Why do some foods taste horrible?

Factual Questions
21

I disagree about multiple tries making something taste acceptable. In 50 years, I’ve tried hard to learn to like Brussels sprouts, cooked sweet potatoes, and beef or pork liver. I’ve tried at least a dozen times to develop a taste other than revulsion for cilantro. I just can’t understand why anyone would want to put anything that tastes that way in one’s mouth.

On the other hand, raw sweet potatoes taste like milky-sweet carrots. I wonder what the chemical changes are that happen when they’re cooked that make them taste bad. There are other veggies that change flavor when cooked (carrots, cabbage, turnips, broccoli and cauliflower, among others) but none that I’ve tasted that change so much for the worse as sweet potatoes.

22

I tell everyone I’m the least picky eater they’ll meet. Onions, tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, anchovies, crawfish, Marmite, Limburger cheese, sashimi, liver, celery, hot pepper . . . Hey, that’s starting to sound like it would make a pretty good sandwich!

I don’t like extra-salty Dutch licorice. I think I tasted something else recently that I didn’t like, but I can’t remember what it was. I think that’s it.

23

I can’t stand tomatoes in their “natural” state but I can eat them in a sauce just fine. My hubby can’t stand raw onions but loves them cooked. I think it has partially something to do with physiology and partially from what you’re exposed to.

24

25%? That low?

I’m surprised. Nearly everyone I know is familiar with asparagus making pee smell strange. It’s not a horrible smell, IMO, but it is distinct.

25

Ah yes, double salted licorice. The first time I tried it I said what is this vile stuff… the second time, I said hey this isn’t that bad… the third time, I was hooked! Something similar happened with brie, and I’m even beginning to appreciate watermelon flavored candy. I love spinach, which at my age (late 20s) is not surprising.

I suspect dracoi hit the nail on the head. Some people are more afraid of snakes than others, so maybe some have a stronger aversion to celery than others.

goes and grabs another double salted licorice

26

I tried by god to like it. I bought a big bag of assorted Drop in Amsterdam to offer people back home, but not enough people like licorice to begin with to try it, so I ended up eating it all myself. I got to the point where I could just manage to appreciate the milder, honey-flavored salted licorice, but the double salted stuff was the candy equivalent of eating habenero peppers: I felt vaguely accomplished for having endured the torture, but the only pleasure was when I finally got the taste to go away afterwards. Like hitting you head with a hammer because it feels so good to stop.

27

Celery is a very odd choice for an example of something that tastes “horrible”. Celery is basically tasteless. I can’t think of many things which are more taste-neutral than celery. Put some peanut butter or cream cheese on it though, and it’s downright delicious! :smiley:

28

It’s not really that odd of an aversion, at least not in my experience. I like celery, but I could see how it’s horrible to a lot of people. It’s got a pretty immediately identifiable taste with a smack of bitterness, as well as a stringy texture that I could see a lot of people not enjoying. “I hate celery!” even has its own Facebook fan page..

29

That is the entire point of the thread; what is bland to some people can actually taste nasty to others.

Cilantro tastes absolutely nothing like soap to me, but to others it does.

I want to try one of Alan Smithee’s delicious sandwiches. :smiley:

30

To me it has a fairly intense smell/taste, somewhere between grass and burnt plastic, strong enough that I could smell it from a few feet away. Chalk it up to different genetics. :slight_smile: (And yes its stringy texture doesn’t help either.)

31

People tell me this about all sorts of food. Rice and potatoes, I’m told, are basically tasteless. Not so: they’re delicious, and they have distinct flavours.

I heard an interesting program on Radio 4 some years ago that mentioned that Alzheimers patients often would forget lifelong food dislikes, and enjoy foods they had always reviled. The same program talked about how you can aquire tastes by repeated exposute. As a lifelong picky eater, I decided to change. Like california jobcase, I’ve only had partial success. Some foods have gone from disgusting to I-wish-it-weren’t-an-ingredient-but-I’ll-eat-it. Nothing has crossed over into the “like” category, though my palate has expanded quite a lot. Bell peppers remain the single most disgusting food on the planet.

Oddly, for such a finicky eater, I have a terrible sense of smell. Whenever someone asks me “can you smell that?” the answer is usually “nope.” I wonder if, with a weak sense of smell, taste buds are correspondingly more important? I don’t think I’m a supertaster or anything.

32

To me it has a light almost anise-y and bitter undertaste, and if it is old and has that spongy inside can make my mouth tingle and the anise and bitter is way stronger. It could be that I am mildly allergic to it, but I like it when it is not old and bitter-tingly.

33

I had never heard of anyone not liking celery until I went to Japan, where it numerous people I met said they didn’t like it. Of course that could be genetic or cultural or just a random glitch in the data.

34

I’ve been told that the taste of artificial sweeteners seem to be a binary thing - some people can tell that it’s artificial and some can’t. I can always tell and it’s revolting.

Also revolting is durian.

35

Because my ex wife cooked it.

36

Nothing is as disgustingly vile as cucumbers. They’re like icy cold dead. And don’t get me started on the smell.

37

I’ve never liked celery at all. It’s vile. As a kid my mom tried to make me eat it, and it just had such a strong, unpleasant taste that I couldn’t eat it. On the other hand, I used to really love bleu cheese dressing. That is, I loved it until I cooked in a restaurant where we made our own bleu cheese dressing, and the recipe included celery seeds (which are basically extremely concentrated celery flavor). That was 20 years ago, and to this day I cannot eat bleu cheese dressing without tasting celery. Even when I know for a fact that it contains no celery parts. I’m in charge of making the dressings at my current job, and so I know everything that goes into the bleu cheese dressing, and celery is not an ingredient. The ingredients are all things I like, except for the fact that the bleu cheese itself continues to taste of celery to me.

I realize that in this case, it’s purely a psychological thing, but it’s there nevertheless.

38

I have always wondered why rich people like crap like caviar (up to $200.00/ounce)-to me it tastes horrible.
Truffles , not quite the same (but to me, nothing special).
the same for “exotic” game animals-venison is OK (I’ve had much better beef), pheasant (tastes like tough old rooster), pidgeon (ok, but two bites is all there is), and Kobe beef (I didn’t think much of it).
And don’t start on “kopiliwak”-the idea of drinking something that came through a rat’s intestines is disgusting.

39

Cucumbers - absolutely vile… and they affect everything they touch, imparting a cucumber flavor so strong you can’t even pick them out!

This topic fascinates me! I always wondered if apples or broccoli, for example, have an inherent “taste/flavor” and different people just process that as bad or good; or does the food actually taste different to different people?! Does that make sense?

I’m a fairly adventurous eater - I’ll try pretty much anything as long as it’s dead, I’ve lived in and traveled to many different countries, I loved the food in Singapore, love Indian, Thai, Italian, etc.

Since childhood, I’ve loved split pea soup, peas, mushrooms, broccoli, black licorice and jelly beans, brussels sprouts, lima beans and liver. As a child my birthday dinner (which the bday kid gets to choose) was always liver and lima beans and mashed potatoes! And sauteed mushrooms! My brother is the opposite - won’t try anything new, could live on hot dogs, chicken nuggets, velveeta, anything fried, nothing unusual.

I cannot stand:
celery
cucumbers
any melon, although I can sort of put up with watermelon
tuna in a can (cat food!)
shrimp - texture issue, I think
raw onions, cooked are fine

If any of the above are in a dish, it will ruin the dish for me. These things will overpower any other flavors in a dish. I used to think it had to do with what we were exposed to as kids, but my brother and I ended up as polar opposites, my sister is somewhat in the middle.

I now have a son and a daughter. DD will try anything, eats a broad range of foods, loves steak, tilapia, broccoli, but she hates peas. DS would happily live on noodles - plain, buttered noodles… he won’t even eat mashed potatoes. The only thing that keeps him healthy is that he loves fruit - mango, pears, pineapple, bananas. He hates meat of any kind, I think it’s a texture problem. So two kids living in the same house, being fed/offered the same foods - totally different!

40

Add “foie gras” (sp?) to that. I can understand acquired tastes, but not snobbery. A girl at a dinner party once looked down her nose at me because she could tell I didn’t care for the stuff. B***h. I’ve probably forgotten more culinary adventures than she will ever have.