Foods I dislike

WARNING:  I may dislike a food that you love.  I’m mildly sorry if you are offended by my dislike, but if you are, I hope you’ll get over it.  I don’t care if you like it, as long as you don’t insist that I like it.

I didn’t build this Rubenesque body by skipping many meals, and there are, in fact, very few foods that I dislike.  As my cousin-in-law Elisabeth once told me, I’ll even eat gristle.  But there are some foods that I have a hard time putting in my mouth, let alone swallowing.

Velveeta or other American cheese food product.  With one possible exception, which is very rarely on a burger, I would never willingly eat American cheese food product.  The fact that it is called  “food product” is enough to turn my stomach.  I don’t want to eat a “food product.”  I want to eat food.  I don’t understand the appeal of this food product.  It tastes like it was created in a laboratory.  It melts well, I suppose, but so does real cheese.  So does plastic, for that matter.  It probably has a shelf-life measured in years, not weeks, and maybe that appeals to some.  Someone once served me chocolate fudge made with Velveeta instead of butter.  Cripes, there out to be a law.  A corollary dislike is the florescent yellow-orange goo that is sold with corn chips at the ballpark, called nacho cheese.  Ugh.  On the other hand, Nacho Cheese Doritos?  Love them.

Cream cheese.  Whatever happened?  I used to love it.  I grew up on cream cheese and bagels, cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwiches, and cream cheese cake.  Now it gives me the jibblies if I eat it.  Is it texture or taste, you ask?  Taste, since it doesn’t matter to me if it’s in a block or whipped in a container.  Either way I can’t stand it.  Cream cheese frosting?  I skip it.  My carrot cake gets vanilla buttercream instead.  One of my standard Christmas cookies is an Oreo truffle, made with cream cheese.  They are wildly popular, and I make dozens of them, and I shudder.  I substitute a mild goat cheese whenever possible in cooking.

As Sandra Boynton says, I’ve never met a carbohydrate I didn’t like.  Almost.  I don’t like banana bread.  This is a bit of a quandary, because I also don’t like ripe bananas, and so as soon as the bananas show any brown spots, I peel them and freeze them.  To make banana bread.  Consequently my freezer has bags and bags of frozen bananas.  I’ll make a huge batch of banana bread a few times a year, and bring it to work, or send it to my children.

Scotch.  Okay, not a food, but a comestible.  Which stimulates a significant gag reflex in me.  I have to give up any thought of being a sophisticated scotch sipper.  No problemo.

Honey mustard anything.  I love honey.  I like mustard.  The two together become a slimy, sweet excrescence.  Pretzels, chicken, ribs, turkey sandwich – it doesn’t matter what it’s served on, or with.  Whatever it is will be better without.  If I discover some honey mustard has snuck into a sandwich I’m eating, I will choke down or spit out the bite (depending on where I am and with whom), and toss the rest.  I’d rather go hungry.

American milk chocolate. Like Hershey bars.  I specify American milk chocolate because I’m actually fond of European milk chocolate, which is rich and creamy.  American milk chocolate is chalky and overly sweet.  If I am jonesing for chocolate, and the only choice is a Hershey bar, I’ll skip it and go brush my teeth to get the craving out of my mouth.

Asparagus in a can.  I don’t think I could put it in my mouth, or get it past my nose.  Maybe, if I were making a cream of asparagus soup and the market had no fresh asparagus, and I absolutely HAD to have homemade cream of asparagus soup, I MIGHT consider using asparagus in a can.  ***  Nope.  I’ve thought about it, and if that were the case I would use frozen asparagus.  What if the market was out of both fresh and frozen asparagus and I absolutely HAD to have cream of asparagus soup?  Jeebus, I’ve never needed cream of asparagus soup that badly.

Anything artificially sweetened.  There are no words.  Saving a few, or even a few hundred, calories is not worth that poison flavor and effect.  I stay away.  Ok, well, full disclosure:  I do have a diet coke about once a year.  Other than that, I stay away.

White chocolate.  What my dad called Lard Bar.   I don’t loathe it on the scale of nacho cheese goo, but I see it as a complete waste of calories.  It is flavorless, except for sweetness.  It can be useful as a contrast in decorating, say, those Oreo truffles mentioned above, but otherwise, why bother?  I’d rather eat real lard.

The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Eaten?  Well, it was 1990 or 1991 during the Chinese Lunar Festival, and the woman I worked with, Isabel, wanted to share a very special, traditional holiday food with me.  I love trying new foods, and will try anything (even insects, if cooked), so I enthusiastically agreed to try the Lunar Festival food.  It was Sweet Lotus Seed soup.  It was cold, achingly sweet, and mucilaginous.  I am inherently a polite human, and so on tasting the soup, I couldn’t spew it back into the cup.  I had to swallow it.  It was like drinking cold sweet snot.  If there’s any reader out there who would like to make me a bowl of this soup to prove that it is not disgusting, I will happily try it again.  Maybe I was pregnant when I tried it.  I couldn’t choke down much then.

 

 

 

Photo credit:  © mucilagenous | Dreamstime.com – <a href=”https://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-image-piece-salted-lard-image37456786#res16757777″>Piece Of Salted Lard Photo</a>