I went to an Argentian steakhouse once and ordered the mixed grill. The steak was amazing and the sausages were some of the best I ever had, but what I really loved were the tender organ meats, the liver, kidneys, sweetbreads, and especially blood sausage, which is a purply-black sausage made out of congealed blood, fat, and spices. It was delicious, and nobody else at the table believed me.
I absolutely won’t eat pork’n’beans or lima beans.
I have an odd relationship with peas. I enjoy snow peas in the pod, and peas in a dish such as my mother’s (in)famous Tuna Noodle Stuff, and even split-pea soup; but peas in a pile by itself is foul.
I’ve only ever had one piece of meatloaf I’ve ever liked, and it was a major deviation from the usual recipe. It contained mushrooms and wasn’t topped with ketchup.
Barbecue, in most instances I’ve run across, is nasty. I don’t want sweet on my meat. A spicy, non-sweet sauce is good; but most of the time people use that KC Masterpiece or some other thinly-disguised maple syrup on their barbecue and I just plain and simple don’t like it. I have, occaisonally, taken a barbecue-sauce encrusted pork steak and rinsed it off under the faucet.
Count me in with the rest of the people who love/hate tomatoes.
I can’t stand raw tomatoes. I think they taste like crap, not to mention they’re slimy and mushy. But I’ll eat cooked tomatoes any way you can fix them. Ketchup, pasta sauce, salsa, on pizza, what have you. Cooked tomatoes are my friend.
I think that’s about the only food oddity I have. I’ll try anyting once unless it has onions in it. Or beef, I won’t touch beef.
Talking and not talking …
I love chocolate but despise fudge.
Corn goes on mashed potatoes, not beside them.
Gotta have just a little bit of sugar in the spaghetti sauce.
I actually am not a big fan of eating. It makes my jaws tired and I only eat about once a day. Surprisingly I very rarely get hunger pains. I think I adapted to this back in high school when I’d stay up very late, skip breakfast so that I could sleep in the morning before school. Then at noon eat 2 or 3 school lunches and then I guess a small snack before bed at night. I can’t actually remember what I did for dinner back then.
Although there are a few foods that I enjoy eating, but not many.
everyone who eats with me thinks I am disgustingly picky…
but really, I just fricking hate onions. and luckily enough, they’re embraced by EVERY fucking culture, in almost every fucking dish. they might be rat intestines once they are in my mouth; that is how fast I must get them out. I generally taste them before I bite into one, but god forbid I don’t, for with that sickening crunch comes a production so completely humiliating to myself and everyone around me that it pretty much ruins the entire meal. so yes, I am going to inspect every bite before I take it, and yes, I am going to sit here and pick out every last motherfucker I can find and pile them in a revolting heap in the side of my dish, and only halfway through your meal will I even begin to take cautious bites of mine.
I also cannot stand for my food to touch. everything has its own separate mathematically partitioned area on the plate, and no, the juices from the vegetables can’t touch the mashed potatoes or the bread. the exceptions are things that have no liquid component, such as steak and fries. this tends to make thanksgiving more a time for cursing than thanking.
I like to eat my food separately by category. I generally eat potato products or rice first. The exception is baked potatoes, which I like to save till last. I still don’t like many vegetables, and I eat them first, if present, to get them out of the way. I eat whatever meat is on the plate last. I can alter this if my dining partner is seriously annoyed by it, but leave me to my own devices and it’s vegetable-potato-meat. I have to make a mini-sandwich from my roll or biscuit. I have an irrational fondness for ketchup, but at least I never made ketchup sandwiches the way my sister did. Once my parents and I had dinner at my aunt’s house. She didn’t have any normal ketchup around, just that odd green-tinted stuff that her grandchildren liked. I was the only adult who could stand to eat the green ketchup. I always want dessert when I eat out, and almost never order it.
I like to duel with toothpicks and appropriately shaped foodstuffs. Eating one’s opponent’s weapon is extremely poor form. I too hate raw tomatoes. I rarely eat bananas, though I love them, because it’s hard to get them to the exact ripeness I like. I hate coconut and do not appreciate it being hidden in things.
I love tomatoes, but I think tomato juice and tomato soup are indescribably disgusting.
When eating sandwiches, I have to eat the part using the bread from the bottom of the loaf first. It’s not as good as the top crust, so I have to get it out of the way.
I’m an utter wuss when it comes to cheese. Anything stronger than a medium cheddar makes me retch. Bleu cheese is out of the question, and anything that would be described as a “stinky” cheese (and to me, that includes bleu cheese and its relatives) will make me leave the area.
I also have a couple of dietary restrictions for health reasons (I need to avoid lactose and gluten), but I don’t count those as oddities. They’re damned inconvenient, though, especially since those foods didn’t bother me when I was younger and I keep forgetting that I shouldn’t eat them any more.
Has anyone ever tried pasta made from soybenas? Guy at a store told me and Wife it was quite good.
I spat out the first mouthful. Wife managed to swallow hers. It was so nauseating I had to suppress the urge to vomit. We promptly tossed out all of the remaining batch.
My parents would watch me spread peanut butter, butter, cream cheese, etc on toast or crackers because of this effect. I heard one of them say, “He sculpts it…” Also, there can’t be any of the spread on the knife after. So I do the “wipe” thing on the edge of the bread with the knife. But that leaves a glob of the stuff that then has to be spread out… so the process takes a while: wipe, spread, wipe, spread. It’s just not worth it some days.
I’ve also done the cheese thing. I get around it by not making grilled cheese sandwiches.
This phenomenon is also expressed with pop-tarts. I used to hate having pop-tart crusts left over with no yummy filling. So now I always make sure to break up the tart into pieces that include some crust with a piece of the middle.
**Hunter Hawk, ** I’m eating a big hunk of valderone bleu cheese as I read this thread… I’m also the reverse of you on tomatoes. Hate them raw but like them as soup or sauce. The only excetion is the Pico de gallo at the local mexican joint. And then only because of intense self-delusion.
I’m not a picky eater, but I cannot stand eating in front of someone who isn’t eating, too, sometimes even my husband. For some reason it makes me feel like a hog, even if it’s just because I eat more slowly.
Conversely, I don’t like eating too fast. If I eat faster than anyone else at the table, I worry that, again, I look like a hog. So I pace myself depending upon how fast or slow people are eating.
It’s a lose-lose situation if I’m eating with someone who eats a lot faster than me - they’ll shovel their food down and I’ll feel compelled to stop eating even if I’m still hungry. Similarly, it sucks if I’m really hungry and eating with a slower eater than me because I feel like I can’t satisfy my hunger fast enough.
It’s really perverse, and I’m slowly getting more comfortable eating in front of my husband if he’s not eating. I run a lot and he doesn’t exercise, so I generally require more calories than he does - he doesn’t even need to snack, but my stomach is usually empty.
I’m trying to make myself like apple pie. I like raw apples, but I think baked apples are kind of gross. All slimy and rubbery. Sometimes I force down some apple pie to try to acclimate myself to it. It helps if it’s a la mode. 
I don’t like plain potato chips, unless there’s dip. No dip, I won’t eat 'em.
I have a fetish for manzanilla olives. I’ll sit down with a jar and eat 10+ olives at a time. I only like Unico olives, too. The other brands are no good. Sometimes I’ll sip a little of the juice too. I bet my sodium levels go through the roof but DAMN, those olives are good.
I love pasta and noodles, so when I discovered a huge Asian supermarket in town, I filled my basket with many varieties of exotic-looking ramen and other packaged noodles from across Southeast Asia. Most of my gambles paid off so far, but yesterday I had these noodles for lunch that were gross. They weren’t like ramen, but they ended up being translucent clear/gray and slimy once they were cooked, thin like vermicelli. The soup base was spicy, with an overpowering smell. I ate them all (again, the compulsion to clean my plate, as I mentioned earlier in the thread), but I hated them, and they made me feel like crap for the rest of the day. I was tired, I had no energy, my head hurt, and they left a disgusting aftertaste in my mouth. Apparently those noodles were made with sweet potato starch. From now on, I’m reading the labels more closely–at least when they have anything written in English!
I too eat only one thing at a time normally. I have noticed that I don’t seem to care about this as much as I used to (is it possible I am becoming less neurotic?).
I must have my soda ice cold! I usually put my glass full of ice in the freezer along with the soda can for about an hour, then drink it. Sometimes it even gets a little slushy.
I don’t like my foods to touch each other, unless we are talking about noodles and mashed potatoes, which must be eaten together.
I guess I should have stated that I’m an ice cream addict. I eat a bowl, or cone, or shake almost every single day. I would say in one month, I normally only miss 4-5 days at the most.
I travel all over to eat ice cream from the different vendors, up to 1.5 hours of travel time is o.k. with me.
I also know just about everything one could know about the history of ice cream and so on.
I hate toppings on my ice cream.
Reading more replies made me think of more (and I thought I was really normal before this thread…)
Like The Sausage Monster, I too eat (drink?) A1 steak sauce all by itself. I don’t, however, put it in a bowl and use a spoon, I jsut drink it straight from the bottle. If, however, I am someplace where it is not my exclusive bottle of A1, I will pour it onto a spoon, still no bowl, though.
I’m also another one of those “condiment has to be on every part of the bread” people. I mean, how could it not?! Why would you want to eat a sandwich that in one bite has no mayo, and in the second is a huge mayo party?! It would be like eating two different sandwiches you ignorant savages! I also hate to leave stuff left on the knife, and use to do the pain staking process of wiping it off on the side of the bread, then spreading that little bit out, then doing it again, with progressivly smaller globs from the knife, buit now I do it once, then just lick the knife clean.
I think I’ve had these too! Mine said they were Szechuan (they spelled it differently, though) pickle flavor. Ugh, the slimyness, and the sheer quantity of noodles! I kept choking down the slimy things and not diminishing the size of the pile.
As to the slimy noodle issue, there’s also bean thread noodles, made from (I think) mung beans. They look pretty normal uncooked; kind of whitish, like rice noodles. However, when you cook them, they become slimy, gelatinous, and almost transparent. They’re revolting. My ex-wife and I once made this Japanese-style noodle salad with sesame and cucumbers; we each took one bite, gagged, then picked out the cucumbers and ate them, leaving the noodles alone. We left the bowl on the counter, and even the (normally ravenous to the point of eating anything) cat wouldn’t touch it. Vile.
Not an oddity, though, as far as I’m concerned. But now I have to add sweet potato starch noodles to The List, because it sounds just the same.
nevermore, my husband hates onions, too. He can manage if they’re ground up or cooked really really well, but the taste and texture together make him ill. I love onions. Whenever we’re at a restaurant I order whatever has the most onions. Sigh.
I, too, hate raw tomatoes. I love ketchup, dried tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato soup, cooked tomatoes in things… but I hate them raw. They’re squishy and have a sweet/metallic flavour that I can’t handle. Blech. I thought I was alone.
Ack! When I was home from college for the first time, I asked my mom to buy me ramen noodles to bring back up, and she came home with some of those instead. She said the lady at the Asian market called them “cow bean noodles.” They were disgusting. And I thought I liked every possible kind of noodle known to man–this is definitely not the case.