My father-in-law, rest his soul, would not eat anything darker than he was. Lucky for him he was a pretty dark skinned black man.
I now work with someone who won’t eat anything blue. Because-- yuck! Blue! She’ll eat blueberry pie if the innards are purple but not if they’re dark blue. Go figure.
When I was a child I would avoid eating the bottom crust of the bread. I don’t mean cutting off all the crusts. I liked that bit. Just the bottom. When eating a sandwich or toast etc. I’d leave the bottom crust like the “pizza bones” the one fella mentioned in another thread.
That was as a child, mind. It’s all the same to me now. And I can’t even give a silly explanation for why I thought that way. It just seemed a bit gross to me for some reason.
A woman I used to work with said her dad wouldn’t allow chewing gum to be anywhere in the house. He stormed the beach at Normandy and chewed up gum reminded him of what he saw floating in the water that day.
As a child, I wouldn’t eat chicken except for the skin. I’d leave the meat, dark and white, untouched except for the portion that would slip off when I ate the skin.
My brother-in-law and my fiance’s brother-in-law agree with you.
My mother refuses to eat green Jell-o. It’s not the taste she minds. It’s the color. Then again, my mother is one of the most screwed up eater I’ve ever met and for her, not eating green Jell-o is pretty normal.
A kid I went to high school with would not eat pepperoni if he could see it. He would eat a sandwich with pepperoni on it, knowing that it had pepperoni, tasting and enjoying the pepperoni. But the sight of pepperoni turned his stomach, he said. So if he glimpsed the pepperoni while eating the sandwich, he would not continue.
When I was young, I couldn’t eat hamburger, or pepperoni, italian sausage - any sausage. Why? Because I took a good close look at it and OMG there were bits of gristle and fat in it! I had a horror of fat. Chicken had to be skinned, meat had to be trimmed. Oh, and if there was a 1/4" speck of the casing at the end of a natural casing hot dog? Freakout time!
Back in grade school the hot lunch for the day was either “pasta and sauce” or “tortellini and sauce” and my mom told me it was just a shape of noodle. Coming from an Italian family the concept of ‘it’s just another shape of noodle’ wasn’t a big deal, it all tastes the same, so I opted for the hot lunch that day. Imagine my horror when I got a big plate of sauce covered ears on my tray. Bleh. Couldn’t eat them, they looked like ears. It was, literally, at least 20 years before I got myself to eat tortellini again because it looked like ears. And at that point, don’t get me wrong, it was still very much on my mind, but this was in a white soup and they were filled with cheese. So even though I was still thinking back to that day in grade school, it was a very different context then ears covered in cheap red sauce. Funnily enough, my ex-wife even said to me “Are you eating the tortellini soup?” knowing full well that I never eat tortellini.
Thinking about it, I’m not sure if it was tortellini or something a bit more earlike. If I ever ran across it, I might still have a hard time eating it. Either way, it turned into a dislike of tortellini.