They are divine when slowly cooked in a little olive oil and garlic, and I will eat them with most anything.
I don’t ever recall not enjoying mushrooms. I can remember riding my bike as a kid to get battered and fried mushrooms from Brown’s Chicken.
When I first moved into a new place of my own after college, there was a tiny Polish deli up the street and I picked up a pint of their mushroom soup. It was a revelation: so that’s what Campbells was trying (and failing) to taste like!
My preferred technique lately has been grilled buttons. Toss in a little oyster sauce & sriracha with a few twists on the pepper grinder, then loose on the hot side of the grill.
But what about mushrooms that I have delivered or (risking my own life) eat at a sit-down restaurant? How come the only type of mushrooms that polarize light come from a you-carry-out place?
To take the side of the other foods which are very pro carry-out in nature.
I’m 60 and to this day I cannot understand the concept of disliking any food because of texture. Because of taste or smell? Absolutely.
So you would enjoy eating sand?
Sand is not food. I’m talking about people who won’t eat certain foods because of texture. But you knew that.
You’ll find plenty of people who won’t eat pears because they are gritty. I’ve heard of plenty of people who don’t like food because it’s slimy. It just doesn’t seem like an unusual attitude to me. If texture doesn’t affect your enjoyment of food then that is a good thing giving you a wider variety of foods you like. Still doesn’t seem hard to conceive of how others might be sensitive to texture just as you might dislike certain flavors or smells that others don’t mind.
I don’t eat tomatoes. I love the flavour though. I eat tomato soup, tomato sauce, tomato juice, tomato ketchup, etc. But not the actual tomato. The texture icks me out. It’s firm AND slimy at the same time, shudder!
Ugh, not for me. I’m totally cool with mushrooms and fungi though!
Understood. It’s a personal thing. That’s why I don’t get it, just like fingernails on a chalkboard has no ill effect on me. In both the food and chalk cases, I’ve always understood it affects people, but I I don’t share the feeling.
When you asked if I eat sand, I wouldn’t have commented the way I did if you said do you eat gritty pears, because again, though they don’t bother me, that example would have clarified things.
It’s all good. No conflicts here. Now watch my wife will introduce me to some exotic food and I’ll be repulsed by its texture 
Yeah, I gotta work on that. We cool.
Mushrooms have always repulsed me. Everything about them - taste, smell, texture - even their visual appearance grosses me out.
My family still teases me about the “mushroom incident,” when the pizza place got the delivery wrong and I ended up having a can of SpaghettiOs for dinner. I wouldn’t even eat the pizza after the shrooms had been picked off. I was in high school at the time.
Every now and then if I happen to find a mushroom in front of me, I’ll think “I’m a grown adult; I shouldn’t be so squeamish about this.” So I’ll put it in my mouth and suddenly it’s all I can do not to puke all over the table.
A couple of years ago I was at a restaurant in Vancouver and ordered poutine. The waitress informed me that they served “vegetarian” poutine - instead of beef gravy they used a mushroom-based imitation. I said “No thanks” and she insisted I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, and she brought out a sample for me to try. I did, and it tasted good! So I got the poutine and it also tasted good. But then for about the next 48 hours the inside of my mouth felt like it was coated with… something. It’s hard to quite put my finger on it. Dirt? Tar? Rubber? Whatever, it was awful. I must have brushed my teeth a dozen times the next day and just couldn’t shake it.
So never again with the mushrooms, no matter what. I don’t care if everyone thinks I’m a big baby.
I remember an incident where two dinner guests offered up their knife skills in the kitchen to help cut up veggies. So they went after the big pile of shrooms One was slicing mushrooms the other was chopping them. It escalated into a shouting match over the correct way to treat a mushroom. Definitely polarizing.
Why are mushrooms polarizing? Because they’re assholes.
This appears to be a major reason for people disliking okra, despite sentencing themselves to a life without gumbo.
Mushrooms only get slimy if you leave them in the fridge too long, like a lot of other things including lettuce.
I’m puzzled by people who have an overwhelming and to me, unreasonable prejudice against a food I’m fine with. It doesn’t bother me though, since it just means there’s more of it for me to eat.
Here’s the real reason mushrooms are so polarizing:
That’s one I don’t get. I have issues with slimy foods, but gumbo in no way seems slimy to me. It’s thickened, like with corn starch or flour. And the other common forms of okra–fried okra or pickled okra–don’t seem slimy to me, either.
Where slimy foods become an issue for me is with seafood. I like the stuff that isn’t slimy–shrimp, clam, fish, etc. But mussels or oysters? Yuck. It feels like swallowing mucus.
It’s also why I don’t like steak cooked under medium, or runny yolks. It’s all still slimy to me. But not okra. I’m sure there is a way to cook it to make it slimy, but I’ve never had it.