Canned peas. Fresh and frozen peas are delightful: a little snap, a little pop, a little sweetness, a ton of color, they just exude spring. Fantastic. Canned peas are mushy, flavorless, and gray. They are an abomination. Canned peas are not allowed in my house.
Boxed mashed potatoes. Real mashed potatoes take like the least effort to make of anything, and taste fantastic. Boxed mashed potatoes just aren’t real food.
Jello. It looks nasty, tastes chemical, and the texture is vomit inducing.
I have nothing at all against lobster meat or crab meat, but I don’t get why you’d want to have a dead critter on your dinner plate for you to dissect yourself.
I don’t get liver. It has a thoroughly nasty taste, a nasty texture, and it’s the body’s filter so it’s full of nasty crap. Why would anyone eat it?
A different sort of “don’t get”: The canned soups that proudly proclaim they have 25% less sodium, when they still have way more than anyone who’s concerned about their sodium intake should have. If you can leave out 25% of the sodium, why not leave out all (or at least most) of it?
Oh God yes.
Wasabi. I like most of the Japanese food that I’ve tried, including pickled ginger, and seaweed in various forms, but I just don’t see the point of wasabi in any quantity, no matter how minute.
This thread is quickly becoming a “icky food I don’t like” thread. I don’t think there is any way to keep that from happening.
You have to own a freezer to keep frozen veggies.
Overcooked vegetables are an abomination unto nature; those who bestow them upon children, depraved monsters who shall, in any future lives, be condemned to the tasteless existence of a head of iceberg lettuce. And carrots are overcooked if they have any degree of cooking at all.
This reminded me of the one time I tried caviar. It tasted like I had poured a tablespoon of salt on a cracker and taken a bite. Even the tiniest little smear was overpoweringly salty. I don’t get it.
Fair enough, here’s a common one that I even like that I don’t really get: Ribs.
They’re delicious for certain, but it just seems like a whole lot of work for something that’s 80% bones and just a few bits of what’s then essentially barbequed pot roast.
God you just reminded me. I was at the officers’ club at Scott AFB and I was probably less than ten years old the last time I had caviar, and I thought almost precisely the same thing you did. All this time I thought it was just that batch or something, but this seems to imply that all caviar is that salty.
If it is, why? Why do people go nuts over it? I can understand liking a fish taste, but something that’s mostly salt? Bah. Give me anchovy paste any day!
As a lover of these things, I have to say that your description here might make me think twice next time I’m confronted by an insect-covered hobo bearing gifts of socks wadded up in a cheesecloth…
A high-end restaurant here in Cincinnati called Boca is known for them. They are carmelized and served with seared scallops in a brown-butter and truffle sauce, and they are fucking amazing.
You’re not doing it right. You’re supposed to hold it in your mouth until it reverts back to liquid, then you drink it. See? Problem solved!
You’re not eating the right kind of liver. See: username.
Did you wash it down with a swallow of vintage champagne? Its the only way to fly with caviar. Plus its supposed (traditionally) to come with little diced sides of hard cooked egg, onions, etc to blend the salty, fishy flavor with.
My WTF food is pretty much anything that’s actually rotten, like hakarl. Blech.
Cognitive issues can derail anyone’s appetite. I happen to like steamed crab/lobster, but I just can’t stomach raw fish. About ten years ago I was eating some sushi and as I was chewing I started thinking more and more about the fact that it was raw fish; it became a race to chew and swallow before barfing, and I barely won, wretching a few times before I swallowed. I haven’t had sushi since then.
Meanwhile I’m baffled by foods that have a reputation for smelling/tasting disgusting. A poster in MPSIMS recently described his experience with hakarl, which by all accounts literally smells/tastes like a blend of stale piss and ammonia. Maybe when rotten shark was all you could find to eat and it kept you alive, it made sense to choke it down, but do you really need to celebrate that victory over the forces of nature by eating it again and again when you don’t have to? I wonder if the 1972 Uruguayan rugby team similarly celebrates their cannibalistic survival effort in the same way.
If the ribs you’re eating taste like barbequed pot roast, someone’s not doing it right.
Pimento cheese- it’s two good foods ruined by mixing them into a mayo-laden slimy slurry.
While I’m on the subject, I can’t imagine why anyone likes mayo as a condiment. It reminds me of slightly sour salty phlegm.
FoieGrasIsEvil, if you don’t mind - may I ask how many colanders you own? 
Well pot roast insomuch that it’s fatty, stringy meat. I’d be able to justify ribs to myself a lot more often if I wasn’t paying $25 for a slab that I have to work at for a few hours to achieve little bits of something that doesn’t magically turn into filet mignon.
Artichokes. I mean the hearts taste okay but not that unlike a lot of other vegetables that are much less a pain in the ass to prepare and eat. The leaves are just a spoon for butter; there’s nothing there.
Thought of another thing: spicy food in general. Food shouldn’t hurt, I feel. To my taste buds, that’s all spiciness adds – “wow, this sausage would be delicious if my tongue weren’t in pain right now.”
Durian, there is just nothing right about eating that.