Honestly, even though there have been plenty of foods that either:
Directly made me sick (either from just plain old eating too much of them, or gave me food poisoning)
or 2) I ate and them coincidentally got sick right after from some other means
I’ve never “given up” on any of those foods…at least not permanently. The closest was Mac and Cheese. I love Mac and Cheese, all kinds (the best is my mom’s homemade, but yeah, I’ll even go for a box of neon orange stuff every now and then.)
Well, one night my senior year in college, I decided to give Alton Brown’s “stovetop mac and cheese” recipe a try. It was delicious! But then I came down with the flue that night…lots of vomiting that night and the next day, along with fever, chills, aches, etc…
I avoided mac and cheese for two years or so…which was a lot for me! Love that stuff.
Although I will say that there is one beverage that might fill this role…last December, I bought a bottle of beer from a local brewer, Long Trail. It was part of a special series they’re doing called the “100 barrel” series, or something. Basically, they are brewing small batches of interesting beers (100 different ones…maybe less, might only be 50.) The one I got was an ale flavored with spruce tips. it was delicious. But I spent ALL of the next day barely being able to move, vomiting a LOT. It wasn’t a hangover, since I only had 5 beers total that night (3 other beers, plus that big bottle.) It might have been food poisoning from something I ate at dinner, or it might have been some weird reaction to something in that beer, I don’t know. Despite that fact that I loved the taste, I didn’t get another bottle of it, and now I’ll never be able to, since each of those beers they’re brewing as part of this series was for a limited time only.
Not a specific food, but anything with artificial cherry flavor. This is due to the incredibly nasty cherry flavored cough syrup I often had to take as a kid. There’s lots of stuff I don’t like, but cherry flavor is the only thing that actually makes me gag just to think about.
Years ago, I went to an exhibition on Saudi culture (hosted by their embassy in the DC convention center, if I recall correctly.)
Sampled some pungent dishes, lamb and various kebabs with characteristic Bedouin spices (a serious foodie would have recognized the main flavoring, it’s very common and distinctive in their cooking).
I became terrifically nauseated. I had to navigate my own way home through the Metro (subway system) while fighting down the overwhelming urge to vomit. I also developed a massive, throbbing headache. When I got home I did, in fact, lose my lunch.
No idea if this was due to the food, to contamination, or just coincidental.
To this day I can’t even stand the smell of Bedouin cooking, let alone eat any, and I’m suspicious of other Eastern Mediterranean and North African cuisines, approaching them with great dubiousness.
Bananas. I got sick on one when I was about 8 years old. I still can’t stand the smell, taste or sight of one. When my son was a baby his favorite food was bananas. I would have to hold my breath and look away with every bite to keep from getting sick.
Circus peanuts and RC Cola. Does anyone really need a reason? Every summer we would go spend time with my great grandfather who loved circus peanuts and RC Cola. It was his special treat he would share with us. Maybe that is why I got sick on the banana.
Food from Hardees. Got horribly sick one time after eating there. I get queasy just looking at their sign.
MadDog.
The owner of a local storefront pizzeria ordered my family off his patio, just off a public sidewalk, even though there were several tables and no one else was using it, or had for at least fifteen minutes. I said, “We will never come back here again,” and we haven’t.
Pecan pie. Growing up in the south, pecan pie rules. At the age of 7 my brother told me the pecan pie filling was made out of boogers. EEEW!! Even though my head tells me different, I can never get the mental picture of cooking boogers out of my mind. And then thoughts of “who contributed? how collected? are they jars of spare, home canned boogers laying around”. I could go on, but enough said.
White cake frosting. When I was about 6 or 7, I had too much and ended up vomiting it up twice that night. Once in a while there’ll be a frosting recipe that I actually sort of like, but usually cakes are covered with that cheapass stuff from the can.
Vicks 44 cough syrup used to be licorice flavored, and I absoultely hated that crap. I also hate Jagermeister because it reminds me of Vicks 44. Oddly enough, I love just about every other form of licorice.
Back in kindergarden, I went to a daycare for the second half of the day, and they served lunch. One time they served what I thought was beans, which I ate and seemed tasty. Someone informed me it was chili. For some inexplicable reason, I got sick and had to go throw up. A couple weeks later, repeat - “I like these beans.” “That’s not beans, it’s chili.” Blugh.
Since then I despise chili, and cannot stand the mexican spices. I will eat fajitas and quesadillas, because they don’t have that flavoring, but cannot stand anything like it. Makes me want to vomit. I even avoid ranch beans.
I haven’t been able to bring myself to use bagged shredded cheese after a bad experience a few weeks ago where I found a giant clump of moldy grossness in the middle of a bag I’d just opened a while before, which had been sealed until then, and which was no where even near the expiration date. Even worse, I found this AFTER already eating quite a bit of cheese from that bag. Where’s the pukey smiley when you need it?
Huh. Those are the only things KFC has ever sold, besides corn on the cob, that hasn’t immediately been rejected by my stomach.
I think that I’m blocking out a terrible food experience. A few years ago my mom started talking about how I’d loved olives as a little kid, and I said no, that was Vynce, I’ve never eaten them. In disbelief she told Dad that I couldn’t remember ever having olives, and I expected him to say that it was my brother who liked them. Nope. He demanded to know if I was screwing with them or if I really couldn’t remember how much I had loved them. I have no memory of ever eating an olive, and something has to account for that, right?
The Chinese buffet - some of the seafood. All that beautiful beautiful seafood. I just can’t help but take a little, though it disagrees with me. But the mussels make me sick, not just there, but everyplace I eat mussels. We went to a big Chinese buffet that had fried mackeral, which I’d never seen before. Naturally, we took some of that, even though it was greasy, dried up, and remarkably fishy. Like a fool, ate it anyway!.. I managed to get home OK, sat down on the couch for about 3 minutes, and spent the next few hours spewing fishy greasy stuff from every orifice. (When we were there, I looked at what the young Chinese slavey girls were eating at their booth, every one of them had steamed greens and rice. Should have known, huh?)
Years ago at Burger King I bought a fried chicken patty sandwich and put it in the refrigerator for later. Later came, and I saw something that looked like it had been dipped in melted Crisco, bun and all, a solid clump of grease. It was so scary looking I threw it out and never bought another.
Little party mints were mentioned earlier- I ate a bazillion of those when I was a kid and puked. Haven’t been able to touch them since.
Same thing with cinnamon hard disc candies. I ate a whole bag of them once (again as a kid) and didn’t vomit as much as I did have a very painful stomach ache and a bad headache that took me all day to recover from.
Sadly, I am apparently no longer able to eat onion rings. I love onion rings. I could eat a ton of them, if it wasn’t for the violent epic diarrhea I got the last 3 or 4 times I ate any. So I just gave up on them.
My dog, when I was a kid, once ate a whole bowl of party mints and HE threw them up beside my bed in the middle of the night. Stepped in it in the morning. Hated party mints ever since, especially the green ones. I actually feel anger looking at ‘mint green’!
When I was about 10, my mom cooked some kind of fish for dinner. It had lots and lots of little tiny bones in it that you couldn’t see. Every bite, I was pulling little bones out of my mouth. I had a really strong visceral reaction, and steadfastly refused to eat fish after that. Even thinking about it kind of grosses me out.
Mountain Dew. I was on a family field trip with Mom & Dad and got very thirsty, probably heat exhaustion or something, and Dad bought me a Mountain Dew from a machine. Was still thirsty after drinking and Dad wouldn’t buy anything else. I’ve had one Mountain Dew in the ~35 years since.
As for being poor, when I got my first real job, I couldn’t afford much more than ramen noodles, cans of pork & beans, and boxes of Banquet frozen chicken. Got sick of those last two and only recently started eating canned beans again.
As a perpetually slim and bulletproof college student, I was a big fan of desserts and cheesecake in particular. One day I arrived for my shift at the health-food co-op and found out there was a huge cheesecake in the deli area that we couldn’t sell so it was up for grabs. I picked at that thing all evening - I’m sure it had been sitting out for hours. I might have even taken a few pieces home for good measure, even though some part of me knew none of this quite added up. For instance, I wasn’t clear on why the dessert was un-sellable in the first place, yet I kept eating it.
The next day, I feared I was going to die. A little later I wished for it. It took a good 36 hours to fully recover. I didn’t go anywhere near cheesecake for about twenty years, and even now I can only have a few bites - when I’m positive it has been properly prepared and refrigerated.
I still cannot eat fish due to an experience in grade school (30-plus years ago).
I was going to school in Hawaii. For lunch, we had these fish-plank things. I wasn’t fond of fish, but hey, I had to eat something. I took a few bites, and suddenly I began choking! :eek:
When it became obvious that I was neither faking nor could the blockage be, er, Heimliched out (I was wheezing) they rushed me to the doctor. He confirmed that I had a fish bone in my throat. Yeah, I know, how does a fish bone get into your school lunch? It was the 70s, I have no idea.
The doctor had me open my mouth wide while he attempted to pull out the fish bone. But I swallowed when I wasn’t supposed to and and the bone went down.
“That’s okay,” the doctor said. “Her stomach acids should take care of it.”
Thank frickin’ God!
Even tuna fish still makes me feel like throwing up.
My wife loves natto (she’s Japanese), but even she admits that only about half the people in Japan like it, and the other half hate it. I can’t bring myself to try it.
On a related note, I used to eat sushi from time to time, until an incident twelve years ago. I had a piece in my mouth and was chewing, and a thought started growing in my mind:
You’re eating raw fish.
That thought became more and more prominent, and I started chewing faster and faster.
You’re eating raw fish.
Pretty soon the thought and the chewing were both engaged in a race.
You’re eating RAW fish.
At the end I was starting to wretch, and just barely managed to swallow the contents of my mouth and keep it down. That was it; I have not eaten sushi since then.
All that beautiful beautiful seafood. I just can’t help but take a little, though it disagrees with me. But the mussels make me sick, not just there, but everyplace I eat mussels. We went to a big Chinese buffet that had fried mackeral, which I’d never seen before. Naturally, we took some of that, even though it was greasy, dried up, and remarkably fishy. Like a fool, ate it anyway!.. I managed to get home OK, sat down on the couch for about 3 minutes, and spent the next few hours spewing fishy greasy stuff from every orifice. (When we were there, I looked at what the young Chinese slavey girls were eating at their booth, every one of them had steamed greens and rice. Should have known, huh?)