25 Foods I Will Not Eat

So I was telling a friend about foods I hate. Hate to eat, that is: I find potatoes, for instance, to be extremely tasty but harbor antipathy toward them on general principle, having been traumatized by spuds in the past. I'll still eat their starchy ass, however.

Don't you stare at me with those damn eyes of yours.

But there are many, many foods I won't eat. I suppose that makes me a picky eater, although conversely I'll try almost anything once. There's just no guarantee I'll like it. My taste buds are like an extremely snotty sorority that will let almost anybody attend a rush party, but mostly only to make fun of girls they were never going to accept in the first place.

I was trying to Google a picture of a snotty sorority girl to insert here,
but I found this instead and thought it hilarious.

Anyway, just for fun I thought I'd list all the foods I hate. Or at least 25 of them. There might be enough left for a second list. Because I hate a lot of foods. Hey, I know what I like and what I don't. In fact, I have a list just like this for people. Wanna know if you're on it? Yeah, I didn't think so.

Here we go, in no particular order of odiousness:

1. Mushrooms - they're goddamn fungus. If I won't let it live in my refrigerator, I won't put it on my pizza.
2. Onions - stinky, weird tasting, nasty texture. When I was a kid, my mom eventually started to grate them into a paste before adding them to food. Otherwise every dinner started and ended with me picking piles of chopped onion out of my meal.
3. Green bell peppers - these are just disgusting. (Red and yellow peppers? Awesome)
4. Jalapeno peppers - I love hot peppers. But jalapenos just don't taste good. Give me those dried Asian death-peppers any day.
5. Tomatoes - I will eat anything made with tomatoes. I will not eat anything that still retains tomato form. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.
6. Cabbage - not in any form. Not even those little purple strings in the house salad.
7. Sauerkraut - technically another form of cabbage, but so unbelievably noxious it deserves its own entry.
8. Beets - seriously?
9. Celery - unless it is cooked into a mush, as in pea soup. Celery that contains any element of crunch or texture is inedible.
10. Sushi - raw fish, often wrapped in seaweed. Gag me.
11. Mango - just not a pleasant taste to me.
12. Pears.
13. Peaches - both of these for the same reason: I had to eat them out of a can in syrup for breakfast every morning of my childhood. As soon as I got old enough to make my own food choices, these were banned forever. And of course, no fruit cocktail for the same reason.
14. Plums - unpleasant. But prunes? Yum!
15. Olives - not black, not green, not stuffed with a pimento and stuck in a martini.
16. Anchovies - if you're getting the idea that I enjoy my pizza on the unadorned side, you're right.
17. Eggs - much like tomatoes in my book. Indispensable as an ingredient, completely unacceptable in their natural state.
18. Oysters - I've had 'em raw, I've had 'em cooked. I don't like them.
19. Pickles - Precocious Daughter puts pickles in a bowl and eats them as a snack. At times like these I find it hard to believe we share the same DNA.
20. Bleu cheese - foulness incarnate.
21. Hummus - I've tried, really really tried to enjoy hummus. I can't do it.
22. Rutabaga - oh Lord, I had to eat these as a kid. I never got over it.
23. Black licorice - Beloved Spouse will eat only black jelly beans. I will eat any color but. We are made for each other.
24. Cottage cheese - in theory there should be nothing objectionable about cottage cheese. But I can't bring myself to eat it.
25. Guacamole - this shit is just nasty.

Turns out there are many more - potato salad, lobster, Brussels sprouts, iced coffee - but I think I've done an adequate job of portraying myself as a cretin with an uneducated palate. Also of being uninvited to other people's dinner parties until the end of time. All in all, not a bad day's work.

Oh, hey. Remind me to tell you about Polish Chop Suey sometime. But I'll have to scour my memory first. I do believe I've actually repressed the trauma of having to eat it.

Think I'll have some prunes...