I’ll go on binges where I’ll eat the same thing, usually leftovers for a week at a time, and I’ll be off it for a month or so, then have it again. But I’ve never been completely put off something that I like.
My Dad, being Okinawan, didn’t like pork because that’s all he had growing up. It never dawned on me that whenever we had a party at my paternal grandparents, we never had any beef, and rarely chicken.
He never outright complained about whatever we ate, having grown up poor, but he said he didn’t care for when we had pork chops. Which is how I learned about why he didn’t like pork.
At the Cadbury chocolate factory, staff are allowed to eat as much as they want, but not take it out of the site. Some people last as much as a week before they go right off chocolates.
When I was a kid my Grandma on my dad’s side was a compulsive shopper / hoarder. As in, full-blown OCD. We used to get a lot of weird stuff for Christmas.
Once she gave us a huge box of off-brand butterscotch pudding cups she got from lord knows where. At first, it was awesome. Butterscotch pudding every day! But I eventually got so sick of it I couldn’t even stand the smell of it.
I once ate so much garlic that i felt sick. And the next day, people at work commented on how i smelled of garlic. I still eat garlic, but now I really don’t like food that’s very garlicky. Like, most of the vegetable dishes from my favorite Chinese restaurant.
When I was in high school, I’d save most of my lunch money to buy cigarettes, but Little Debbie cakes in the school cafeteria only cost a quarter. I wouldn’t touch one now with a ten-foot pole. (Not a cigarette either).
Decades ago I was visiting a small city on a business trip. I bought my first Papa John’s pizza and took it back to the hotel. It came with a container of oily, garlicky dipping sauce, which was something I had not seen.
I’ve had a few slices of Papa John’s since then, but never again touched the dipping sauce.
I managed to do it with a beverage in a single night. The very first time I got drunk, at the tender age of seventeen, it was on peppermint schnapps. I took to it with great gusto. And boy howdy, did I get drunk. Came home puking in front of the parents, wish-I-were-dead hangover the next day, the whole nine yards. To this day, at the age of sixty-five, I can’t so much as take a whiff of that stuff without getting a queasy feeling in my stomach.
When my mother had dementia and was still living in her house, before she went into a nursing home, I would be driving over there all the time, doing chores, doing shopping, cooking, cleaning. I always brought a bowl of jello with bananas cut up in it. We would both have some, but I now can’t even look at jello or bananas. They are both ruined for me.
My father wouldn’t eat lentils, and we never had them in the house.
He nearly starved to death as a child (war zone); some of the time there was nothing to eat but lentils. He said that he was very glad to get them at the time, and he never wanted to see them again in his life.
Every single time I made pancakes in the past. Especially when I was a young teen and my stepsisters would beg me to make a batch. We were always so sure we could eat a million of them. And always, always, we’d get to the third one and never want to even see another pancake ever again. We’d go through as long as a whole month when even the scent of waffles made our bellies ache. But sooner or later, that pancake itch would start again. . …
Nowadays I know to make enough pancakes for everyone to get only 2. Leave them wanting more.
My mom worked as a “soda jerk” when she was in high school (she worked 6 pm to 10 pm for 10 cents/hr). She was told she could eat as much candy and ice cream as she wanted. Even when we, her children, were adults, she was never that hot on eating ice cream.
Also, when she was a little kid in Murray City, her family only had a barrel of pickled herring to eat for a whole month. She’d get a little nauseated when I’d chow down on it.
