Microwave popcorn. Popcorn is my favorite snack food, but the microwave stuff is terrible. That fake butter smell that comes out of those things and stinks up the whole house is the worst.
I loved it, until I had kids. There’s something about the smell of a dirty diaper that hits my nose the same was as the smell of artificial movie theater butter flavor.
Also, cottage cheese. The aversion is so strong that I assume it must be related to some sort of illness, but I don’t remember what led me from yum to nausea.
A few, most noticeably soy sauce.
I discovered it a few years ago, really liked and used it daily for months. One day I left for a half week trip to Spain, came back and couldn’t stand it anymore!
I had suddenly become extremely sensible to a particular note of its taste, which I could barely perceive before, now felt overwhelming and disgusting.
After one year of break I recently started using it again, but don’t like it as much as before.
Some time after switching to a vegetarian diet, I couldn’t stand the smell of meat.
Other times the opposite happened.
I never cared for ginger. Then last summer I was biting pieces off raw ginger along with tomatoes as snacks.
Real or fake? And if real, how real? Real soy sauce contains some amount of alcohol and lacks the distinctly chemical undertone you get from something like La Choy. I can’t have La Choy any more either, but that’s just because I’m used to tasting the natural stuff and that seems more like shoving my tongue inside a barrel of random chemicals.
Corned Beef. As a kid, I would only eat corned beef sandwiches for lunch. From first grade until sixth grade, every day was a corned beef sandwiches with spicy brown mustard, chips, a cookie, and a drink. I’m not sure what exactly changed, but upon entering seventh grade I started buy lunch from the school instead of bringing one, and now if I smell corned beef it makes me gag.
I went out with my wife once to a Spanish restaurant in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. We ordered a big pitcher of Sangria and a “Seafood Paella” - the Paella came when we were about halfway through the Sangria, and what the menu description didn’t say was that their version of “seafood” meant 2% whitefish, 1% shrimp, 2% mussels (which I hate) and 95% baby squids. I ate a few and noticed a decidedly squid-like flavor to the entire dish, which I really didn’t like. Not to mention that a bunch of them were upside down, so all over the Paella was tons of little legs pointing up to the sky! So I tried to pick them out. After about 5 minutes I had about a 6 inch pile of baby squids on my plate and was feeling revolted (the combination of the Paella and being somewhat bloated on Sangria was a deadly combo).
We drove home and I kept the window down the entire time, because I felt THAT close to just barfing it all up. Paella is really low on my list now, regardless as to what’s in it.
Seafood paella is a revolting dish no matter what’s in it. May as well call it “Shell’n’Bones Stew”.
It’s much better with chorizo and little bone-in chicken pieces. Mmmmm, now you’re making me miss my Spanish host mother’s cooking…
Incidentally, I share Charlatan’s aversion to baby squid, from something very similar - Spanish restaurant in DC. I can’t stand eating food that looks at you. And somehow, that extended to much of the seafood community, to the point where calamari revolts me, and I’m only slowly working my way into sushi. :P
I once made guacamole with a partially-rotten avocado, got totally sick, and couldn’t stomach the smell or thought of the stuff for years and years, although I’ve recently given it another shot and I seem to be over it.
Supertasting and bad guac, a winning combination.
No current food aversions, but as a kid, I got immediately sick after eating a fish sandwish from a fast food place. We rarely had fast food, and I loved the fish sandwiches, but after emptying my stomach out with visibly recognizable fish sandwich chunks in it, I could not eat a fish sandwich for nearly 20 years.
Then, as a college student, my youth orchestra went on tour to England and Scotland, since we’d been invited to a festival. We were hosted by different cities on the way to Edinburgh, and what do you know but every single meal for the one-week trip from London to Edinburgh featured ham (aka gammon), and most of the meals for the second week also featured ham. I never developed a loathing for ham, and now I quite like it, but it took about a decade before I would voluntarily buy and eat ham.
I got food poisoning after having a seafood pasta at Red Robin and still get queasy ten years later every time we drive past it.
Mayo. I ate a sandwich with some bad mayo when I was around seven years old and got deathly ill. I couldn’t touch the stuff for decades. Even today, I avoid it whenever possible and can tolerate only tiny amounts.
Ramen. Ate it for 2 months straight when it was all I could afford.
Also, pork. Lived in Turkey long enough that I no longer consider pork an every day, normal part of my diet. Like dog or horse meat, I’ll eat pork out of politeness if you serve it to me, but it never enters my mind to want it as a food any more.
Wendy’s Frosties. I had one or two a week for a long, long time, but then one day after having one at lunch, I had a massive acid reflux attack while meeting a potential wedding photographer and spent the rest of the evening praying for death.
I can have ice cream just fine. I can have milkshakes just fine. But I can’t have Frosties anymore.
Which SUCKS.
Hot pockets. I despise them now.
Except bacon, right?
Even squirted full of Easy Cheese right after they come out of the microwave?
Ugh. Now I despise Hot Pockets.
Which is probably a good thing.
Including. I don’t get cravings for bacon. You can have my share.