Your Food Phobias? (mentally, woman, parent, aunt)

[puginabug]

Don’t think I could eat insects. Definitely pets, as Terra said earlier, are off the menu. I’d have to be near death or catatonic to ear dog or cat.

I’ve eaten hearts, livers, tripe (not my favorite). Love chicken gizzards and liver.

My daughter hunt and cooks/eats squirrel. Not for me, thanks, although I do like rabbit.

Can’t think of anything really that I wouldn’t at least try, other than the aforementioned.

[pathrunner]

Oh dear. I've always fed organ meats to my dogs: chicken gizzards, livers and hearts. I don't think I could eat gizzards. Well, there's always a first time.... which I hope never comes!!

[NW4me]

When I was a kid, spaghetti made me think of worms, so I didn't want to eat it.

Of course, I outgrew that... and yet, if I want to make pasta, I choose a less-messy,
more fork-friendly shape... like corkscrews, lanterns or wagon wheels.

[pathrunner]

You're reminding me that one summer when I was a little kid we went to Oregon to visit my mother's family. We visited her aunt's berry farm just outside Portland. They had a huge berry patch (blackberries) raspberries and also cherry trees. My dad bit into a blackberry and bit right into a stink bug. I did not eat any kind of berry pie until I was well into my 20's.

[Parnassia]

Originally Posted by TerraDown

Yes, Ms. Elnina. Thanks to this website, I have learned how to get rid of them. Put Bay leaves in the flour. Someone posted that over in the food forum yrs. ago. I took their advice, and it works!

*Yes, I put them in the cereals and sugar too. It really does work.

My mom did this. Don't recall everything tasting like bay, though every once in a while I can recall her cursing under her breath over a missed bay leaf ending up getting baked into something. She was what I would describe as a dutiful well-intentioned cook, not a brilliant one !

[Parnassia]

After thinking about phobias a little more I can bring to mind a couple.

While going through an 8 month chemo regimen for breast cancer, most of the time I could eat normally, but there were periods during the cycle I couldn't even tolerate the scent of cooking. Some chemo agents distort your sense of smell and taste. My appetite was here one minute, gone the next too. Learned the drill pretty quickly but did make a couple of mistakes. One was fixing myself that snack of melted muenster cheese on Triscuits at just the wrong moment. Never ever again. If I'd had the strength of character I might have used chemo to bring an end to my chocolate habit by eating too much at one of those wrong moments. I didn't have the discipline and my waistline reflects that fact.

A kindhearted coworker who knew about the chemo put together her family favorite chicken/turkey tetrazzini casserole, froze it and presented it to me at work. She'd heard the myth that chemo patients always lose lots of weight. The thing was HUGE! I swear she found a fancy oversized casserole dish especially for the occasion. As the afternoon wore on, the scent of thawing casserole floated through my cubicle and by the time "we" arrived home the aroma was overwhelming. I chucked it into the fridge rather hurriedly, appetite gone. The odor permeated the fridge to the degree I couldn't bear to open the door. The next morning was no better. What to do? I finally called a neighbor whose wife happened to be out of town. He was a lean and lanky bottomless pit with an insatiable appetite, so was pretty sure he'd polish off the problem for me. Asked him to let himself in the house (the only entry was through the kitchen), open the fridge and remove the offending casserole while I cowered in the bathroom. Only bring the dish back after it was well scoured, so I could return it to its owner. She'd never need to know I couldn't enjoy her specialty. The olfactory memory of that casserole haunts me to this day.

I am eternally thankful I have a cast iron GI tract and can eat pretty much anything. As a biologist who had the privilege of living and working in some very remote parts of the USA, I've also had the pleasure of eating unusual things. There's a list somewhere here on C-D but a few highlights include bowhead whale blubber (an incredible, unexpected YUM!), roast walrus, smoke dried harbor seal, herring roe rolled up in sea lettuce, beaver kidneys, and sea cucumber (aka sea slugs). The only one I'd do a hard pass on now would be the walrus. It wasn't fresh. It had spent the previous few months in seal oil sewn up in a seal stomach and buried. Yeah, the vitamin content may have been well preserved but...

[CalWorth]

After reading the other posts, mine don't seem so bad.

Fruit cocktail. The grapes reminded me of eyeballs, the pears of cataracts.

Soft-boiled eggs...horrible when they are cold...slimy. It took years for me to appreciate eating eggs with intact yolks, like poached or sunny side up

Canned spinach. I love fresh or frozen, canned is gross.

I was literally force-fed this stuff by my parents, which has a lot to do with how revolting these foods are to me.

[pathrunner]

Yes, canned spinach seems gross... now. When I was a finicky kid though, I liked it. Go figure. Well, there was nothing else. I don't know whether they even sold fresh spinach in the grocery stores back in the 50's and 60's. Surely they must have. My mom never fixed it. It was always out of the can. Ugh. Why did I like it??

[TwinbrookNine]

I would never eat fish - turns out I'm allergic to anything that swims in water or crawls in muck. Just looking at oysters makes me throw up.

Duckblood soup (czarnina). Yuk!
Can't stand anything pumpkin.
Olives (yuk!)
liver

[hunterseat]

I knew a woman who had a fear of mustard. No joke. A friend of mine practices many types of therapists on people and horses (occasional dog). She worked with the woman using EFT (tapping). As far as I know it worked!