Yes, they do! And that’s another one for my list. The first Twinkie I ever ate was the last one.
When I was pregnant, everything made me urky, but the only permanent aversion I developed as a result was to a perfume (Eternity), not a food.
Asparagus. One time I made some for my lunch the next day and a put a bay leaf in it overnight. Little did I realize how strong it would be! Besides, I hate that slimy, stringy texture. I’ve only had it once since then, probably 15 years ago.
I can’t eat Top Ramen any more. Just seeing it in the store makes me think of how much I ate of it when I was habitually broke. I now think of it as “poor food.”
I can’t stand the smell of mayonnaise or Miracle Whip and globs of either creep me out big time. Plus, when I was little my mom told me that if you left a knife in it too ling, it would create a poison. I’m sure now she meant silver knives, not stainless steel. Anyway, to me mayonnaise is a necessary evil. Some foods just have to have it but don’t let me see globs or let me smell it straight or I’ll start gagging.
I like Thousand Island dressing but it’s mayonnaise-based. Again with the gag reflex if I should catch a whiff of it before I start eating it. Eugh!
My father’s father was a commercial fisherman during the non Prohibition years, and my uncles enjoyed fishing as a recreation. At least one uncle also had some lobster traps when I was growing up. My father had moved to Texas to marry my mother (long story which I won’t go into) and every year our family went to New England for vacation among the Bodoni family. One year, my uncle donated a couple of huge lobsters for a family reunion feast. He put the live lobsters in an open box, and put the box in the back seat of the car, with me and my grandmother. I must have been a preschooler at the time. While we drove to the gathering spot, the lobsters kept trying to climb out of the box. This absolutely terrified me. My grandmother, who was no stranger to live seafood, just kept poking them back in the box. However, I couldn’t eat them after they’d been cooked, and to this day I still won’t eat shellfish of any sort.
I once got sick after my mother insisted that I eat my weekly portion of liver. She was on Weight Watchers back in the 60s, and back then, people thought liver was healthy. I hated liver to begin with, and was feeling a bit queasy that night, but my mother made me eat it. It came right back up. She never made me eat liver again.
Wait. There was a time when you didn’t consider it that?
One night, hubby and I went out to dinner at a nice little neighborhood Italian/Greek place. I ordered the Italian sausage ravioli. Not long after I got home, I was sitting on the sofa, and it felt like there was something tucked between my lower back and the sofa. Something sharp. I looked, but found nothing. Then the nausea hit. I was having another kidney stone attack. When I puked, all I tasted was Italian sausage. I know it was the stone that caused the puking, but I still can’t eat Italian sausage, and that was almost twenty years ago!
The first time I ever drank peppermint Schnapps, I thought “this doesn’t taste like alcohol at all; it tastes like Wrigley’s gum, liquefied” and I drank lots of it. Yup, you guess it, not nearly as pleasant-tasting coming back up! That was 25 years ago, and although I drink other flavors of Schnapps, I don’t drink peppermint.
I agree with Indyellen about watermelon flavoring in things that are not large and green with red interiors.
But for me, it’s grapefruit. No special circumstance – I didn’t get a piece of grapefruit caught in my throat as a toddler, or have a grapefruit try to climb out of a citrus-fruit box waving its feelers at me, or something – I just am completely repelled by the taste. It’s intensely sour and cannot be sweetened enough to overcome the sourness*, and it dominates other food. My mother stopped serving DelMonte mixed citrus salad from the cans, because even if she removed all the grapefruit from my portion, the fact that the other fruit had been in contact with it made them taste like grapefruit – the flavor of the grapefruit overpowered the taste of the tangeine wedges and such.
- Strangely enough, though, I can drink pinapple-grapefruit beverages – the pineapple juice seems to counteract the grapefruit taste. But it’s the only way in which grapefruit taste is palatable to me.
This is also known as the Garcia taste aversion effect
Add me to the mayonaise and Miracle Whip club. Or the anti-club. When I was around 6 or 7, my family went to Friendly’s . I had their tuna, which is made with Miracle Whip, or something similar. I got the stomach flu that same day.
Friendly? not so much.
Gary Gulman does a bit about this in his comedy act. “Grapefruit was here, I can tell…” According to him, grapes are the only fruit which can withstand a grapefruit ‘invasion’, having the skin as a barrier and all.
I need to hear that bit, because I have a similar one about green peppers. “This pizza is polluted!”
The smell alone of teriyaki makes my stomach turn.
I had managed to escalate a upper respiratory infection into a case of pneumonia and ended up in the hospital for three days. My insurance company at the time (this is thirteen years ago) would only keep me there until my fever went down and then I was released.
I was still sick and very weak so my grandmother had come over to help out. By help out, I mean clean things and offer to feed me non-stop. 
I had no appetite and the only food I could stomach was fruit, toast and oatmeal. She wanted to get some “real food” down me and tried everything - even offered to make me turkey and sides if I would just eat some of it. Even though I told her repeatedly that all I wanted was toast/fruit, she was going to feed me, by cracky.
She knew I loved stir fry so she made some. The medications I was on tended to make me nauseous and I had just dosed up when she brought me a huge plate of rice, chicken and veggies - doused in teriyaki. In her defense, she had never made stir fry before and didn’t realize that you don’t use teriyaki as gravy.
I took three dutiful bites before I had to wobble to the bathroom and heave. Haven’t been able to stomach teriyaki since.
Definitely the top of my list. It was served quite often for school dinners in my primary school, and the dinnerladies used to force me to eat it. We called it frog’s spawn. By the time I was 7 I’d been reported to the headmaster so often for refusing that my mother started to give me packed lunches to take instead. Nearly 50 years later even the thought of this nasty stuff makes me queasy.
Other things on my list are
beef sausages [I used to like these until one fateful day a boyfriend cooked them for me for breakfast]
custard tarts [my daughter and I share this one - I bought them from a bakery when she was about 4 and we were both horrifically sick]
Chicken soup. I can’t explain what specific ingredient in chicken soup makes me gag, because I seem to like them all on their own just fine, but the smell of chicken soup makes me ill.
I trace this back to a time in college when my boyfriend and I both were feeling a little under the weather. Ah, maybe we feel a cold coming on, so let’s take it easy and get some rest. Oh, and eat chicken soup. Just after our chicken soup supper, the flu hit the boyfriend like a ton of bricks. Vomit, vomit, vomit. I had never seen a person so ill before, he even attempted to start cleaning up but he was wobbly and swaying on this feet. I insisted he go back to bed because I was worried he would pass out and fall and hit his head.
So I changed the sheets on the bed, washed the floors, cleaned the bathroom. And just as soon as I was done, the flu hit me. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Southern Comfort. Even the smell of it makes me gag, and because I think it smells like blueberries, anything with blueberries turns my stomach, too. (All related to an incident more than 15 years ago where I appropriated an entire fifth of the stuff at a party and declared it was all mine and I was going to drink the whole thing. Darn near did, too.)
Interestingly, I got food poisoning only once in my life (if last week wasn’t food poisoning, which I don’t think it could because it lasted three days)…and that was a from a turkey sandwich made with…old deli turkey. : vomit smiley :
I had horrific liquids coming out of both ends more than twice an hour for about 30 hours, and in those thirty hours I had to perform in Measure for Measure. It was the same year that michael jordan had his ‘flu game’ and so I call that my michael jordan isabella. Go on stage, do a scene, run off stage farting and puking…come back in ten minutes. blech.
But the aversion therapy didn’t work that time. I still eat turkey sandwiches with the same Jewel deli turkey on the same bread…not often, but I do.
It’s amazing how all this works. For some reason I’d always thought it was only me. I guess I’m unique like everyone else 
When I was 8 or 9, I got sick after having a bagel with cream cheese. As a Jewish kid growing up in the NYC metro area, that’s a food group all to itself. As I recall, it wasn’t until I was in college that I’d even TRY cream cheese again. For some reason, I never associated getting sick with the bagel. It had to be the cream cheese. Once I finally found out that I would not die if I had cream cheese, I’ve managed to make it a friend of mine once again.
Campbell’s Tomato Soup, OTOH, uhm, no. I think I lived on it as a kid, and while I enjoy all sorts of tomato based products (and raw tomatoes, for that matter), including veggie soups and all sorts of soups with a tomato base, the thought of having a bowl of just plain tomato soup just makes me ill. ::shudder::
Once, when I was a kid, we got a pizza from Pizza Hut, with pepperoni on it. (There may have been other things, but I don’t remember anymore.) Not long after consuming said pizza, I broke out in hives. The next few days were awful, itchy ordeals. It was years before I’d go back to Pizza Hut, and even longer before I’d eat pepperoni on anything, although the hives never came back. I still don’t know just what it was that I was so allergic to.
Also, somewhere along the way I ate one too many pieces of banana candy, and now I won’t eat bananas at all, though I will eat banana bread. There was no specific incident - I just stopped. I remember really loving bananas once, too. Perhaps I’ll try them again someday.
For a long time I couldn’t stand salting my food (anything with salt in it already was fine), because one time I put way, way, way too much salt on something and spent the night puking. I eventually got over this one, and it ended up stopping my bad habit of automatically putting salt on things.
I still have the same problem with smoked turkey, sort of–one Christmas we had 27 people in the house and smoked two turkeys. One of them apparently didn’t get done quite right, and half the people (including me) at dinner couldn’t keep anything down for a couple days afterwards. Used to be I couldn’t even stand the smell of our fireplace when it was cold, because it sort of reminded me of the smell of the turkey.
Oh: and tequila, just because.
Chef Boy-ar-dee canned spaghetti. The smell of any of those canned pastas is enough to make me gag. And coffee with any kind of creamer in it.
I was eight when I announced that I was done drinking milk. I haven’t looked back since, it is hard for me to understand how drinking milk is any different from drinking pig’s blood or any other body fluid.
The smell of Cherrio’s in milk makes me heave. I can’t imagine eating anything that smelled like that.
Sprite. Not Diet Sprike, or Sierra Mist. Sprite.
A little over two years ago, I was feeling under the weather the day my family was to drive down to St. Louis to meet my brother. During the drive down, I got progressively worse–I could tell my temperature was skyrocketing, I was getting chills, the whole nine yards. I didn’t want to screw up the vacation, so I didn’t say anything. The next day, I was barely coherent (according to my now-husband, who called me that afternoon). My parents ordered me back to bed, and, after I slept for a while, we went to the Union Station mall there.
While at the mall, I started getting kind of queasy. I tried to throw up, but I couldn’t. Mom suggested Sprite to settle my stomach, and we bought a 20 oz. bottle. I drank maybe half of it–it was the only thing I’d had that day. About an hour or two later, the barfing started. I ended up in the ER after being unable to keep anything down. I had some kind of massive bacterial infection (they never found out what), and I was put on mega-antibiotics and an anti-nausea drug, and the barfing ceased.
For about a week after that, I wouldn’t eat much–couldn’t eat Chinese food for a month, for example. All the aversions went away after about two months, except for the Sprite, which I still can’t drink without feeling ill.