Someone upstairs mentioned liking sauerkraut/choucroute. Four months working in an Alsace hotel has given me an implacable loathing for the stuff. It Stinks. Twenty years on, I've literally never eaten it again.
Peanut butter is another foodstuff which also Stinks.
Regarding taste, I will eat just about anything except okra. I will eat it if it is fried, but that is about it. I will not eat many things just because they are an unhealthy diet, soft drinks being one, and a lot of processed food loaded with salt and sugar and things I can not pronounce.
@Telford - you are from The Black Country and you don't like tripe and offal? (Faints and swoons ...)
I do like liver and kidney
My maternal grandfather was from Birmingham (ok, not The Black Country) and he loved pork scratchings, chicken feet and that ghastly boiled sweet 'Birmingham Troach'. Is that still available? I would draw the line at those.
Sprouts are like Marmite, I suppose, in that some people (such as @Telford) love them, which is good, of course, as no doubt they are nourishing, but others - myself included - are convinced that they are grown on the bitter fields of Mordor, to afflict the palates and digestion of the West...
It is true that many sprouts are grown in the gardens and allotments of the Black Country (Tolkein's Mordor).
Peanut butter is another foodstuff which also Stinks.
It's amusing seeing pages of posts listing things I like and this is no exception. Though would agree that it can stink - especially if it's left in a plastic box at ambient temperature for any length of time. How many people's hatred steam from food they had to eat as children?
I loathe marmite - though have a pot in the cupboard to add in minute quantities to some recipes as a source of umami.
If I were invited to someone’s house for a meal and was asked if there were any foods I can’t eat, I would say curry, seafood and mushrooms because of the texture. I would not expect to be given tripe or tongue or some of the more obscure items mentioned.
I avoid certain other foods because they don’t like me, though I like them, eg cauliflower, tomatoes.
I would never choose pasta salad, sweet n sour dishes, chicken nuggets, kebabs and other abominations.
As I was reminded by a recent bout of food poisoning, I'm best avoiding bought-in tubs of prepped stuff. And fish'n'chips aside, I don't go for takeaways.
Our local Korean BBQ though does a lovely crispy fried chicken bits, and we have an intention of visiting a Turkish restaurant which is winner of Best Kebabs in Edinburgh.
Okra, for me. Slimy and utterly revolting. Fortunately, it's not normally part of our cuisine here.
The other thing I've tried, which I thought was really repulsive was gefilte fish. It may be much prized by yiddishe mothers, but to me it just struck me that an enormous amount of effort had been put into completely wrecking what started off as perfectly OK ingredients.
For years I wouldn't touch bread and butter pudding after a particularly revolting mess that was served at school. However, recently I've dared to eat and enjoy it, cooked and prepared in a way that bears almost no resemblance to the offending example.
There is one other item of food which I can't eat. I seem to have acquired an allergic reaction to it. However, I can't cite it as something I can't stand because before I used to love it, and now very much regret having to refuse it.
I'm always puzzled by people who object to Marmite. Wonderful stuff in my opinion. Goes very well with cheese and pickle in a sandwich, and also on toast on its own.
Bananas. The smell makes me want to throw up. Actually eating them results in me throwing up. Including when someone used one as a cake ingredient and didn't mention it. 🤢
My lactose tolerance is ...odd. Quiche, white sauces, cream sauces for pasta, are Bad Things. Cheese is usually fine. Omelettes are fine, but a cheese omelette probably won't be! I don't take milk in tea very much as it's so sweet.
Okra, for me. Slimy and utterly revolting. Fortunately, it's not normally part of our cuisine here.
Steamed okra is definitely slimy. Roasted okra or fried okra, on the other hand, are not slimy at all. If you ever have an opportunity to try them roasted or fried, you might feel like you’re eating a totally different food from steamed okra.
Having said that, I’m not trying to play the “well, you just haven’t tried them _____” game. I couldn’t even begin to count that number of times I’ve heard “You don’t like pumpkin/peaches? You just haven’t had them prepared the right way. I bet you’d love my pumpkin/peach _____.”
No, I can pretty much guarantee I wouldn’t. Sometimes you just don’t like a particular food, no matter how it’s prepared.
About the only thing I've ever come across I really couldn't eat was some weird processed starch crackers a colleague brought back from Japan which were not only plasticky but so dry they stuck to my tongue.
I've tried real Chinese food that smelt like a farmyard, natto, hakarl, cassoulet de andouillette, you name it and I've finished my helping. All the things I hated as a kid I love now.
Dried apricots do give me wind cramps if I over indulge, but that is not the same thing, especially as I love them.
Marmite is the ambrosia of the gods. I'm less keen on their rice pudding, but if you were to give it to me it would vanish down the hatch with the rest.
Scripture agrees with me (see Hosea 3:1): the eating of raisin cakes is part and parcel of idolatry. Be it resolved, therefore, that all raisins everywhere from all times and places be swiftly and most forcefully returned to Their Father The Devil.
There are very few things I really CAN'T/WON'T eat. I've had very bad response to Quorn, and allergic type reaction to kiwi which means I really won't touch those. However in terms of things that are about plain dislike (as opposed to allergy/tolerance response)...
Parsnips. We hates them we does.... (but will hold our noses and eat them if we're a guest and they are completely unavoidable)
I have tried so many ways with parsnips, and I still don't like them. It doesn't matter what I do - roast them, add something like harissa or curry to spice them up, I've even tried using them in cakes/muffins... And I so relate to @Nick Tamen with the “well, you just haven’t tried them _____” game. It doesn't matter what I do, it still tastes of parsnip and I just Do.Not.Like.That.
Which is in some ways a shame, as I'd kind of quite like to be able to eat what's seasonally available. Just not parsnips.
I suspect there's something there about not really liking slightly sweet root veg as I don't much like carrot either. However carrot is easier to hide/spice out/cook into stew until it disintegrates (thus hiding the taste) or successfully turn into cake.
I'm also really Not.Keen on pineapple. But I can eat that more easily than parsnip in the pursuit of good manners....
Liquorice is the devil's earwax. (Ok - it's not that awful.)
I once had tripe sausages, unless they were andouilettes, in a restaurant just outside Taize. They looked disgusting, and were delicious. The only thing that would have improved them would have been being able to eat them with my eyes closed.
@KarlLB - I get that and do sympathise. Believe me. I genuinely get it if there are things that revolt you.
That doesn't stop me turning round, as this is Hell and saying to @Nick Tamen and some of the other fussy bastards on this thread, 'Get over it! There are people starving in Africa! Didn't your mother tell you to eat your greens! What's not to like?'
My mother was of the Boil Everything school of vegetable cookery, so I was brought up on soggy cabbage and tasteless parsnip.
But then I discovered roast parsnip and 3 minute cabbage (ditto sprouts). And courgettes, an otherwise watery, dispiriting vegetable, can be transformed by griddling.
On a more positive note, sprouts improve immeasurably if you roast them rather than boil them.
I quite like them boiled as long as they aren't boiled to mush but prefer them roast. Now I've discovered that I wouldn't have them any other way. Mind you, I only have them at Christmas.
I do think I'm fortunate liking almost anything and everything. I don’t know whether it's nature or nurture. I am genuinely puzzled though as to how people don't like stuff I either like a great deal or can tolerate or find inoffensive.
I hope that doesn't mean I'd be a pain in the neck and go round lecturing or hectoring people about it but I'm sure I have done so a time or two in the past.
My tolerance level is low but there was an incredibly fussy eater from Los Angeles on my Madagascan trip. She refused to eat any of the local food and subsisted on snacks she'd brought with her or bottles of Coke or packets of crisps (potato chips) she bought from petrol (gas) stations.
She wouldn't eat any of the lovely French style breakfasts and on the one occasion there was an 'American breakfast' she refused to eat it as it wasn't American enough.
She couldn't understand why there weren't McDonald's around. She once asked for the vegetable soup 'without the vegetables.'
The Malagasy people bent over backwards to help her in all sorts of ways and to find her things she wanted to eat. To no avail.
I'm sure there are Brits who behave like that abroad. She clearly hadn't read any of the notes supplied by the tour operator and it wasn't the right trip for her.
On a more positive note, sprouts improve immeasurably if you roast them rather than boil them.
And yet they don’t improve enough to rise above horrid.
Mind you, I only have them at Christmas.
I really was dumbstruck when I realized—thanks to “The Vicar of Dibley”—that sprouts are traditional at Christmas in the UK. Definitely not my idea of celebratory.
I don’t know whether it's nature or nurture. I am genuinely puzzled though as to how people don't like stuff I either like a great deal or can tolerate or find inoffensive.
Sometimes it’s genetic. Presence or lack of particular genes can affect how we taste certain chemicals in foods, cilantro tasting like soap to some people being a prime example. It can be what’s going on for some people with sprouts and other brassicas, too.
I think there are those for whom familiarity is the only safe option. We more adventurous types may feel they are missing out big time, but we don't have their sensory experiences.
It is possible though to convert. Mr F would never look at olives until one time we had them fresh on a Greek island and now he loves them.
Yes, there is a gene for tasting sulfurous compounds in sprouts that give them an extra-strong sulfurous (ie rotten egg) flavour if you have it. I remember doing a demo for school kids where I asked them to rate how strong a flavour was, then did PCR on cheek swabs. LO and behold, the sprout haters all had the gene.
I spent a month in China about ten years ago, three weeks in a non-tourist city on the mainland, and a week in Hong Kong. I speak no Mandarin (nor Cantonese, nor the local language of the city I stayed in), and as an almost lone guest in a business focused hotel simply had to help myself from the breakfast, lunch or dinner buffet.
I remember saying to myself “People are eating it, it’s food. Get on with it.” This was even more necessary when I was a guest. Fish balls, about the size of a ping pong ball, and beef balls the same - both with a slightly rubbery texture, and very hard to eat with chopsticks. Other things offered to me as a special delicacy.
The oddest thing (to me) which I ate was ducks’ feet, actually the meat was very tasty and tender. The only thing I passed up (in a most beautifully presented meal) was octopus rings - about 1 or 1.5 cm in diameter. Fortunately it was in a context where there was no social pressure to try it. I understand it would have been chewy. It looked it.
I certainly reaped the benefit of a childhood where my mother (who was a very good cook) would say, “You’ll eat what’s put in front of you, and you’ll like it.”
On a more positive note, sprouts improve immeasurably if you roast them rather than boil them.
At one point during lockdown I was getting an veg box that a catering supplier were selling to use the surplus that restaurants couldn't take; sprouts shredded and then stir fried with coconut seemed to work well - albeit a little more fiddly than preparing the same amount of cabbage.
Like you apart from the odd thing I don't really care for I will eat most things - though bad cooking is still bad cooking.
I spent a month in China about ten years ago, three weeks in a non-tourist city on the mainland, and a week in Hong Kong. I speak no Mandarin (nor Cantonese, nor the local language of the city I stayed in), and as an almost lone guest in a business focused hotel simply had to help myself from the breakfast, lunch or dinner buffet.
I remember saying to myself “People are eating it, it’s food. Get on with it.” This was even more necessary when I was a guest. Fish balls, about the size of a ping pong ball, and beef balls the same - both with a slightly rubbery texture, and very hard to eat with chopsticks. Other things offered to me as a special delicacy.
The oddest thing (to me) which I ate was ducks’ feet, actually the meat was very tasty and tender. The only thing I passed up (in a most beautifully presented meal) was octopus rings - about 1 or 1.5 cm in diameter. Fortunately it was in a context where there was no social pressure to try it. I understand it would have been chewy. It looked it.
I certainly reaped the benefit of a childhood where my mother (who was a very good cook) would say, “You’ll eat what’s put in front of you, and you’ll like it.”
I had the same - at least at school. It just meant wasted dinner money and hungry afternoons.
People with food aversions will know - you cannot make yourself eat the stuff. You just gag and vomit if you try.
I don't think you can force food aversions out of someone either by trying to force feed them or by leaving them hungry if they won't eat what you offer. Certainly being made to sit in front of some school offering for an hour and a half didn't make me eat it.
The rule in our house when I was growing up was that you had to take one bite of each food on the table without making a face. We weren’t required to serve ourselves anything more than that one bite, and nothing more was said as long as we didn’t make a face.
In other words, we didn’t have to like it and we weren’t necessarily expected to learn to like it, but we were expected to refrain from letting others at the table know we didn’t like it.
For me as a child, it was bacon. I’d hide it up my sleeve, or in a pocket. I once got into trouble when my mother found a rasher hidden under the edge of the carpet.
Bacon's funny stuff. Cooked so the fat fully renders and crisps it's one of the best things out there. Still floppy with strings of rubbery fat - revolting.
One of the things I really want to love to eat is eggplant. It's so pretty!! My mom and every one of my friends love it. To me, it tastes very bitter and the texture is not something I want to put into my mouth. Same with cornmeal mush. Mush absolutely will make me gag.
My BFF hates sprouts, but I didn't know that until she came to my house for dinner one time. I had roasted a pan of various veg, including sprouts (which I love however I can get them!), and she told me she doesn't like sprouts at all. I gave her the option of taking one (they were all halved) if she wanted. She did, just to see if I was as crazy as she knew me to be! She loved it, and ended up eating the whole pan of them, except for the few I had on my plate.
Oh, I forgot tripe (it’s like eating a kitchen sponge for me), raw oysters, tongue, lots of organs I suspect (dear God, eyeballs? That wasn’t even on my radar, apart from a scene in an old movie involving a genie)… though liver is fine for me, as is scrapple and lots of things that are made with organs but are basically puréed and made into one solid mass.
None of that rice flour and water turned into a tasteless jelly-like substance (I think it's called Banh cuon--warning, the pics online are LIES, there's nothing like so much "real food" added to it. The jelly to food ratio is at least ten to 1). It can only be made possible by smothering it in onions and fish sauce, and then I can choke a little of it down. It's the texture, and the tastelessness. It's basically like eating a vanilla jellyfish.
I have only dipped into random posts in this thread, but I have just spotted mention of Birmingham Troach. It was a bit like instantaneous time travel back 70 years.
I had not seen, heard of, nor tasted troach for 70 years - had utterly forgotten they had ever existed.
The memory retrieval system is a wonderful and capricious thing.
Troach were certainly a sweet I knew well in my childhood, although not with the appellation 'Birmingham'.
As I am sure I have mentioned before, I grew up in Birmingham, on the boundary with the Black Country. Both of my parents were from the Black Country and I was born in my maternal grandparents house, so just about Black Country born.
My childhood diet was certainly full of the various internal organs my parents were brought up on - apart from tripe which was only occasionally cooked , and that was just for my father, as were sweetbreads. Consequently I never acquired a taste for either. Of the other offal, I ate most, including brains, but could never abide kidneys - just the smell was enough to put me off.
If Mom cooked a fry-up mine had to be cooked first, before the kidney was added, because it 'tainted' the fat that the rest of the food was cooking in.
I still can't/won't eat any dish that has been cooked with kidneys.
A lot of people seem to love pine nuts and they have become really popular in salads lately. I can't even eat one. The flavour makes me spit them out immediately. I once ate a pesto pasta made with pine nuts, not realising that pesto is often made from them, and didn't like the aftertaste but ate it anyway and ended up with a stomach ache, so I may have an intolerance.
Pine nuts to me taste like eating a pine cone or pine needles. Very chemically and not at all edible tasting. I suspect they have another flavour for people who like them. If you do like pine nuts, what food would you compare the flavour to?
I have read of pine nuts sometimes causing a metallic taste in people's mouths, but I don't think that is my problem as the taste goes away for me as soon as I stop eating pine nuts or pesto, whereas other people end up tasting metal for days.
Sensory wise I hate orange juice with pulp. As a child I couldn't drink it at all and as an adult I have to gulp it down quickly if it is the only non-fizzy/pop/soda drink available. I also get sick from most sodas so don't drink them, especially not diet drinks as I have the gene that means artificial sugars taste terrible.
I can understand people not liking one or two items, but some people seem to have an inordinately long list of what they don't like.
. . .
That's not a value judgement. I have no idea why I seem able to eat anything and everything and why other people can't.
People are different. Does it need to be more complicated than that?
Look on the bright side—more of those foods for you. At least, that’s what I tell my wife when it comes to tomatoes on salads and peaches.
Yeah, but although a Heavenly thread this one has made me think and post in a Purgatorial or Hellish way.
How much of this is purely subjective and how much is gastric, cultural, genetic etc etc?
I completely take on board @KarlLB's point about certain foods causing people to gag or vomit. I don't doubt that and can well imagine how it must feel if people are pressuring you to eat things you can't stomach or treating you like a wierdo if you don't share the same tastes as them.
But what if I were to post on the 'Tolkein's Works' thread that his books were 'horrid' rather than, 'I think his novels are horrid.'
I'd soon get short shrift.
As it happens, I don't think his novels are 'horrid.' I just don't want to read them. That's a subjective response. Other people love them.
Fine.
It's a tricky area this.
If I posted 'You don't like sprouts? What's wrong with you?' I'd rightly be ticked off.
Elder daughters-in-law will not eat tomatoes, other than cooked as an ingredient in a soup or casserole. Consequently none of the grandchildren on that branch will eat tomatoes.
I love them, as do both of my sons. Elder son now grows tomatoes for his sole consumption, his children cannot be temped to try them.
(To be fair, all three kids have autism, so food preferences in general have always been idiosyncratic)
I also get sick from most sodas so don't drink them, especially not diet drinks as I have the gene that means artificial sugars taste terrible.
I never even thought about fizzy drinks in relation to this thread, probably because I just don't bother with them. Even non-diet ones tend to have sweeteners in, and my experience of those is:
saccharin, slightly bitter but since I only encounter it in tonic water, that's ok.
aspartame, weird bitter/metallic aftertaste, may trigger migraines, definitely a diuretic!
sucralose, appalling lingering sickly aftertaste that I have to drink a lot of water to get rid of.
Since Ribena started using sucralose in their normal version, I've stopped buying it and found a different squash made with only sugar. I got into the habit of checking ingredient lists when shopping as a kid, due to family food allergies. It's still a useful habit.
As a vegan/vegetarian there are lots of things I won't eat though back in the day I did like roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Back in my meat eating days someone gave me pig's trotters, they were pretty vile in my opinion, but most meat I was fine with.
I can over-taste bitter, so Brussel Sprouts aren't my favourite thin, but I can eat them. My husband thinks they've now been bred to be too bland, and wants the ones he remembers as a child.
The one thing I won't drink is low-sugar drinks, to me they just taste of vile chemicals.
low-sugar drinks are vile chemicals. As well as the horrid sucralose, they contain godnose and f*cknose. I know, I once (briefly) worked in a large food* manufacturer's development lab.
* I use the word 'food' here ironically.
PS: I love sprouts. But not, repeat not, the after-effects.
As a kid I remember being some neighbourhood kids being excited because their Mum was making tacos to take to a work function we were all attending. I offended them greatly because the taco shell tasted of vomit (to me) and I had to spit it out before I was really sick. I was so mortified because I hate embarrassing myself in public and I also didn't want to hurt their feelings, or offend their mother.
Even now I an only eat burritos or soft tacos and not the crunchy kind though my husband really enjoys them.
Just try having an intolerance/allergy to onion and shallots .... One famous fast-food franchise even includes it in the "savoury coating" on its chips. As for help-yourself salad bars, they are definitely out-of-bounds.
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Doublethink, Admin
Peanut butter is another foodstuff which also Stinks.
BLT Sandwiches. Very popular apparently. I do like liver and kidney I have never heard of Birmingham Troach,
It is true that many sprouts are grown in the gardens and allotments of the Black Country (Tolkein's Mordor).
Neither do I. They have to be fresh ( Not frozen} firm and preferably straight from the stick.
It's amusing seeing pages of posts listing things I like and this is no exception. Though would agree that it can stink - especially if it's left in a plastic box at ambient temperature for any length of time. How many people's hatred steam from food they had to eat as children?
I loathe marmite - though have a pot in the cupboard to add in minute quantities to some recipes as a source of umami.
I avoid certain other foods because they don’t like me, though I like them, eg cauliflower, tomatoes.
I would never choose pasta salad, sweet n sour dishes, chicken nuggets, kebabs and other abominations.
Our local Korean BBQ though does a lovely crispy fried chicken bits, and we have an intention of visiting a Turkish restaurant which is winner of Best Kebabs in Edinburgh.
The other thing I've tried, which I thought was really repulsive was gefilte fish. It may be much prized by yiddishe mothers, but to me it just struck me that an enormous amount of effort had been put into completely wrecking what started off as perfectly OK ingredients.
For years I wouldn't touch bread and butter pudding after a particularly revolting mess that was served at school. However, recently I've dared to eat and enjoy it, cooked and prepared in a way that bears almost no resemblance to the offending example.
There is one other item of food which I can't eat. I seem to have acquired an allergic reaction to it. However, I can't cite it as something I can't stand because before I used to love it, and now very much regret having to refuse it.
I'm always puzzled by people who object to Marmite. Wonderful stuff in my opinion. Goes very well with cheese and pickle in a sandwich, and also on toast on its own.
My lactose tolerance is ...odd. Quiche, white sauces, cream sauces for pasta, are Bad Things. Cheese is usually fine. Omelettes are fine, but a cheese omelette probably won't be! I don't take milk in tea very much as it's so sweet.
Having said that, I’m not trying to play the “well, you just haven’t tried them _____” game. I couldn’t even begin to count that number of times I’ve heard “You don’t like pumpkin/peaches? You just haven’t had them prepared the right way. I bet you’d love my pumpkin/peach _____.”
No, I can pretty much guarantee I wouldn’t. Sometimes you just don’t like a particular food, no matter how it’s prepared.
I've tried real Chinese food that smelt like a farmyard, natto, hakarl, cassoulet de andouillette, you name it and I've finished my helping. All the things I hated as a kid I love now.
Dried apricots do give me wind cramps if I over indulge, but that is not the same thing, especially as I love them.
Marmite is the ambrosia of the gods. I'm less keen on their rice pudding, but if you were to give it to me it would vanish down the hatch with the rest.
Nasty-ass chocolate-chip-decoy dead-fly bullshit.
Scripture agrees with me (see Hosea 3:1): the eating of raisin cakes is part and parcel of idolatry. Be it resolved, therefore, that all raisins everywhere from all times and places be swiftly and most forcefully returned to Their Father The Devil.
Not at all keen on aniseed or aniseed-adjacent flavours - having said that I flirt with Campari (usually in a Negroni).
Parsnips. We hates them we does.... (but will hold our noses and eat them if we're a guest and they are completely unavoidable)
I have tried so many ways with parsnips, and I still don't like them. It doesn't matter what I do - roast them, add something like harissa or curry to spice them up, I've even tried using them in cakes/muffins... And I so relate to @Nick Tamen with the “well, you just haven’t tried them _____” game. It doesn't matter what I do, it still tastes of parsnip and I just Do.Not.Like.That.
Which is in some ways a shame, as I'd kind of quite like to be able to eat what's seasonally available. Just not parsnips.
I suspect there's something there about not really liking slightly sweet root veg as I don't much like carrot either. However carrot is easier to hide/spice out/cook into stew until it disintegrates (thus hiding the taste) or successfully turn into cake.
I'm also really Not.Keen on pineapple. But I can eat that more easily than parsnip in the pursuit of good manners....
I once had tripe sausages, unless they were andouilettes, in a restaurant just outside Taize. They looked disgusting, and were delicious. The only thing that would have improved them would have been being able to eat them with my eyes closed.
That doesn't stop me turning round, as this is Hell and saying to @Nick Tamen and some of the other fussy bastards on this thread, 'Get over it! There are people starving in Africa! Didn't your mother tell you to eat your greens! What's not to like?'
😉
Aieeeeee!
I was joking but not in an appropriate place.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
But then I discovered roast parsnip and 3 minute cabbage (ditto sprouts). And courgettes, an otherwise watery, dispiriting vegetable, can be transformed by griddling.
I quite like them boiled as long as they aren't boiled to mush but prefer them roast. Now I've discovered that I wouldn't have them any other way. Mind you, I only have them at Christmas.
I do think I'm fortunate liking almost anything and everything. I don’t know whether it's nature or nurture. I am genuinely puzzled though as to how people don't like stuff I either like a great deal or can tolerate or find inoffensive.
I hope that doesn't mean I'd be a pain in the neck and go round lecturing or hectoring people about it but I'm sure I have done so a time or two in the past.
My tolerance level is low but there was an incredibly fussy eater from Los Angeles on my Madagascan trip. She refused to eat any of the local food and subsisted on snacks she'd brought with her or bottles of Coke or packets of crisps (potato chips) she bought from petrol (gas) stations.
She wouldn't eat any of the lovely French style breakfasts and on the one occasion there was an 'American breakfast' she refused to eat it as it wasn't American enough.
She couldn't understand why there weren't McDonald's around. She once asked for the vegetable soup 'without the vegetables.'
The Malagasy people bent over backwards to help her in all sorts of ways and to find her things she wanted to eat. To no avail.
I'm sure there are Brits who behave like that abroad. She clearly hadn't read any of the notes supplied by the tour operator and it wasn't the right trip for her.
They say travel broadens the mind ...
I really was dumbstruck when I realized—thanks to “The Vicar of Dibley”—that sprouts are traditional at Christmas in the UK. Definitely not my idea of celebratory.
Sometimes it’s genetic. Presence or lack of particular genes can affect how we taste certain chemicals in foods, cilantro tasting like soap to some people being a prime example. It can be what’s going on for some people with sprouts and other brassicas, too.
It is possible though to convert. Mr F would never look at olives until one time we had them fresh on a Greek island and now he loves them.
I'm genuinely puzzled but don't want to be judgemental or More Omnivorous Than Thou.
I can understand people not liking one or two items, but some people seem to have an inordinately long list of what they don't like.
If these fall into categories, brassica for instance, then that would explain a lot. Or genetic factors.
Otherwise I'm genuinely at a loss to understand any of this.
That's not a value judgement. I have no idea why I seem able to eat anything and everything and why other people can't.
I remember saying to myself “People are eating it, it’s food. Get on with it.” This was even more necessary when I was a guest. Fish balls, about the size of a ping pong ball, and beef balls the same - both with a slightly rubbery texture, and very hard to eat with chopsticks. Other things offered to me as a special delicacy.
The oddest thing (to me) which I ate was ducks’ feet, actually the meat was very tasty and tender. The only thing I passed up (in a most beautifully presented meal) was octopus rings - about 1 or 1.5 cm in diameter. Fortunately it was in a context where there was no social pressure to try it. I understand it would have been chewy. It looked it.
I certainly reaped the benefit of a childhood where my mother (who was a very good cook) would say, “You’ll eat what’s put in front of you, and you’ll like it.”
At one point during lockdown I was getting an veg box that a catering supplier were selling to use the surplus that restaurants couldn't take; sprouts shredded and then stir fried with coconut seemed to work well - albeit a little more fiddly than preparing the same amount of cabbage.
Like you apart from the odd thing I don't really care for I will eat most things - though bad cooking is still bad cooking.
Look on the bright side—more of those foods for you. At least, that’s what I tell my wife when it comes to tomatoes on salads and peaches.
I had the same - at least at school. It just meant wasted dinner money and hungry afternoons.
People with food aversions will know - you cannot make yourself eat the stuff. You just gag and vomit if you try.
I don't think you can force food aversions out of someone either by trying to force feed them or by leaving them hungry if they won't eat what you offer. Certainly being made to sit in front of some school offering for an hour and a half didn't make me eat it.
In other words, we didn’t have to like it and we weren’t necessarily expected to learn to like it, but we were expected to refrain from letting others at the table know we didn’t like it.
My BFF hates sprouts, but I didn't know that until she came to my house for dinner one time. I had roasted a pan of various veg, including sprouts (which I love however I can get them!), and she told me she doesn't like sprouts at all. I gave her the option of taking one (they were all halved) if she wanted. She did, just to see if I was as crazy as she knew me to be! She loved it, and ended up eating the whole pan of them, except for the few I had on my plate.
I had not seen, heard of, nor tasted troach for 70 years - had utterly forgotten they had ever existed.
The memory retrieval system is a wonderful and capricious thing.
Troach were certainly a sweet I knew well in my childhood, although not with the appellation 'Birmingham'.
As I am sure I have mentioned before, I grew up in Birmingham, on the boundary with the Black Country. Both of my parents were from the Black Country and I was born in my maternal grandparents house, so just about Black Country born.
My childhood diet was certainly full of the various internal organs my parents were brought up on - apart from tripe which was only occasionally cooked , and that was just for my father, as were sweetbreads. Consequently I never acquired a taste for either. Of the other offal, I ate most, including brains, but could never abide kidneys - just the smell was enough to put me off.
If Mom cooked a fry-up mine had to be cooked first, before the kidney was added, because it 'tainted' the fat that the rest of the food was cooking in.
I still can't/won't eat any dish that has been cooked with kidneys.
Pine nuts to me taste like eating a pine cone or pine needles. Very chemically and not at all edible tasting. I suspect they have another flavour for people who like them. If you do like pine nuts, what food would you compare the flavour to?
I have read of pine nuts sometimes causing a metallic taste in people's mouths, but I don't think that is my problem as the taste goes away for me as soon as I stop eating pine nuts or pesto, whereas other people end up tasting metal for days.
Sensory wise I hate orange juice with pulp. As a child I couldn't drink it at all and as an adult I have to gulp it down quickly if it is the only non-fizzy/pop/soda drink available. I also get sick from most sodas so don't drink them, especially not diet drinks as I have the gene that means artificial sugars taste terrible.
Yeah, but although a Heavenly thread this one has made me think and post in a Purgatorial or Hellish way.
How much of this is purely subjective and how much is gastric, cultural, genetic etc etc?
I completely take on board @KarlLB's point about certain foods causing people to gag or vomit. I don't doubt that and can well imagine how it must feel if people are pressuring you to eat things you can't stomach or treating you like a wierdo if you don't share the same tastes as them.
But what if I were to post on the 'Tolkein's Works' thread that his books were 'horrid' rather than, 'I think his novels are horrid.'
I'd soon get short shrift.
As it happens, I don't think his novels are 'horrid.' I just don't want to read them. That's a subjective response. Other people love them.
Fine.
It's a tricky area this.
If I posted 'You don't like sprouts? What's wrong with you?' I'd rightly be ticked off.
No.
I love them, as do both of my sons. Elder son now grows tomatoes for his sole consumption, his children cannot be temped to try them.
(To be fair, all three kids have autism, so food preferences in general have always been idiosyncratic)
I never even thought about fizzy drinks in relation to this thread, probably because I just don't bother with them. Even non-diet ones tend to have sweeteners in, and my experience of those is:
Since Ribena started using sucralose in their normal version, I've stopped buying it and found a different squash made with only sugar. I got into the habit of checking ingredient lists when shopping as a kid, due to family food allergies. It's still a useful habit.
I can over-taste bitter, so Brussel Sprouts aren't my favourite thin, but I can eat them. My husband thinks they've now been bred to be too bland, and wants the ones he remembers as a child.
The one thing I won't drink is low-sugar drinks, to me they just taste of vile chemicals.
* I use the word 'food' here ironically.
PS: I love sprouts. But not, repeat not, the after-effects.
Even now I an only eat burritos or soft tacos and not the crunchy kind though my husband really enjoys them.
I only discovered this as an adult tho, because the liver I was served for school dinner had been kept hot for about 3 hours, and was truly vile.