate category. I could sit at the same table with you if you were eating most of the things on this list. Not if you were eating brains.
Of those you aren’t missing much except marrow, marrow is really nice, try some osso bucco in an Italian restaurant, oyu won’t need to eat the marrow in it but if you should try it is like a fine pate.
I’m not wild about guavas - they taste fine enough, but they have those leetle pips that catch in teeth, and the juice has those siliceous grains like pears, only 10x worse - they make me cough.
That’s the closest I’ve come to finding non-casa marzu-related food repulsive.
Although my old Chief Geologist used to tell this story about the Sea Cucumber soup he was once served at a posh conference dinner in Taiwan. He said it looked like a long blob of congealed fat in green dishwater. Yum! I don’t think
Asparagus tastes like piss. Ditto brussels sprouts. Onions are the devil. Are beats even a food?
Well, how about that. For the past twenty-five years I have believed that rutabaga and kohlrabi were one and the same, mostly because a friend of mine who is from Africa told me so. Whenever I mentioned my dislike for rutabaga, he would tell me that it was called kohlrabi in Africa and in the northern U.S.
Rutabaga (the orange, bitter, turnip-like root vegetable which is very bitter) remains the only vegetable I do not like. Kohlrabi (the corm of a cabbage-like plant) has been added to my list of foods to try.
Thank you for the enlightenment, ignorance has been fought and defeated. 
P.S.
Did I mention that rutabaga is bitter?
Though I think Garden- and BocaBurgers taste pretty good and have eaten my share, I can’t abide most soybased meat substitutes. Not only do they seem to have no taste, but the gas they give me is of the explosive variety.
“Captain!! It’s the deadly soy gas!! Captain!”
Meh. My tastes have changed over the years, until I can eat most anything without gagging. This includes scrapple, head cheese, menudo, fresh habaneros (burns a little later on, nothing that topical xylocaine won’t cure), okra, trout livers, turtles, frog legs, and kidneys. Also vending machine sandwiches.
But I do not like [del]sock monkeys[/del] beets. At all. Ick.
That’s just me. I do not see beets as evil. I do not condemn those who enjoy beets. Rather I am glad they have pleasure from them.
De gustibus non est disputandem. Those who make value judgements on others based on what they enjoy or do not enjoy eating should be slapped and sterilized. Or slapped and fertilized, whichever is more appropriate.
