“YUCK, GROSS!”: the things we absolutely hated as kids
The I-don’t-like-it monster. It was invariably on the packing list for my school trip that it “had to stay at home.” Well, you can bet it was there at home. Which child didn’t have one? Bits, pieces, vegetables: children quickly find something wrong with their food. Too spicy, too highly seasoned, too much, too healthy. Although we can no longer imagine it, we were just like that when we were younger. These were our absolute no-gos:
Wieke: “My mother’s lasagna, because she made it without béchamel sauce, and when I was 25 (I’m 30 now) I discovered that lasagna is supposed to have béchamel sauce. In fact, that’s the only thing that makes lasagna even remotely tasty. To this day, I haven’t eaten lasagna more than 10 times. Which was incredibly inconvenient for my parents, because that same lasagna was my brother’s favorite food. 90% of our arguments at home were about lasagna. I hate lasagna now. Still.”
Sharon: “Something I’m really ashamed of now: we ate out quite often, and everywhere I always ordered chicken with fries and applesauce. When you think about it, it’s a miracle I turned out okay—food-wise. My preference for fries (or chips, I don’t mind which you call them) has remained, by the way, but only in places where ordering them is completely legitimate (De Friethoes! Par Hassard! The snack bar!). Now that I think about it: my twelve-year-old son has never eaten applesauce! He has been eating sushi since he got teeth, though, which may be the other extreme…”
Steffi: “Beans. In any form. Brown, white, kidney, soy or borlotti: I wouldn’t eat them. Not because of the taste, which I actually thought was pretty good. But that texture! That taut, crunchy skin, followed by a floury explosion when you bit through it. Brrr. I thought it was horrifying. So when I went to eat at a friend’s house and her father put a huge pan of chili con carne on the table, that was reason enough for me to announce that I was vegetarian. The result: I got a plate without meat. Just beans. I struggled through it with tears in my eyes. And never stayed for dinner at that friend’s house again.”
Adeline: “Peas. Gah-damn-it. Negotiating with my mother over how many peas I had to eat was a high-level affair. She put 8 on my plate; I started with 2. In the end, I still tried to slip the 5 I was required to eat into the mouth of our German Shepherd. I still don’t eat them.”
Sabina: “I didn’t like macaroni with red sauce. With bits in it. My mother often made red sauce with bits in it. And those bits were: diced bell pepper, cubes of salami, pieces of onion, mushrooms. The red sauce came from an envelope. If I even smelled it, I went pale. Luckily, we had a dog who sat halfway under the table between my sister and me during dinner. Big advantage: I could feed the dog the macaroni with red sauce and bits, because it really ate EVERYTHING. Big disadvantage: it was a white dog (a Dalmatian), which still had a red-orange snout for a few hours after dinner.”
Marcus: “Marmalade. My Anglophile father loved it. I always watched with a certain horror as he meticulously spread marmalade on a crispbread every morning—he was a man of rituals—(not a single spot remained unspread) and ate it with satisfaction. He insisted I try it too, and I tried several times, but to this day I find it disgusting. The bitter-sweet taste. The texture with hard bits of peel. Brrrr…. In general, I think everything with hard bits of peel is horrible.”
Also read:
- 10 foods that are weirdly delicious #13
- This is what we ate in the 1990s, part one
- I asked star chefs about their ultimate guilty pleasure
