“How Can You Eat That?”
There are several things we (at least I) should be eating. Which ones, you ask? Salmon immediately comes to mind, with its high-quality protein, many vitamins and minerals and, especially, omega-3 fatty acids. My problem is this: I dislike salmon and always have.
Most people I know enjoy salmon and often say they love it. When they look askance at me for saying I don’t like it and ask me why, my answer is simple: I just can’t deal with the taste. Hearing my response almost always leads to their giving me the description of a recipe I absolutely MUST try that will result in my never wanting to eat anything else ever again. Sorry, but no. I have tried salmon many times in many different ways and just don’t like it.
There are other foods I live without (and without regret), just as likely there are things you don’t enjoy eating. What brought the subject of popular versus unpopular foods to mind was an article I read in which the author all but criminalized anyone who could tolerate, much less enjoy, candy corn. No, I’m not kidding. While the article was written as a pre-Halloween piece, with the author thinking of a way to grab readers’ attention, to use words such as “disgusting” and “vile,” and referred to those who enjoyed the candy as suffering from ageusia (yeah, I had to look it up, too), seemed more than a little over the top to me. The article ended with a thinly veiled threat that the author would write a later article on the Illuminati’s ultimate revenge against gourmets—circus peanuts. Regardless of how one might feel about a particular food, who cares if it isn’t one you like? Just don’t eat it. (And, just to counterpoint, if candy corn is so terrible just who bought the thirty-five million pounds of it that were manufactured last year?)
Which led me to research foods people typically dislike, and to what extent they will express their displeasure. In one study, done in Great Britain by Save the Children (I have no idea why they felt the need to investigate) number one is oysters, with 47% of respondents claiming they hated them.
In several studies done in the United States, what came out as number one? This is too widespread and diverse a country to unify on anything, much less a most disliked food (I am really tired of people using the word hate for something as banal as preference in culinary taste).However, studies have been done on a state-by-state basis. I expected to see the usual items I’ve heard people rail against such as liver, lima beans, Brussels sprouts, and ranch dressing on pizza.
OK, that last one was I’d never heard of, and is–according to one study–specific to residents of New York State. Having learned that, I was interested in finding out what food was most disliked in other states, fully expecting the list to be filled with foods such as the above cited liver, creamed spinach, anchovies—in short, and again, the foods I’ve heard people complain about all my life; you’ve probably heard the same. While I won’t list all fifty states, here is a sampling of responses.
Florida: Licorice
Georgia: Tuna salad
Illinois: String cheese (specifically, the practice of biting string cheese instead of peeling it—go figure)
Kansas: Seafood
Louisiana: Cookies with raisins
Maryland: The corner pieces of brownies
Massachusetts: Mayonnaise on french fries
Michigan: Cold pizza
Texas: Well-done steak
Huh? Needless to say, I was surprised. These were the most disliked foods? Not that I like—or would even eat—mayonnaise on french fries, but that it ranked highest on that states’ list just seemed odd to me. Of course, I don’t know—nor could learn—the details of how the study was conducted, so I take no responsibility in reporting the accuracy of the results.
Looking for something less serious to write about, I decided to search on a potentially much more amusing topic: children’s reactions to foods they dislike. Frankly, what I found was predictable and dull. But, far more smile-inducing was a Website I found that gave children’s reasons for refusing to eat some of their favorite foods, as reported by their mothers. Again, here is a sampling that I am certain many of you will be able to relate to:
1) One mother’s youngster had watched the movie “Ratatouille” a reported gazillion times and begged her mother to get her some ratatouille which is a dish the main character apparently makes during the cartoon. The woman searched high and low for the right reecipe until she was able to duplicate the dish, only to have her daughter refuse to eat it because “it wasn’t made by a rat.”
2) Another child, scared by what happened to Snow White, refused to eat an apple. The mother’s response? “I told her that if this apple really could make her sleep for several hours I would have cleaned the store out.”
3) A four-year-old refused to eat pitted cherries because they had “turned into olives.”
4) After watching his mother painstakingly make onion rings from scratch (a favorite treat of the child), he refused to eat them because they contained onions.
5) Seeing the characters Anna, Elsa, and Olaf from the movie “Frozen” on a box of breakfast cereal made one three-year-old girl refuse to eat it because she didn’t want to eat anything that tasted like Elsa.
6) After putting five spoons in her bowl, another pre-school aged child refused to eat because there were too many spoons in the bowl.
7) A frustrated mother reported that after putting a plate of crackers and cheese (next to each other) on a plate, her child refused to eat because “I asked for cheese and crackers!”
8) Noting the strand of cheese that had dripped off his grilled cheese sandwich, a little boy wouldn’t eat the sandwich because it had a tail and he doesn’t eat animals.
9) Again, regarding cheese, one child refused to eat a slice of Swiss cheese because “a mouse already ate some!”
10) Finally, a little girl adamantly refused to eat an apple that had an indented blossom end (the bottom) because “it has a booty.”
I’ll close with a reference to something I mentioned earlier. It is my guess that in reading the most hated food by state you wondered, “What about Connecticut?” I won’t disappoint the curious. The most hated food item reported by Nutmeggers was … canned food. Any and all of them.
Hmm. I’d have sworn it would have been salmon.
This week’s Street Advertising Smile:
