The Anti Comfort Food Thread

Cafe Society
61

I’ve got a few, though in subsequent years I’ve managed to work through them all to the point where I will eat all of them again…but in most cases it took 10+ years.

  1. Kentucky Fried Chicken, specifically the biscuits. I got the tummy bug shortly after eating a meal of this and associated the two for years. Fortunately for me, I love KFC enough that I managed to break the association and now I’m back to eating it fairly regularly, even the biscuits.

  2. Chow Mein. Wow, getting the flu after eating this is not a pleasant sight. I won’t elaborate. ::shudder::

  3. Subway. I think they left the fixings out too long in the containers. Didn’t actually puke or anything, but the spouse and I felt rotten for most of the rest of the evening after eating those sandwiches. We still remember lying in bed watching the opening ceremonies of the Atlanta Olympics and feeling awful.

  4. Pizza Hut pizza–specifically delivery pizza. Obvious note: when you call a pizza joint to deliver a pizza, they don’t deliver it, and you call them back, do not say anything sarcastic and nasty to them. The pizza arrived, but we’re still convinced it might have contained “a little something extra.” In any case, I got sick the next day (broke my 16-year “vomit streak” and boy was I pissed about it!) and then the spouse got sick a few hours after I did and stayed sick longer. Bleah. Nowadays I’ll eat Pizza Hut pizza but only at the restaurant. No more delivery for me.

62

Bread-and-butter pickles…bleargh. I was staying at my grandparent’s motel, and there was a big jar of them in the office fridge. Every time I went up there I would sneak a few pickle chips. I ended up getting supremely sick for only about half a day, but it was about 10 years before I could eat any kind of sweet pickle again.

63

When I was a toddler, I lived mainly on two things: canned beets and fresh red bell peppers.

I can only assume that my parents were just trying to get these vile, contemptuous food items out of their pantry and were as surprised as the rest of us to find that their chunky toddler would inhale a can of beets like Popeye on speed.

They even have pictures of me with my face covered in red beet juice and happily holding a half of a red bell pepper (the other half having just been devoured)

20 some years later, I cannot have anything to do with either of these foods.

I can smell beets, but I will not eat them. I cannot be within sniffing distance of someone cutting a red bell pepper though. BLEEEGH

I have no idea when these two food items went from the nice to the naughty list, but good LORD they are vile now.

I also won’t eat Big Macs because I hurked after my very first one during a family road trip. Ick.

64

Another one on sweet pickles, but for a different reason.

I was at a party with a bunch of the people I work with. It seems I was on a mission: be the first one to be put to bed. With the help of a large amount of gin and Sprite, and a Zima or two, I accomplished that goal. I woke up the next morning with the puke muscles twitching. I stagger to the bathroom and heave my guts out, barely noticing that my face had been heavily written upon. I make my way back to where I was sleeping, when I notice that I had gotten some puke on me. Well, I can’t be rolling in my own puke on the hosts’ blankets, so I strip down to my jockeys and try to get some sleep.

Long story short, I’m not allowed back in that house.

But it was that night that I first tried sweet pickles. I thought they were pretty good, and I know damn well why I was puking that morning; but the association is still there.

65

Root beer.

Yep, from a childhood incident of food poisoning. We were travelling through N. Dakota, shortly after a fluke hail storm had passed through. The restaurant had lost power for quite a while but didn’t thow away their meat.

I ate a chopped steak, i.e. hamburger, and later drank a bottle of root beer. My poor father. (My sister had eaten the same thing.) There he was with two little girls, both sicker than dogs, stuck far away from home. We threw up so much Dad found an emergency room for us.

I still can’t stand even the smell of root beer.

66

Ramen noodles.

Once upon a time, two roommates and I got caught flatfooted by an evil landlord. Our old landlord sold the place out to the new guy, who promptly insisted that we add to our deposit if we wanted to stay, or move out. The tab came to something like $150.

Now, we did have that much, but that was about it. We couldn’t afford to try and find another place to live. He had us, and we all knew it. We gave him the $150, and worked it out: we had two weeks until we would be getting any additional funds. We then drained our bank accounts, emptied the beer kitty, dug under the couch cushions and under the seats of our cars, and put together about $30 … to feed four people for two weeks. This comes out to about 53 cents per person per day; enough at the time for each of us to have a can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle or a Hershey bar as our sole daily ration.

Not good.

We put our heads together. We went to the Generic Food aisle at the grocery store. We went to the Bakery Thrift Store, where they sell day-old bread. Rocket Boy was ROTC, and could shop at the PX. We inventoried the contents of our pantry, and looked under our beds. In the end, we had the following to last us two weeks: many loaves of bread, an economy-sized box of Lipton Tea, a large military-issue can of peanut butter, and about a hundred little packages of generic ramen noodles.

We lived on the stuff for two weeks.

Breakfast was toast, lunch consisted of peanut butter sandwiches, sometimes with little packets of jelly swiped from restaurants all over town; dinner consisted of a bowl of instant ramen noodle soup. To drink, there was ice water or tea, sometimes with little packets of sugar and lemon swiped from restaurants all over town. The smokers were in especially bad straits – when we ran out of tobacco, we were finally reduced to tearing up the tea bags and rolling our own with Bugler rolling papers and Lipton’s Tea, which nearly got us arrested because the neighbors noticed the odd smell.

By the first weekend, we were so desperate for something different, we were experimenting with fried ketchup fritters and peanut butter soup.

By the second weekend, we were making slingshots out of our old underwear and trying to shoot birds out of the trees for barbecue. Our neighbors really began to wonder about us after that. But, fortunately, our torment was over. Bobo (short for *borborygmi * – look it up) came home from work with his uncashed paycheck, and roared for us all to get in the $#&%! car and come and cash this thing and EEEEEEEEEEEEAT! We did. Rapidly.

After that, though, I found that I could not eat ramen soup. The stuff has nearly no smell, but the consistency of the noodles just grossed me out.

It was more than a decade before I could eat ramen noodles, after that.

67

Most Chinese food. It’s very sad, but ever since I got food poisoning–from what I know not–and it kicked in right after a large lunch of very good Chinese food, I can’t eat it. I still like pot stickers, but that’s about it. It’s been over 10 years, and I still don’t like Chinese food.

68

why do we do these crazy things at parties? Your post reminded me of an all-night student party that I went to when I was 19. Someone bet me I couldn’t drink a half bottle of Martini in one go - so, of course, I did. I spent the rest of the night lying on the bathroom floor with my head hanging over the sunken bath - puking, drinking water, and puking again. I’ve never tasted Martini since then - or taken a bet that involved alcohol.

69

I wouldn’t have thought I had any more food aversions since my first two posts in this thread, but Angel of the Lord reminded me of another. I never really cared for lemon-lime sodas much in the first place, but when I was pregnant I had to take a glucose tolerance test. After a 12-hour fast, I had to drink a little paper cup full of what felt and tasted exactly like THICK 7up.

A little aside here, because it’s important: my OB/GYN had inquired about morning sickness, and I confirmed that yep, I had that. What neither of us realized at that point was how severe it was - he routinely asked, I routinely answered, but since I didn’t know my problem was far beyond the bounds of normal, I didn’t think to elaborate. In fact, I was what they call “hyperemetic” (look that one up.)

So I slug down this sticky sweet fluid - and immediately crash to the floor, sweating profusely and projectile vomiting, in a room full of expectant mothers, some of whom become extremely sympathetic, and join me in the vomit-fest. My poor doctor had never seen such an outright explosion of horror. He hustled me into the nearest ambulance and sent me to the hospital, where I spent three days on IVs and overhearing doctors mutter about emergency C-sections.

If someone so much as opens a bottle of lemon-lime soda anywhere near me now, it has the combined effect of making me sick to my stomach and giving me a minor anxiety attack.

(PS: I delivered normally with no complications a few months later.)

70

Vanilla vodka.

My friend and former roommate is always coming up with new drinks. Her new invention this time was vanilla vodka and coke. Pretty damn tasty! Except, of course, I hadn’t eaten anything that day except a sundae. Although I really didn’t drink that much (maybe three or four drinks over a six hour time period, with a few glasses of water in the middle there), this made me violently ill.

I have a very strong stomach - I hadn’t vomited in thirteen years. I’ve been a hell of a lot drunker but that’s the sickest I have ever been thanks to alcohol. I’ll never touch the stuff again.

71

Mulberries, I ate unripe mulberries, didn’t know they were not ripe and the black ones tasted spoiled. The pink and red ones were tart and tasty. A couple of hours later I started feeling dizzy and ill. That was 40 years ago, the thought still makes me feel green. I actully walked past a tree a few years ago without getting ill. i felt I had made great strides.

72

I can’t even think of tequila now without getting a little queasy. This is from an incident in college (surprise!) that started with shots from a ridiculously cheap gallon bottle of tequila my roommate bought, and ended with my lying on the floor of my bedroom vaguely aware of another roommate cleaning my puke out of the carpet and my other roommates standing over me debating whether they should take me to the hospital. (They didn’t. Instead, they decided to “put on that music [SolGrundy] likes; that’ll make him feel better.” At the time, my favorite band was The Pogues, so I had the “pleasure” of lying drunk and sick and wanting to die on my bedroom floor while listening to songs about people drinking themselves to death.)

A couple of years after that, a friend offered me a sip of her margarita. I thought I was over the aversion by that point, so I said sure. As soon as I tasted the salt on the rim of the glass, I got violently ill again and had to throw up. So no more tequila for me, ever.

The worst food poisoning I ever got was after I’d eaten at a pretty good Thai restaurant in a mall. (It wasn’t responsible, it was just the last thing I’d eaten before getting sick.) I went back to the place a while later and ordered the same thing, just to see if I could eat it. I didn’t get ill, but I definitely didn’t enjoy it as much as I’d used to and have never eaten it again. It’s not so bad, because that dish is fairly unusual.

Also: avocadoes. I’ve never gotten sick off of them, but only because I’ve always hated them. Including guacomole, which might as well be a big dish full of earwax as far as I’m concerned. I have tried to eat it to force myself over the aversion (because I live in California, and it’s near impossible to avoid avacadoes here), but it always makes me nauseated after just a bite.

73

On three separate occassions in my childhood I sat in front of the TV watching Sesame Street and gorged myself sick on each of the following afterschool snacks: one huge box of prunes (This was before I could read; I thought they were REALLY big raisins). I jar of Vlasic pickles. I plate of fried shrimp and grits with ketchup.

I got over getting sick from eating pickles pretty quickly. It was something like 11 years before I ate shrimp again (never with ketchup). To this day, thanks to vomiting, stomach cramps and sitting on the toilet until 3am, I barely tolerate raisins and avoid prunes like they contain bite-sized bits of the plague.

74

My mom make a delicious homemade strawberry cake. It was so good, in fact, that I ate an entire cake in one sitting when I was quite young… around 10 or so. I finally got around to eating it again last September for my mom’s birthday - just 23 short years later!

I also OD’d on Sunkist Orange. In another example of over-indulgence, I drank an entire 3-liter bottle (remember those?) in around an hour. I still can’t down the stuff, much like Snickers bars, of which I ate a six-pack over a weekend. I didn’t actually get sick from the Snickers, but I never want to eat one again.

As ar as liquor goes, gin is something I’ll never come within 20 feet of. I drank of lot of gin the third or forth time I’d drank any sort of alcohol and that row with the gin was the first time I’d ever been sick. Nothing like throwing up something that tastes like Pine Sol on the way back up…

75

Coriander/cilantro - smells like stink bugs to me.

Pine nuts. Not sure if I might actually be allergic to these; on the two occasions I’ve eaten them, I’ve had that run-to-the-toilet-and-explosively-vomit thing within a minute or so of swallowing.

76

Yeah, I’m another sweet pickle hater. AFAIK, I never got sick on them. I could never bring myself to eat enough of them to get sick. And sweet pickle relish? Oh, God! Make me choose between sweet pickle relish and warm pig’s blood, I’d really have to think about it for awhile.

77

Goldschlager. Just the scent gets me. Hell, if I even THINK about the sickeningly sweet cinnamon smell, I get the shivers.

I used to have an aversion to Cup O Noodles, because it was the last thing I ate before having a real bad puking episode. I’d say it lasted a good 10 years. I’m not sure how it ended, but I can recall sophomore year in college going to Costco and getting a flat of the stuff to eat on the cheap. I guess being poor trumps the hatred o’ the Cup O Noodles!

And I have never ever had canned spinach before. But after reading this thread? Jesus H Christ I don’t think I can even LOOK at it in the store. :eek:

78

I can’t believe Egg Nog hasn’t made the list… I got sick on it as a child, and dread even having to be around it during the Christmas holidays.

I can’t prove it, but it has to be Satan’s bathwater…

79

Black licorice. When I was a kid I ate an entire bag of licorice allsorts and became sick, sick, sick. I don’t think I’ve touched a piece of black licorice since–I will eat red licorice, but not often–and am even wary of Jagermeister. But that’s probably a good thing in the long run.

80

I promised myself I would never, ever do this, because it really bugs me…

But…

Band name!

sigh