Are there any foods that have been ruined for you?

[PurpleDingo99]

Everyone usually has one food that have a "phobia" of. usually because they either got food poisoning off it or just had an absolutely aweful version of it. My mother wont touch scampi anymore because she got horribly sick off it once. Last night, i found my first. Our local country club had its weekly italian buffet last night (always a mixed bag. their on-the-spot pasta station sucks, but they have some great amuse-ish things like prochuitto and cheeses and occasionally good cuts of meat.) I was starving last night and ended up with three or four plates of food- all filled to various densities. I hadnt had osso buco or risotto for a while, so those ended up on my plate. I dont remember when the last time i had osso buco was (or if i ever liked it,) but that grizzly meat was the most revolting thing i have eaten in months. I literally took one bite and put it on my bread plate so i could forget about it. It was so bad that that taste lingered in my mouth to such an intensity that i couldnt even enjoy the lemon grass salmon. The texture just stayed on my teeth. Its almost as if my teeth went numb.

Do you have any dishes that you cant even touch any more?

[Maison Rustique]

chicken

[peppyre]

I'm having issues with poultry at the moment. No turkey for me this Chirstmas.

[ghostrider]

Two poultry responses have me very curious as to why.

[Octaveman]

Cajun popcorn shrimp. Ate too many one time...got sick...15 years ago.

Mushroom Chicken at any Chinese fast food. Found a cigarette butt in my dish one time. It's been 4 years and counting.

[Ling]

butter chicken--I was hospitalized after eating this at a friend's birthday party. I now feel sick whenever I smell this dish.

[lovebenton0]

I couldn't stand to be around boiled shrimp for years! A friend was making gumbo with shrimp for us when I was pregnant (and I could eat anything! nothing else bothered me). But we arrived while it was going into the pot of gumbo, which I normally would have loved to be eating. Something about that smell when it started cooking in the gumbo . . . I sat out on the porch with a bowl of rice, and a peanut butter sandwich.

Fortunately I recovered from that -- about 10 years later.

[flapjack willy]

I know this may sound strange, but I will not eat food that someone else has prepared unless it is in a restaurant. If folks send or bring food over to the house or we are invited to a party I will not eat.

[NulloModo]

Flapjack -

That is truly bizarre, what is the reasoning behind that?

Personally, the idea of writing off a food entirely just because you had a bad preparation of it, or once got sick from it, seems silly to me. I have a friend who won't eat fried wontons anymore because he once got sick off of them, and he really like fried wontons.

The only time I can recall ever giving myself serious food poisoning was from a big batch of italian sausage and peppers that I made up, and somehow managed to not fully cook. I was sick as a dog for about a week, and I will admit, that during that week, the thought of Italian sausage was pretty revolting. Less than a month later though I was digging in with gusto to the same dish (which I did manage to cook thoroughly that time).

[maremosso]

Coconut anything.

After tasting something cooked in rancid coconut oil once in South India... never, never again!

[Rachel Perlow]

Hmm, I had a very VERY bad experience after eating watermelon a few years ago. Interestingly, it did not turn me off of watermelon, but has made me phobic about scrubbing the outside of all melons with dish soap and hot water before slicing into them.

[Carlovski]

I can't eat Pomegranates any more. Used to love them as a kid but was ill after eating one (Almost certainly unrelated) and haven't eaten one since. I keep seeing them in the shops and am almost tempted, but haven't managed it yet.

I had the same thing with Mussels for a while, but am glad to say I am back eating them now. Still don't like eating cold mussels though (Eg in a seafood salad).

[petite tête de chou]

I was so nervous about attending my first day of school in the first grade that I vomited my boiled eggs.

Didn't eat eggs for about a year after that. And even tho' I enjoy eggs NOW, I'll always have a wee bit of a twinge about them.

[JennotJenn]

Israeli couscous. I can hardly even type the words without dry heaving. For the record, they come back up in the same shape they go down. Also this Cookies and Cream candy bar that Hershey's used to make. Violent stomach bug one Easter, and the last thing I ate before the bug hit was a cookies and cream bunny. Unrelated to food, but I can't hear the song Hot!Hot!Hot! without feeling sick!sick!sick! Not because the song is so horrible, though it is, but because I came down with another horrible stomach bug during my cousin Katie's dance recital, where they danced to that song. Been a good 10 years and I still turn green when I hear it. And I finally got over it, but I couldn't eat collards for awhile because I saw my cousin Dennis puke them up on my grandma's kitchen floor. But I got over that.

Oh, and in response to someone upthread, I used to be the same way about homecooked food. But it was also restaurant food. Any food that I had not seen someone prepare. It was because I'm mentally ill, though, and when I was little it manifested itself in an absolute terror that someone was going to poison me (I lost 15 pounds during that period, which is a LOT for a 7 year old).

My mom can't eat chicken anymore (case of salmonella that landed her in hospital, taken via ambulance).

[JPW]

Rum and coke. 1st time I ever got sick from drinking too much.

A score of years later, the smell of it still makes my stomach churn.

In terms of food, a bad dish just makes me want to run off to the store to get the ingredients so I can make it at home the RIGHT way.

[Jaymes]

Snails.

Used to love them and ordered them all the time until I had this conversation one evening with a dining companion:

"How is your escargot?"

"Good. Really good."

"I can't eat them. When I look at them, all I can think about is that slimy trail they leave on sidewalks."

And from then on, when I look at them, all I can think about is that slimy trail they leave on sidewalks.

[Mabelline]

The smell of mescal...it reminds me of a truly enormous hangover in Rocky Point (Puerto Penasco, Sonorra, Mexico)--on the beach...in the heat...smell like gasoline in my very eyeballs, I believe. No thank you very much. But everyone should be 20 once, I reckon.

[Jaymes]

But everyone should be 20 once, I reckon.

And maybe even twice, if you live long enough. At least that's what I'm hoping.

[Mabelline]

God, I'm so slow on the uptake this morning. That's cool Jaymes. I'll buy your dinner on your birthday --as long as you don't want mescal with it! Promise!

The only food I cannot abide to be around is muskmelons. It's a smell thing there as well, but different. As a teenager, my first real job was flagging for a cropduster. Me and another kid got stranded for several hours beside a picked field of muskmelons on the reservation, one that had the cows turned in to clean up. It was over 110*, no shade, flies, that melon smell.....YIKES. I still cannot abide them.

[PurpleDingo99]

I actually found a caterpillar in a cooked pile of green beans a while back. surprisingly, ill still eat them.

[JPW]

I actually found a caterpillar in a cooked pile of green beans a while back. surprisingly, ill still eat them.

←

Caterpillars or green beans?

[Susan G]

Lemon chicken. First boyfriend broke up with me during this meal.

Twenty years later, the flavors still evoke the sadness and nausea.

How pathetic is this?

[jgm]

Mine isn't a particular food; it's a restaurant...actually, a building.

When we first moved to the neighborhood, it was a delightful waterfront seafood place, which served a wonderful brunch on Sunday mornings. Then the tornado hit, and the seafood place didn't reopen. The building was vacant for awhile.

Finally, another restaurant opened in that same building, but it was a much different kind of restaurant. It lasted a couple of years, obviously because the food was pretty mediocre. When the next restaurant openened in that building, my husband and I tried it out one Saturday night. His meal was unremarkable; mine was barely edible. Something about chicken marinated in yogurt served on rice. Everything was off-white, and it had no flavor whatsoever. When I saw it on the menu, I figured those were the main ingredients, but it turns out they were the only ingredients. We were not impressed.

Later that night I became extremely ill. Who knows whether it was flu or food poisoning. Two other restaurants have opened in that same building, but I cannot bring myself to walk through the front door, even though the owners, managers, staff, furniture--you name it, everything has changed. Doesn't matter. I can't drive by the building without an uncomfortable twitch in my stomach.

[elswinger]

I don't know why, but I haven't had a gould BBQ Pork Rib in awhile, and though I might be blocking out the incident, for some reason the though of ribs makes me a bit queasy (and beleive me, pork ribs used to be in my top three food groups).

[PurpleDingo99]

Heh. i just remembered when i got deathly sick off a shake at cold stone in vegas. Missed lance burton, back when i actually cared about magic. Oh well. *eats more coldstone*