All children have some different food tastes from their parents.
But as they grow older some tastes they pick up and others stay different.
tastes picked up - from Dad, swiss cheese, horseradish sauce, Polish dill pickles
tastes not picked up - pumpernickel, cream and sugar in coffee, squash, eggnog and fruit liquors at holidays
My whole family adores shrimp, sushi, and most other seafood. I can’t stand it, won’t touch it.
I picked up my preference of diet soda from my dad. Since he was diabetic, that’s all we ever had in the house. I never tried regular sugary soda until after I was already used to diet, so it tastes way too cloying and sweet.
Liverwurst…ultimate fail.
My Father used to make sandwiches out of the stuff…with tons of mayonnaise…I’m feeling a little queasy just thinking about it.
My mother likes eveything from popcorn to steak burnt to a crisp and over salted. :eek:
Mostly from Mom, since I lived with her: Fresh vegetables and hot tea.
Not picked up: Mushrooms (except in a very small number of contexts), asparagus
Lack of taste that I picked up from parents: Coffee and beer. Neither of them drank either, so I never developed a taste for either.
No idea where I got it from, since neither parent likes it: Spicy hot foods.
Picked up: Wheat, pumpernickel, and rye breads. Buckwheat pancakes. Real maple syrup. My favorite Girl Scout cookie is the Samoa, also my mom’s favorite. Cooked white rice eaten as a cold, sweet cereal. Savory potato pancakes and corn fritters. Velveeta Shells ‘n’ Cheese. Spaghetti sandwiches. Most Chinese food (in general).
Failed to pick up: puddings, cream and meringue pies, cranberry sauce, sauerkraut, corned beef hash, peanut butter and sugar/honey sandwiches, use of honey as a topping in general, boiled or canned vegetables, hot coffee (I like my coffee drinks chilled, sweet, and frou-frou). Sausages of any sort. Sweet and sour Chinese food, and the canned La Choy chop suey type stuff. (This last part was a big reason I thought I hated Chinese food until I was in my teens… I thought for years that all Chinese food was covered in neon sweet/sour sauce or bland brown goo.)
Picked up: love of rich beef dishes, jello, tapioca pudding, milk, fish of any sort, artichokes.
Failed to pick up: thin horrible black bitter coffee, breadless meatloaf (i.e., baked hamburger clod), various post WWII cheapy dishes (like spaghetti sauce made with Campbell’s tomato soup, or “garbage soup”, or tamale pie).
Is there an “acquired on my own, to my parents’ utter horror and disgust” category?
Mom raised me on garden fresh vegetables, which I still love. Scratch-made biscuits. Hamburger ‘steak’ with red wine, onion & mushroom gravy, and all manner of ‘poor people food’ that made the best of the cheap stuff we had on hand.
Never did develop a taste for liver & onions, though; the smell of it cooking still makes me gag.
tastes not picked up - coffee, liver.
I eat and drink almost anything (including scrapple), but one thing my Father drank that I never could manage is buttermilk.
I realized the last time I visited my folks that I eat almost nothing they do any more.
them: skim milk; me: soy milk
them: margarine; me: Smart Balance and olive oil
them: canned vegetables; me: fresh or frozen only
them: diet soda and juice; me: hate soda, prefer tea, coffee, and I do like juice
them: cookies and crackers; me: just the cheese
What we still have in common is I still do love steak and potatoes. That’s almost it, though. I have to go the grocery store and take my own food when I go to visit them at their lake house.
Dad: Rye bread, braunschweiger, black pepper on corn, fresh raspberries. I used to even eat liver and onions with him, but I no longer can.
Mom: SPAM (oh, hush), pieroghis, eggs fried in bacon fat, hot tea.
Where we diverge:
I strongly dislike coffee, they were unbearable until they had a pot. Each. At 5am.
Iceberg lettuce being the only lettuce. Dad always complained that any salad was rabbit food, and refused dandelion greens because he had them when he was very young and dirt poor. Mom will now eat fresh spinach.
Hamburger Helper. Do I need to say more? TheKid will get her HH fix when she goes over to Moms’ house, but that’s the only place where it’s found.
Fish. Maybe if it was ever something other than northern served, but I have never developed a taste for fish.
Oleo/margarine. Back when butter was ridiculously expensive, Mom quit buying butter altogether. Parkay took it’s place. I will, in a pinch, use oleo when baking, but never for anything else.
I didn’t pick up much from my mom. She is a fairly picky eater and hates to cook. So when we were growing up, I ate what I made. She did give all of her daughters her massive sweet tooth though. She didn’t allow us to eat her junk food when we were growing up so now that we have our own money we buy it - in large quantities. We all have an issue with junk food and need to work on it.
However, my mother LOVES liver (chicken) and liverwurst. I detest both.
My mother loathes celery. I love celery. I’ve even had celery soda.
Acquired: lots of Asian dishes like braised meat rice (lu rou fan), Peking duck, Shanghai soup dumplings (xiao long bao), Hunan style tofu, green onion pancakes, thousand layer pancake, red bean soup, green bean soup, Taiwanese spicy beef noodle soup, soy milk, jasmine and oolong tea, Taiwanese sugar apple, etc…
Failed to acquire: Asian dishes like oyster pancakes, stinky tofu, grass jelly, ai yu jelly, taro, lotus root, chicken feet…
My mother convinced me that eggplant was not, in fact, food. Not, intentionally; she just didn’t know how to cook it.
My father convinced me that hominy was not, in fact, food. Again, not intentionally; he just had no idea what a #10 institutional-sized can of hominy was for, and served it to us straight out of the can, mixed with, IIRC, stewed tomatoes.
I have since learned that both lessons were wrong. But Mom’s was more wrong than Dad’s.
My parents were hippies and the closest grocery store to our house when I was a kid was an organic health food type place. We went to Safeway for big grocery runs, but for just a few items, it was usually easier just to run around the corner to get them. The result is not exactly that I’m a health food nut (I love my sweets), but I dislike a lot of processed foods. They just taste too…chemical-y to me. There are quite a few foods that I have learned are quite common since becoming an adult that I have never eaten because I wasn’t given them when I was a kid. A friend had a poll on LiveJournal recently, asking if we liked a. Miracle Whip and b. Cool Whip, and I had to admit I’ve never had either one. So, my mom won there. I’m sure she’s pleased with herself.
But my parents failed to pass on their love of fish (hate it, now I’m a vegetarian anyway), artichoke, and horseradish. God, horseradish is disgusting. For years I hated pesto, which my parents make tons of every summer, but I’ve come to like it in the last few years.
I do not like the really *FISHY fish, especially mackeral, herring in any form, sardines, bacalao and lutefisk. I prefer mild ‘sweet’ fish like cod, haddock, sole, flounder, and like crab/lobster/shrimp. Allergic to bivalves.
To this day, they do not understand my disgust at the smell of mackeral - it smells like someone left it out in the sun and it is rotting.
Oddly enough, I do like canned tuna, and sashimi tuna …
Liver and onions. Blargh. Only organ meat I like is heart [though I did have a killer good haggis that they didnt put the liver in so I would try it. And I have eaten pork brains in eggs to be polite] Our parents could not get either my brother or I to eat liver and onions.
I do love most veggies, except for acorn squash, zucchini, eggplant, okra and I am highly allergic to mushrooms. The family favorites seem to be artichoke, asparagus, and the beautiful sunny yellow summer squash. And everybody seems to like hubbard squash soup made to an old [1600s] family recipe. My dad used to make a fantastic faux native american soup based sort of on succhotash … he invented it as a way to use up leftovers. I believe it was thickened with mashed succhotash, the meat was generallly leftover roasted chicken or turkey, and there was whole unmashed succhotash in it. I need to try and reproduce it…
My mom got me drinking both coffee and tea very young.
“What food tastes have you acquired, failed to acquire from your parents?” This answer may sound facetious but truthfully, most of my food tastes were *not *acquired from my parents. I still like foods fried in bacon grease, a taste acquired from my parents, but almost everything everything else I eat, Mexican etc was a taste acquired in adulthood.
Growing up in suburban DC, I failed to get my parents southern tastes for the most part. Black-eyed peas? Barf. Okra? No thanks.
The parts I did pick up include the love of things fried. The Unidentified Fried Object (is fish, or chicken?) one can find in institutional cafeterias still draws me in.
My experience is (I believe) similar. I was raised by a single mom. She has the palatte of a 5 year old. Nothing spicy, no seafood, no peppers of any kind ever not even bell, not even near her food. If you ordered a cheese pizza with peppers on half she would not eat a slice of the cheese half because it was too close to the peppers half. She never met a mashed potatto she didn’t like but hates rice in any form. As I was growing up I just echoed her and said I didn’t like all of the same things she didn’t like.
Turns out most rice dishes are perfectly fine for me, some are even delicious. I like seafood, including sushi and sashimi. Oddly the one seafood item she will allow past her lips is lobster and I do not care for that. Vegetables? Love 'em! Even brussels sprouts and asparagus.
My sister also turned out to be a far more adventurous eater than our mother is.