Which Italian foods? Are you referring to pasta or pizza or chicken piccata or polenta or cannoli or biscotti or what? There’s such a tremendous variety in what constitutes Italian food. I’m just curious as to what the common denominator is.
Also we were regulars enough that they always recognized us and she didn’t want dad to be unable to eat his meal. I’m guessing she’d seen a lot of Americans try it and be turned off by its texture.
I admit except for desserts and fruit I’m not terribly adventurous foods wise, and I’m okay with that. Not everyone needs to be a foodie. Also I have a low salt tolerance - I think pretzels are too salty, for example - so that can be tricky. I tried prosciutto with melon (which was excellent) in Italy. I literally gagged and spit the prosciutto out.
Given the post from eschrodinger you were responding to, I have to confess that before reading beyond this sentence I had a mental image of the little Odesio reluctantly dragging his feet out to the pasta coop to slaughter the spaghetti for that night’s dinner. 
My grandmother grew up in the depression and her father sold fruit to make money. They ate what didn’t sell, which was a lot of melons. She never ate melons, and found it quite annoying that many fruit cups, as one might find at a Perkins restaurant, was mostly melon.
And then there’s my friend. Her father has no sense of smell, so all the food she grew up with catered to his restrictions. For example, no Chinese food, because it’s slimy. She came over for lunch and my mother prepared her cheese and bread sandwich according to her mother’s instructions. She threw up.
She’s a lot better now. It took her years of trying things and now she can go to a restaurant and find something to eat.
My husband has texture issues (big chunks of mushrooms) and doesn’t like bitter things (spinach). Theoretically the texture issue might be improved by working with a therapist. But it’s not a big deal.
And we agree on cilantro. Blech.
None of them in particular except for my hated spaghetti. It’s just that I will never suggest to anyone that we go to an Italian restaurant, I won’t pick Italian dishes to cook at home, and when trying to pick a place to eat amongst friends I will do my best to move away from anything that reeks of Italian. On the flip side, the few times I am forced to go to an Italian restaurant I don’t have any trouble finding something to eat I just don’t want to be there. It’s a weird self-imposed aversion.
That’s just silly. Everyone knows pasta is picked off of trees when they’re ripe. While I never slaughtered chickens as a child, I did witness them being slaughtered. I was also forced to reluctantly go into the chicken coop to collect eggs when I was 4. Those chickens and that damned rooster really hated me.
If you don’t mind my asking (I may be taking a study-abroad trip with a student who has a similar issue, if study abroad is an option again by 2022), what specifically are you afraid of? Like, are you afraid of getting sick, or reacting in a socially embarrassing way if you don’t like it, or what?
Of course you have to eat some to acquire the taste - but there are different ways to do that. I personally try new foods in situations where I won’t have to go hungry or wait and pay for a second meal if I don’t like it. So I’ll try something new if my husband orders it or at a buffet or if I’m on a cruise or if someone else orders it at a family-style restaurant.
Reading through this thread makes me wonder what happens what happens to food aversions when a person is in extremis – for example, as a prisoner-of-war with a hostile captor.
I’ve seen accounts where such prisoners were given intentionally fouled food. I’m not aware of any accounts where, say, a prisoner was revulsed at the texture of eggs, the hostile captors learned of it, and then offered the prisoner eggs and only eggs for weeks on end.
Prisoners hate nutraloaf, as seen here:
Wikipedia notes that in some states having to eat this is considered cruel and unusual punishment. So I imagine feeding this to POWs is illegal if both countries have signed the Geneva Convention.
Nobody would die rather than eat something that smells, feels, or tastes nasty. However, they will be negatively affected and would probably lose strength and weight due to eating less of the stuff than is optimal. Of course, that’s not the point of the thread. Nobody goes to a restaurant looking for something they know they won’t enjoy.
I have a deal with Sunflower. If she wants to try something new and or different, I will order something we know she likes. If her experiment fils we just switch plates
My son’s close friend is a super picky eater. The kid is 14 and sticks to chicken strips and white bread and won’t eat anything else. II think it’s a texture problem, but I’ve never asked. feel bad for the kid because he has to bring a suitcase full of food on all scouting trips, but hey ,he accommodates himself, so it’s not like it’s a burden on anyone else. It must suck to be the picky eater, especially when it’s a texture/gag reflex issue. I imagine that either everyone blames this kid’s parents or the kid themselves and assumes they’re just being an asshat. Edited to add that I will not eat one food (ricotta) due to a texture issue, so I definitely sympathize with the kid.
I’ll eat almost anything. I’m lucky that my genetics allow me to find cilantro tasty, because I looooooooove cilantro. It adds a depth of flavor that gives (especially) Sonoran dishes their oomph.
But I hate mac and cheese. I refuse to eat it. I know it’s a psychological issue – we were poor growing up and mac & cheese is about the cheapest meatless dish so we ate it most Fridays – it brings up bad connotations. It’s also because it’s usually made with elbow macaroni which is about the only pasta I don’t like. I won’t eat macaroni salad if it’s made with elbow pasta.
How does he eat it? Most people I know think steak cooked any way other than medium rare is an abomination!
Mac and cheese was the big thing among my friends when I was a kid. I hate it. Give me a PB and J sandwich any day. I ate a lot of sad lunches at friends’ houses.
And I, too, thought medium rare was the preferred doneness for steaks.
A lot of things. Afraid of getting sick, because I’d been hearing the Saga of the Spoiled Potato Salad since I was three, the year after it happened. I didn’t get sick, because I was deemed “too young” for potato salad. Naturally, the lesson I got from that was “S/he who doesn’t eat is saved.” Also afraid of a socially embarrassing reaction. I once nearly choked on a mozzarella stick, and my sister’s then-boyfriend made fun of me all the rest of the day for it. Also that I’ll find it utterly vile. When I was a pre-schooler, I was made to drink powdered milk (I forget why) and it was never properly mixed up. Half water and half grainy stuff. And some people were not above holding my nose and pushing the glass against my mouth.
I have managed to condition myself out of making gross analogies, as in “The lettuce in this burrito feels like spiderwebs!” But that was a problem, too, for a while. I guess I’m like the people who hate to fly; in fact, they hate it so much, they spend the whole flight thinking about precisely how the plane might malfunction.
Interestingly enough, I’ve had more success trying Asian foods, maybe because I don’t have a history of being force-fed them. If it looks good and smells good, I’ll try it. But if it doesn’t, I think I’m allowed to turn down one or two things; just not the entire cuisine.
carrps, he likes it very charred on the outside. I say taste the meat, not the heat.
I find if I don’t like something I know I should be eating I make sure I am very hungry when I know it is going to be served. I used to hate spinach but now I love it, same way with beats. Vegis in general I was never a big fan of until my late 30’s when I used the hunger before eating thing. For me it works.
I was pretty picky as a kid, and it was not really anything I had control of. It was NOT voluntary behavior for me. Gag reflex would kick in, humiliation would follow. Wanting to avoid that, I got pretty suspicious of new foods. Fortunately I outgrew that by about age 16-18. That change might have been related to my habit of putting small amounts of possible trigger food in my mouth, and swallowing it with a mouthful of water. That got me thru a lot of meals, and my sense of dread dropped quite a bit by using that mechanism when I could.
After a while of doing that, it just stopped being a significant issue over a relatively brief period of time, and then it was essentially gone.
I would hate to still have those issues, I must admit. I feel bad for those who do, and don’t want to give them a hard time.
Here’s an article in The New Yorker about a small group of fisherman adrift at sea for several months. They were able to catch sea birds and occasional fish, but one of them couldn’t bring himself to eat raw meat. He starved to death. Eventually the rest were rescued.
Not eating anything in November was not logical. So I guess that can happen to people. 
There’s little point of having anything to eat if it’s just going to return in an inedible format. Unfortunately he got sick. (To note, he didn’t get sick until he’d been starving for weeks.)
I know Rilchiam already answered; as an uber picky eater I just want to chime in. To me, the thought of putting something unpalatable in my mouth is extremely distressing. I imagine it like the deep fear some people have of needles. I have no idea if I’m a super smeller or taster, but for instance, the smell of mayonnaise is so repellent to me it makes me mildly nauseous to be around it; I cannot fathom putting it in my mouth. Consciously I know it won’t hurt me but I’d rather experience physical pain than experience eating something I don’t like. It’s hard to explain and I know some people don’t believe / can’t imagine that but that’s how it is, for me at least.