Occasionally, I will hear a person that I previously thought sane express a dislike for tomatoes.
Not like tomatoes?!?!?!?!
How does that happen? It must have something to do with these peoples’ mothers ingesting strange chemicles during pregnancy. Or alien implants. Or maybe a sad sad sense of humor.
Tomatoes are the best food possible. They are sweet and hearty at the same time. Really good ones have a perfectly faint green gardeny taste. So red! So juicy! So wonderful! Drizzle on a bit of oil and vinigar…or serve with a dollop of mayonaise (my childhood snack)…or use in soups and stews and sauces…or simply eat out of hand (I eat baskets of cherry tomatoes like candy).
What is there not to like? Does it have to do with mealy low-grade middle of winter supermarket tomatoes? I really want to understand this. I cannot comprehend the idea of despising tomatoes.
Are there any other sublime foods that you can’t understand anyone dislikeing? I’m not big on artichokes and asparagus, and I know that makes me a freak in some circles…but really can artichokes and asparagus ever live up to the perfection of the tomato?
No, for me it’s defeinitely the texture of tomatoes… kind of a combination of slimy and bitty…ick! The smell is also foul… especially tinned tomatoes… actually, I’m not that keen on the taste, but I do eat tomato ketchup, soup and other stuff where the taste has been sufficiently dfiluted by additives
The ones that weren’t really allowed to ripen have no taste and a plastic texture. The ones that did ripen on the vine are acidy as hell. What’s to like?
Cook them, though, and they lose the acid taste. So tomatoes in sauces, soups, and ketchup are generally fine, unless the sauce was cooked by a serious tomato lover who thinks you just barely bring it to the boil to preserve that acid flavor.
I don’t understand my brother-in-law, who loves cauliflower and broccoli but hates green peas. How can anyone love two of the bitterest veggies out there - cauliflower even smells like cat pee when you cook it - but not like gentle, tender green peas? I’ve been told, however, that most people have a genetic deficiency that prevents them from knowing how disgusting the vegetables of the cabbage family really are. Poor bastids.
Raw tomatoes and ketchup are both disgusting. Tomato sauce is good, and tomato soup is tolerable, but just plain old tomatoes–yuck! Almost as bad a zucchini (or however it’s spelled).
Now what I don’t understand is how some people I know can dislike cucumbers, which is definitely among God’s top five greatest successes in the vegetable department.
Except for ketchup and spaghetti sauce (with lots of ground beef) I would not eat tomatoes of any kind as a kid. About the time I turned 15, I began to try tomatoes on hamburgers. I gradually tried them more and more with different foods. Once I began to cook for myself in college, I learned to love them, but putting them in salads took the longest for some reason.
Foods I hate:
Squash: bitter, with a nasty texture
Okra: slimey, bitter, make me gag, except in well made gumbo
Turnip greens: like eating boiled cardboard
Cabbage: cole slaw or raw is fine, but anything involving cooking it I will not touch.
Sweet potatoes: no idea why, can’t eat them no matter how they are prepared.
I love tomatoes - they just don’t like me. I get a really upset stomach when I eat them. It’s a shame because I love them so much. Only - as much as I love tomatoes, is as much as I hate tomato soup and tomato sauce/ketchup. Blah. Horrid, revolting substances.
The burning hives … the endless puking as my throat swells shut …the invetiable stomach pump …
I also have the same problem with whole strawberries
But i can eat strawberry jam ketchup sauces ect although with tomato stuff i get a really bad sour stomach if i eat too much of it
Just the whole thing has too much acid for me to take and cooking dissipates some of it i guess
My brother cant eat oranges becuase his stomach and such is in a net of some kind that was implanted in his body and the acid will eat through the net
I used to totally hate raw tomatoes, would pick them out of anything I ate. Now, I’m a bit easier on the fruit/vegetable, I like them as an enhancement to a dish, as long as it doesn’t dominate. The tomato continuum:
cooked tomatoes, A-OK
tomatoes on a sandwich or burger, thumbs up
tomato and mozzarella with fresh basil and olive oil, I’m learning to like
tomato wedges in a salad, thumbs down
tomato and mayonnaise sandwich (like good old dad), forget it
tomato all by itself, unthinkable
For me, it’s the texture and the taste. They are slimy yet mealy. I can choke them down cooked but raw makes me gag.
I also hate milk. Don’t drink the stuff ever. I was allergic to cow’s milk as a child and had to drink goat’s milk. Ruined milk for me. I use soy or rice milk for cereal.
I used to love tomatoes and one day when I was about 6 I wandered into my grandma’s garden and hit the tomato patch. I sat in there all morning eating tomatoes and a few carrots. I ate so many I was sick for two days. To this day a wedge of raw tomato in a salad will turn my stomach. I can choke it down, as long as I have other food to chase it with and get rid of the taste. I like a very, very thin (no thicker than 1/8 inch) slice on a burger but that’s it. The worst thing that ever become known as food is a cherry tomato. It just barely edges out peas for the nastiest thing to put on my plate.
My little girl will eat big tomatoes like apples and I can barely look at her when she does it.
I’m starting to get used to tomatoes, but for the longest time, I detested the things. The gushy centers of them still make me gag. It’s the same thing with cucumbers (yet, for some reason, I find the gushy part of the pickle the most enjoyable…odd that). I like them a bit more now, but still can’t eat them like an apple like my mom does. I’ll take them if they’re diced up, and I LOVE pico de guillo, which is basically just diced tomatoes, onion and cilantro. I also love tomato basil soup, and can handle them in sauce form, but I still can’t quite handle them on a sandwich. When they come on sandwiches, they come out sliced and the slimy centers are all still there and they get the bread all soggy and ooze out all over the place when you bite them in half and it’s just gross. Their texture just gets to me sometimes. Katchup sometimes gets that shingly feel to it, and I can’t handle that.
And I second peas as one of the ten most gross foods ever. Ehhh…
I also don’t like potatos. I can eat thinly cut french fries, and my friend made some cheesey potatoes the other night which I actually enjoyed, but the texture of them are something I never got used to. Too grainy and funky. The taste isn’t all that appealing to me, either. Can’t handle mashed, it’s like eating old grits.
Don’t like grits or oatmeal either. Or beans. The texture of beans (especially red beans) makes me vomit. It was pretty tough living in Louisianna, let me tell you.
You damn peahaters, have you ever gone out into a garden and eaten young raw peas straight from the vine? Few foods are as wonderful: they’re sweet, succulent, tender, flavorful, and all-round fantastic.
Good tomatoes are the same way.
I used to hate green peppers, but I’m learning to like them. I still think that roasted red peppers look and taste more like some sort of parasite pulled out of the tenderloin than like anything I want to eat. They’re slimy and awful.
But the weirdest I’ve encountered is a kid who stayed with us one summer when I was younger. He was from Belize, he thought pro wrestling was real, he corrected us when we said Arnold Schwarzenegger (“Schwarzenegro!” he said, eyes wide with horror), and he hated chocolate.
Because they taste nasty. I don’t like tomatos, I don’t like ketchup, I won’t touch tomato soup. I’ll eat spaghetti sauce because there is enough other stuff in it to mask the taste of the tomatos.
I don’t even like to pick them out of my salad because the juice lingers and leaves its flavour behind.
I hate raw tomatoes. I love cooked tomatoes – tomato sauce, tomarto soup, stewed tomatoes, skewered tomatoes in kabobs are all fine. Raw tomatoes are the pits.
Partly it’s the texture. As a fellow raw tomato-hater once expressed it, “Tomatoes don’t look like they’re finished”. It’s that semisolid, partly congealed glop that doesn’t seem right.
I think it’s also partly the fact that I once saw a huge and particularly gross caterpillar in a green tomato we broke open when I was a kid. I just can’t get that image out of my mind, along with the thought that I might find one in a raw tomato. Or, worse, part of one.
It’s all about the texture with me. I don’t like tomatoes in big chunks, raw or cooked, but I love red sauces. Tomato soup and ketchup are okay.
Also in the texture route, I hate bananas, and mushy berries (like in pie fillings and fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt). I don’t like cottage cheese, either, though that’s a combo of the texture and getting sick once after I ate some. TMI–it looks the same coming up as it does going down.
I won’t eat tomatoes in any form raw, and am always picking them out of salads and off sandwiches. I tried a fried green tomato once - it didn’t taste as nasty as a raw tomato, but still made me sick afterwards. I think it’s equal parts texture and taste that I don’t like.
And sun-dried tomatoes are even worse - the same disagreeable taste, but leathery inedibleness rather than being merely slimy.
