Back in Leave It To Beaver days, they sold Magic Milk Straws coated with flavoring, that you put in milk. As you sucked up the milk, it was flavored with chocolate, which was OK, or strawberry, which was terrible, or the dreaded banana. Something about the awful FAKE flavor powder in the banana disagreed with me and made me violently nauseated. To this day I can’t abide fake fruit flavors in general, or banana flavor in anything, even pie or bread. I can eat a plain old banana, though, if I’m quick at it.
I’ve had freshly made sushi made with brown rice which was just sickening. I spit out the first piece, for once listening to the little voice in my head instructing me to do so. Now.
When I was 11 my dad and I were visiting a friend and she gave me a glass of grape juice. I’m terrified of grape juice because you always get that “mustache” and it’s a bitch to wipe off. Being polite, I very carefully drank the grape juice…and still got the mustache “corners.” My dad laughed at me and since then I refuse to drink grape juice without a straw. I also don’t drink red wine for the same reason. (I also just don’t like red wine.)
Pepto-Bismol. Instead of settling the nausea, the stuff only makes it worse. Wouldn’t touch it today if it were the only anti-nauseant available in the universe.
Sour cream and onion potato chips. Got very drunk in college one night and pigged out on them for some reason.
Fast forward to the next morning where I am now in the throes of the worst hangover I have ever had, before or since, and busy throwing up anything and quite possibly everything I’d ever eaten, all the while praying for death so I could feel better.
Haven’t touched one since, and that’s some 30-plus years ago now.
My one and only visit to Burger King. I got a burger and took one bite of it and knew something was terribly, terribly wrong. I spit it out and have not been to Burger King since. Maybe I’m missing out on great burgers… I dunno. But I can’t get rid of that memory.
During my teenage years I had the appetite of a ravenous wolf. One time my mother hadn’t been to the store for awhile, and as we lived out in the sticks and I couldn’t drive I had to satiate my hunger with whatever I could find in the pantry. I consumed various odds and ends: a bit of ice cream, some leftover spaghetti, and I forget what else, but I do remember I topped it all off with some homemade garlic bread.
Well my stomach didn’t care for such a weird combination of food, and after a spell of nausea I ended up throwing it all back up. Took me a long time–over a decade–before I could stand the smell of garlic again.
Veal - the texture of it feels mushy/gelatinous/weird in my mouth. I just can’t make myself swallow it.
Goose - one year I baked one for the holidays. It was greasy and the proportions of the wings made it look like a prehistoric pterodactyl. I tried to tell myself that I was being irrational, but I could not get that image of a walking lizard bird out of my head. When I tried to eat a bite I gagged. Wound up feeding it to the dog.
When I was a kid we had BBQ ribs for dinner. The next morning I woke up with the flu and vomited the food back up. It was still largely recognizable as the meat from the night before. I didn’t eat rib for 15 years at least.
It’s funny considering how fast food moves through my system now (once started a long several course meal with spinach in the first course…at the end of the meal I went to the restroom and the spinach was all ready to leave out the back door.
A fly landed on my spaghettios when I was really young… I also couldn’t eat those for several years… that was a weird one.
Canyon Creek makes a delicious Prime Rib Sandwich that I always order. It comes au jus with mayo, and a mild horseradish sauce. It is a fantastic combination.
We went to Quiznos one night (might have been my 3-4th time at a Quiznos) and I ordered their prime rib sub. They start by warming the beef in a little bath of botulism before assembling the sandwich and sending it through the oven. It was okay going down, but it didn’t want to stay around for long. I managed to spend most of the night sitting on the toilet without throwing up, but the force of the BM and the wretched belches put me off.
It took about 2 years before I could contemplate any Prime Rib sandwich, and I have not ventured near a Quiznos since.
My wife got food poisoning from chicken wings almost 20 years ago and has not had any since.
My mother had a flu as a kid and lost her lunch when she saw her brother lick peanut butter off a knife, and has never gone near PB since.
I haven’t had a screwdriver since 1987. Love vodka. OJ is OK. Just don’t put em together.
Foodwise, when I was a young kid I loved tomatoes. Used to eat them like apples with a little salt. Once I accidentally got way too much salt on one and my mom forced me to eat it anyway. It was 30 years before I’d even put a slice of tomato on a burger.
This happened to me once but was scary. I was eating mussels in a wine and butter sauce. I dipped the empty shell in and sipped a little of the sauce.
MY throat snapped shut and I couldn’t breath for 30 seconds, pretty terrifying. I started to breathe through my nose and tried to calm my mind, not an easy thing. Eventually it relaxed, I drank some water, and 5 minutes later resumed my meal just fine.
I’m a 57 yr old male.
I may have a slight hiatal hernia, undiagnosed. Sometimes the first bite of a meal gets stuck. I get up and walk around and can feel the muscles release the food and all is fine. I try to take a smaller bite, chew well, etc. It happens when I am talking to someone, or in a hurry.
Thanks for feedback.
The choking incident freaked my wife out.
When I was younger, I loved bleu cheese salad dressing. Then, in my early 20s, I went to work cooking in a restaurant where they made their own salad dressings from scratch. Their recipe for bleu cheese dressing included celery seed, and it so happens that I absolutely hate the taste of celery, especially the seeds.
Ever since then, I can’t eat bleu cheese dressing without tasting celery seed. Even when I know for a fact that there is no celery or celery seed in the recipe. For example, I make all the dressings at my current job, so I know there’s no celery/celery seed in the bleu cheese, but I still imagine I can taste it. I suspect that tasting that dressing back in my 20s simply made a permanent mental association between the taste of bleu cheese and the taste of celerly, and I can’t get rid of it.
Peeps. One Easter there was an easter egg hunt and I found lots and lots of Peeps. Being a kid, I then sat down and ate lots and lots of Peeps. Then I felt horribly ill and vomited lots and lots of Peeps. In the 30+ years since, just looking at a peep, or any kind of marshmallow, makes me want to throw up.
I desperately hope that no one got any sort of disease from this, and that the “friend” got much-needed psychiatric help. Fast.
I spent years unable to eat caramel corn after a vomiting episode after a fair amount of it as a kid (I think that was how we found out I was coming down with the flu or some such). Also had problems with instant chicken broth after getting a lot of it while hospitalized for a burst appendix.
I once ate nearly a pound of delicious kimchi, and felt like total shit for an entire week afterward. It was just too much kimchi, I guess. Even though it used to be one of my favorite foods, when I think about eating it now, I get a fermented taste in the back of my throat and have to close my eyes so as not to be overwhelmed by nausea.
I used to love pizza, then about 20 years ago I went into a restaurant/café in a small town and the only thing on it’s menu that sounded reasonably appetising was pizza (I can’t actually remember what else was on the menu now). I had to wait as it was being cooked to order, then it arrived, steaming hot.
It was disgusting. They’d taken a thin’n’crispy pizza base sliced a tomato onto in, then smothered it in two different types of cheese, neither of which was the sort of cheese you’d normally use on a pizza. The base was rock hard, the tomato wasn’t cooked, and the two cheeses had melted into each other …
urgh it was foul. Can’t even look at pizza these days
I’m dealing with one in the making right now. I will have to force the issue to see if I can get over it or not.
Wed night I dropped by Subway on the way home to grab a sandwich. A tasty steak and cheese sandwich. I’m fairly regular with that. It’s quick and easy when I’m going home for a late dinner.
I got home, sat down to eat, and something didn’t taste right. I ended up eating half the sandwich before I decided that the meat was a little off. Not completely rancid, but starting to turn. I gave up on the sandwich. Fortunately I didn’t actually get sick over it, but the thought does make me a bit skittish.
Now I’m afraid to go back to Subway again. Actually, I’m more concerned going to that specific Subway. It’s convenient, but there are a couple others around. Maybe I’ll hit an alternate store to get a good steak and cheese, then decide if I want to try that specific store again.
The reason was - my parents bought a huge plastic tub filled with honey from a farmer. I loved that stuff and made many a sandwich with it. However, one day I must have left the lid not properly sealed, so there was an opening. I went to open the honey tub with bread and knife in hand and … inside there was a boiling, seething mass of ants.
It was like an ant version of the battle of Ypres. There were different species of ants, all fighting it out for control of the honey. Some ants were stuck in the stuff, some were corpses, others were eating them, others fighting - just a gross scene all around.
I once managed to get my teeth stuck together on a Jolly Rancher candy. I was never exactly crazy for them, but any fondness I might have had disappeared after that.
And for a couple of years as a kid, marshmallows and a few other sweet foods made me nauseous, but I have no idea what the trigger was for that.