Their taste, texture or presentation can impact on one’s enjoyment of a food. We all have foods that we love and seek out, yet there are others we avoid due to our personal preferences.
Our food preferences can be affected by our culture, what we have been brought up on (yes, we can blame our parents), our own taste buds and our genes.
For December, please tell us what food you dislike the most and why?
The most interesting answer will be awarded a Food Challenge Champion badge.
I love steak pies but I accidentally ordered steak and kidney once . I can still smell the kidney to this day . Definitely on the top of my least favored food . I think the ''why" with kidneys would have to do with the end result of their function .
A badly done steak and kidney pie will put anyone off. I agree.
But I have had very good french style kidneys flambe, with shallots, mushrooms, flamed in brandy, and cream to sauce it up, and that is something else altogether. Do try that if you get a chance at a French style restaurant.
Offal of any kind. When at school in the early 60s we were made to cook creamed brains. I threw up. Mum made steak and kidney pie once (Dad loved it)… like @vax2000 I hate the taste and texture of kidneys. Grandma did haggis once. I can’t remember liking or disliking, but if you presented me with it now… I’d throw up. Once exception to my no offal rule is pate… occasionally to be polite.
Dammit, now I feel sick, just having thought about it all.
I have a sensory aversion to any mushy, gooey, slimy food.
Also hate any organ meats of animals.
My grandmother would make a fragrant sauce using chicken giblets which was very popular with the rest of the family as was her tripe and bacon casserole.
I couldn’t even think of it!
Any fish with fine bones in it brings on aversion and a gagging reflex. Something to do with having more than one misadventure with bones stuck in places that created much concern.
In Master Chef a single bone can send a contestant home. In households of not so long ago, the blame for failure to remove bones as one ate or crunch and swallow lay elsewhere.
Bananas. I was given chewable tablets when I was a child that were banana flavoured. I have never recovered. But, I also dislike mango and papaya, so maybe there is more to it.
Tripe is a major no. Just wrong in so many ways.
And the fermented, sticky, stinky, gooey mess that is natto - fermented soybeans that are very popular in Japan. Not with me they’re not !
Asia is full of unusual foods. Acquired tastes in many instances. I have tried a lot of what Japan has to offer. Some products such as whale meat should be avoided for the best of reasons. Shirako was a once off, although if one knew in advance what is in what is on a plate it might be a short meal. It’s one of the lesser challenges of Asian cuisine.
How to revere texture and ignore flavour, or enjoy flavour where the texture is challenging? Is what we reject more a result of our early food experiences (familiarity and acquired tastes) than any other influences? Mind over matter for those who watched another contrived celebrity TV series, famous for Julia and a Vet. A pair of true comedians. No comment on the quality of the acting of the cast or quality of food stuff required.
Soft, gooey foods are very unpopular with posters so far.
Maybe the dislike is due to an innate self-preservation quality because ‘spoiled’ foods are soft, slimy, smelly…and could cause serious diseases.
Probably the tablets were flavoured with artificial banana essence. This brings up two things that might be interesting - or at least relevant.
One is that smells are a very powerful stimulus of memory and the recollection is often very visceral, it makes us feel the feelings associated with the smell whether good or bad. These memories and feelings tend to stick with us for life.
You can expect strong smell to play a big role in food dislikes.
The other is that bananas go through complex changes as they ripen. There is the obvious softening and change of colour but also changes to smell. To my nose the smell of a very ripe banana is dominated by the main ingredient in synthetic banana essence (iso amyl acetate) and I don’t like it. I love bananas but only between the firm-yellow and few black spots stages. Once they are very ripe (lots of black and very soft) the smell drives me away and they need to be cooked or fed to the chooks.
I am not much into meat. So the most disgusting things were animal bits, which were tripe, and eyeballs (very salty gooey blahhh). The thought of either makes my stomach curl up and try to hide.
Jellyfish (eaten at an Asian restaurant) was just very salty, soft, gooey, strange tasting jelly. Not something I will rush to have again.
I forgot about tripe. Mum cooked it for me once… I hated it. Her response was “oh thank god, I dont like it either!!” I think we just had a sandwich for dinner that night.
I’m not fussed on papaya, but I adore Mango and would eat Kensington Pride every day if I could. I have friends who also don’t like mango and I have zero comprehension of that. Then again, none of those get my aversion to banana cake, banana flavouring or strawberry flavouring. Bananas much be eaten just short of green.
Then there are those avocadoes which ripen in patches because people squeeze with fingertips which starts the rotting process. Rotting avocado is the worst!
Aussies have shared with the Dailymail.uk the dishes they hated as children.
The list includes:
Ham steak topped with a pineapple ring.
Apricot chicken.
Pork chops.
Steak and kidney pie.
Lumpy mashed potatoes.
Frozen peas.
Apparently the problem was overcooked meat and mushy veggies, but many said it has put them off those foods for life.
