I grew up in the 60’s with meat served at
every meal. I also grew up with a blood
condition where I got sick from eating
too much iron.
My mother would serve red meat a lot, and
I could not eat it. The leftovers were even
worse. The only “meat” I liked was poultry
skin, which is mostly fat.
I complained about meat so much that at age 10
I was forbidden to eat it. I had vegetables,
starch, fruit and water for supper every night.
I never complained.
For me it was green beans. I had one of those “clean your plate or else” mothers and spent many meals miserably eating my beans. I grow my own beans now, but let them all go to shell bean stage. (I have yet to meet a shell bean I didn’t like.) Cut up in a veggie soup is okay, but a pile of plain string beans brings up too many bad associations. I have eaten them to be polite, but I have been unable to enjoy them.
[hijack]** now, though, i love them and have a bumper crop of brandywines and amish pastes coming up.** Are Amish Pastes not the most wonderfully prolific variety? They are huge, too. If you like trying different varieties, I recommend the Garden Peach. I tried it for the first time this year. It is a small, pinkish-orange, very sweet tomato with a slightly fuzzy, peach-like skin. My 2 year old eats them like apples. Yummy! [/hijack]
Mushrooms. I hate them. I hate them and my parents used to try to sneak them in to dishes.
“They are cut up small. She won’t notice.” or my favorite
“Just pick them out.” Yeah, because the first thing everyone wants to do is pick through their food.
My BF hates mushrooms too, and rice? He got sick on it once when his mom made him sit at the table until he eats it, now he can’t even look at it. Based on these stories, I think it’s a bad idea to make your children eat certain foods. They just end up hating them forever.
When I was about 8, we visited my cousins in England. The kids were left behind with this horrid, evil old caretaker lady, Mrs. Haskel, while the adults went on a tour of the Continent.
Mrs. Haskel made us eat bread fried in bacon grease for breakfast, under threat of not going to Battersea amusement park (where my Uncle used to love to go on “the pub ride”).
I remain scarred to this day.
Shaky Jake
Spinach. I hate Spinach. Tastes just like fresh grass. Squash. Urgh.
Liver, I’m happy to never have to eat this one again.
On the whole, however, my Mom didn’t cook anything that I didn’t eat. They tried me on a few things, but overall they realised that I ate enough other stuff to be healthy. And my Mom is a fantastic cook! nothing came out bad at her house. I learned to cook from her. 
I was a VERY picky eater as a small child. I wouldn’t eat any foods that had somehow touched another dish, anything with gravy or sauce, nothing soggy, and no mushrooms, onions, or peppers.
(Okay, to be honest, I still maintain most of these eating habits, except for the “food touching other food” thing and the “no sauces” doctrine. Gravy is still a no.)
My parents were fairly lenient at mealtimes (“Try three bites. If you don’t like it after that, you don’t have to finish.”), but they stood firm on one meal.
Chicken a la king.
Dear god, the very words make my stomach shudder. Mom would whip up this skillet full of stuff that looked like baby vomit, pour it over toast, and put it in front of me. It was a gravy based dish, full of mushrooms and pimentos. It was a bunch of blended-up food. It made the bread soggy. It was the nexus of everything I hated. At the age of four, chicken a la king was the most horrific thing that could happen in my life.
For some reason, mom was adamant that I finish every last bite of the stuff. I have memories of forcing bite after bite into my mouth, only to supress the gag reflex moments later. Sure, dad would call it “dynamited chicken” in an attempt to make it fun or something, but I saw through his little game.
These little fiascos made me an even pickier eater, and when little brother came along, he was even worse. Mom eventaully gave up on cooking meals with any kind of variety, and the family settled in for 15+ years of five or six different dinners in constant rotation.
Luckily, these meals did not include the dreaded chicken dish.
scrambled eggs.
Mmmmmm, fried bread. I guess you have to be a Brit…
I got this same lecture/force feeding from my grandmother about squash. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth…
I ate the squash
I immediately threw up all over the table.
Sweeeeeet, sweet victory
Never had to eat squash again, you betcha.
Liver and onions with brussel sprouts as a side dish and a big glass of milk. :eek: Bleh, bleh, bleh… My mom would make this meal at least once a month and would swear each time that I love brussel sprouts. I hate them along with the liver and onions. I would smell it cooking and start pretending to be sick, it never worked of course. Thank god my dog loved liver. Whoever thought to cook liver and serve it were out of their freakin mind! And don’t even get me started on milk, that stuff makes me gag! It’s disgusting! And yet at each meal my parents would make me drink it knowing the battle we had at each meal. Then when I didn’t drink the milk (which half the time I didn’t) they would put it in the refrigerator and make me drink the next morning at breakfast, the whole time I’m gagging and would usally end up throwing up. You would have thought that they would have just given up but no, not my parents. Yuck!
We have fried bread here…you get it at the state fair, all hot and doughy, you put powered sugar and cinnamon on it…yum. Bread fried in yesterday’s bacon grease? Blech. Stuff like this is where the “Fine British Cuisine” jokes come from.
Bangers and mash, though, with onion gravy…that is truly some fine eatin’.
Shaky Jake
SPINACH! Looks like seaweed!
Could not stand it - yuck!
Now, I love spinach dip, but not anything else with spinach.
Will never serve it to my family now.
Traumatic foods for me:
Mom’s homemade vegetable soup (had the consistency of pudding) and sauerkraut served up every New Year’s Eve with milk…I can’t even stomach the smell to this day.
I can’t stand any foods that are even remotely slimy:
Eggs cooked over easy must have no white slimy stuff
Mayonnaise
Sandwiches that make the bread squishy and slimy like tuna or egg salad. When I was a kid, I always ate tuna salad in a bowl because I gagged on the bread.
Tomatoes - Ick!!
Mushrooms - kinda slimy, when cooked…they look like slugs
Cooked spinach or any kind of cooked greens…YUCK!!
Cereal that got soggy fast like Wheaties or Corn Flakes
It amazes me how authority figures from our childhoods would always make us clean the plate no matter what vile concoction rested upon it!! To this day leaving food on the plate makes me feel apprehensive, even if I am full. (of course, these days, I only eat what I really like!!)
Hominy! I still have nightmares about that stuff. So similar to regular corn … and yet so terribly, terribly different.
shivers
SSU
damn. that’s commitment. personally, i love egg salad, and always have. the best part about easter when i was a kid was that all the hard boiled eggs that didn’t get eaten within a day or two got made into egg salad. yum. now what’s really foul is that the other day a coworker of mine came back after lunch with some vegan “mock” egg salad. i guess it was soy based or something. i wouldn’t go near the stuff.
as for what I hated as a kid… well, i actually really liked them until the fateful day that i ate too many. bing cherries. i ate most of a big bowl of the things, and got a terrible stomach ache as a result. i don’t think i got sick, but to this day i still haven’t eaten one. that was probably 12 or so years ago. i even remember what i was wearing… hard rock cafe t-shirt, and i got some of the juice from a cherry on it. left a small, pink stain on the shirt for all eternity. I’m getting a little queasy just thinking about them. bleh.
Seems like a lot of you hate creamed corn. Here in the South, that’s a sacrilege, but I have always loathed it. It makes me gag.
Another thing I don’t remember seeing here before: salmon patties. WTF? Whoever invented that should burn in hell. The only way to eat those growing up was to drown them in ketchup and hope you didn’t get a piece of bone in your mouth.
Oatmeal is another one. It smells terrific, but I can’t put that in my mouth.
Our parents got mad when we didn’t eat what was placed before us; we were being “ungrateful.” So I ate a lot of salmon patties.
I guess I was lucky–my mother was an excellent cook, and my father is phenomenal in the kitchen (ah, the benefits of growing up in Louisiana). I was fairly picky, and they never forced me to eat anything I didn’t like.
My traumatic experiences came from school cafeterias–day after day of cold, unspiced string beans and other vile veggies dumped directly from enormous cans into the serving bowls, then slapped onto trays like birdsplat falling from a great height, forming unnatural unions with the cold cornbread and the mystery meat…
I tell you, the beets were the best thing they served! At least they weren’t any worse cold. I quit paying for school lunches in 3rd grade–I had already quit eating them. I just pocketed the lunch money, snuck away from the lunch lines, and waited for supper.
My mother and grandmother were excellent cooks. Still, my mom had certain foods that she liked that she made us “try”. Problem was, she made us “try” them every single time she made them!!! These things included Brussel sprouts, English mushy peas (the color of radioactive waste), mashed carrots and turnips, and baked beans.
Of course, then there was the traditional New Year’s Day meal of boiled cabbage, pork and black eyed peas. Urp. They were foods that promised prosperity and if we didn’t eat them, our family was destined to be impoverished for the upcoming year. My brother and I “tried” them every year and yet, we still never hit that financial windfall these repulsive foods were supposed to ensure. Finally, we got smart enough to point this out and then we never had to “try” them again!
Two things make me turn green. Mashed potatoes, and M&M’s.
I don’t see how anybody could eat them. They are basically pre-digested. The only thing that should ever be puree’d then eaten is well, ok, nothing should go through that. Sick.
M&M’s are more a horror story than anything else. My sister and I had to sell them as a fund-raiser. We had to sell two boxes each, or 200 bags total. But, we had the same neighbors (obviously) and while the other people in the fund raiser had no problem, not only did my sis and I have to sell twice as much to the people, but we lived in a scantily populated area. So we ended up having to sell twice as much to half as many. We always bought 50 bags ourselves because we had to meet our quota, then ate nothing but M&M’s for dessert after every meal for weeks. Kinda get turned off from them. The horror part happened the last time we ever went out to sell M&M’s. Their was a bear cub in our neighbor’s yard. Cub=Mother close by. We turned around to go home, and there was another bear cub coming up the road towards us, blocking our chances of getting home soon. We could only continue up the road, and on our right was 2 full grown adult bears, and 2 more adults on our left. We were between adults and their cubs. With 2 pounds of candy each, with no escape. We went to another neighbor’s house, total stranger, and asked them for a ride home. Got home fine, just finished finding $50 or so to buy the rest, and a seventh bear came into our backyard. 7 bears in 1/2 hour. Too much for me. No more M&M’s, and certainly no mashed potatoes.