Are there any foods that have been ruined for you?

[liamsaunt]

Mussels. I haven't been able to eat them for over four years, since a bowl of big flabby bland mussels I had in a restaurant. They made me sick, and that was it. It's a shame, because I used to love mussels. I keep trying to make myself eat them again, but no luck so far.

And kaluha. But I won't tell that story.

[Ore]

The sickest I have EVER been was from a roulade of Monkfish liver served at Kushiyu - a Sushi restaurant in the Valley (Los Angeles). I was sooo sick that night - I vomited three or four times and had a 103 degree fever for about 30 hours - I am brave though - I dont eat the liver anymore - but I do eat the meat - I haven't gone back to Kushiyu though - and its a damn good sushi place...

Also, after that night of sushi, before I got sick, we went out for a guiness - So I had bad monkfish liver in me, and the guiness, and to this day I still cant drink the guiness...maybe the guiness made me sick?? I am at 80% Monkfish liver - 20% Guiness as the cause

Anyone know if beer (from the tap) can get you this sick??

Ore

[Jinmyo]

A few years ago, a cook did a bad leg of lamb. I pulled it from the oven and dumped it. Egad, the stench. I threw up.

For a few months just the thought of lamb made my stomach twist. So I cooked (and ate) quite a bit of it until that nonsense stopped.

I love lamb and refused to be denied using it because of some misguided primordial fight-or-flight response.

[NulloModo]

i thought one one thing I haven't been able to bring myself to cook in the past year:

Fennel or Tripe.

Last year, on the last day of school, I decided to make myself a celebratory dinner of tripe braised with fennel and herbs (and some other stuff). During the prep I managed to almost completely chop off the tip of my right index finger. Now, I love fennel, and happily eat it when anyone else makes it, but every time I try to pick up those bulbs at the grocery store myself my finger starts to twitch...

[wnissen]

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).

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I actually think it's a pretty sensible survival mechanism. Back when the edibility of many potential foods was in doubt, long-remembered aversion to the food that made you sick was a very useful reaction. However, it has always seemed to me that, especially with microbial contamination, the aversion tends to fall on the wrong food. I had Norwalk a couple of weeks ago (often miscalled a "stomach virus") which could have been food related or not, there is no way to tell. However, my last two meals before I started getting really sick were an eclair and a dungeness crab (the latter consumed when I could tell I was getting ill), and I now have a mild aversion to both those foods. Not very useful, given that I was almost certainly infected with Norwalk several days before.

Walt

[FL Heat]

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? 

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The very first time I had Indian food (at an Indian restaurant, with the oh-so-handsome Indian man whose parents ran the place), the same thing happened (he wasn't my first boyfriend, just my first head-over-heels-he's-the-cutest-thing-EVER crush in college). And I still associate the fragrance (which I thought was amazing when I walked in and horrific when I walked out) of Indian restaurants with those feelings.

We can be pathetic together.

Diana

[Susan G]

Hey! Misery *does* love company!!

[Tess]

A family I lived with in Ireland seemed to eat rabbit for every meal, and a corporate dining room at one of my jobs was all lamb all the time. In both cases, bad cooking made it a lot worse. I have completely lost patience with both those foods. Neither was my favorite, so no big deal.

I haven't been permanently turned off by getting ill over something; I don't think I've ever even had a mild case of food poisoning.

[chow guy]

I got really sick on lobster once. It took many years for me to get back to eating lobsters. Thank goodness, it has long since passed and the red beasts and I have made up.

[FistFullaRoux]

I still have issues with canteloupe. I can handle a slice, maybe, every once in a while. I'm just extrememly careful not to eat more than that.

The story goes, I ate several beautiful ripe ones from the garden, in one sitting, solo.

Raw oysters on the other hand, that is an instant reaction. Besides, I'm in Birmingham, Alabama - a little too far inland for me to risk them raw. I'll have to try them again next time I go back to Louisiana.

[Tonyy13]

Red Bull and Gin... Deadly combo... Can't even stand the smell of Red bull now......

"They call it Red bull, why is it yellow?" Rough night, rougher morning.....

[auntdot]

Flapjack, you are not alone. My dad would not eat anything not made by him, my mother, or in a restaurant. And it wasn't that he was sqeamish about seeing food made, he would cook with my mom all the time. He always said it was because he was passed around from relative to relative as a kid. Don't know exactly what memory precipitated that aversion, and would not ask.

My aversion to snails is that when I lived in Southern CA would have to walk across a long lawn after dark to get to the apartment. There were so many snails that one could not take a step without crushing at least one. The next morning you would see the corpses. It turned me off to the buggers.

But adore raw clams and oysters.

Go figure.

[M. Lucia]

I generally have a stomach of iron, however the one time I have been sick since I was a child I saw baby corns return from whence they came. As if those things weren't creepy enough already, I can't look at them without remembering the incident.

I'll pretty much eat anything though.

What interests me here is how food is so tied to memory. Experience cultivates our likes and dislikes just as much as tastes. Whenever I eat macaroni and cheese I think of how I cooked it for my family during a very difficult time, and crudites salad brings up the first meal I ever ate in Paris. Rarely has a food been ruined for me, but rather its odors and tastes tied with a personal experience or emotion.

[Bernaise]

boiled pork.

any kind any time...

broth made with pork and frankly any of those pork dumplings particualrly steamed dumplings at dim sum

[jgarner53]

I swore off sushi for about six months after a bout with something after a sushi meal one Christmas (for some reason, there was a spate of years where I always got sick in some fashion at Christmas: cold, flu, whatever). But after revisiting my sushi, I couldn't quite stomach it.

But nothing's ever been permanently ruined for me.

[neep]

Well -- not entirely ruined, but I haven't had a tuna fish salad sandwich which measures up to the platonic ideal of a tuna salad sandwich. Mostly because in New York diners the tuna tastes like it comes out of a tanker truck.

Ever hopeful, I have one about once a year.

[McDuff]

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.

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I once read a quality spec sheet from Guittard that had a notation for testing the cocoa beans for E. coli. Kind of made me wonder. Who peed on the watermelon?

[Misa]

As a kid, my babysitter served me cottage cheese in the middle of having the flu. It has the same texture coming back up.

I can occasionally eat it, but generally... it makes me gag.

[Dani Mc]

Gin. I used to love dirty tanqueray martinis until a well meaning friend kept replacing them at a rate that made it impossible to tell how much I had drunk. I told him I felt ill and wanted to go home, so he SPED me there in his brand new car. I asked him to slow down twice and he didn't listen, so I projectile vomited into the AC/Heat vents on the dashboard. The process to clean it was not entirely sucessful. He claims he could smell faint whiffs whenever the heat was cranked for the next few months. Too bad it was at the beginning of a long Colorado winter.

There were times when shrimp, pistachios, and cinnamon doughnuts were not my friends, but I'll happily eat them now.

[Muffin210]

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.

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Ha ha! I bet there are a lot of us who haven't been able to touch those things since their freshman year in college! (Not to mention Jaegermeister...)

The last thing I ate before getting ill with what turned out later to be appendicitis was a blueberry danish, and although blueberries were probably one of my favorite foods before then, it was years before I could stand to taste them again.

[rosebud]

H-m-m-m-m. The only things I can't really abide are the things I disected in biology class. I've never eaten frog legs or perch (I've never run across anything to do with cats), but I also realized I couldn't eat an insect or amphibian. This actually became a problem when we went to a French family's place for a meal. Believe it or not, this was in Germany. I won't bore you with the details (everybody significant was in the military). However, I was brought up to at least TRY what was put on my plate. I just stared at that snail and tried to decide what was worse: do I eat this thing and then barf (thus, ruining everyone's dinner) or be a wuss and not eat this. I was 13 years old at the time. I chose to just stare at it. Our host simply declared, "Good, more for me!" Bless him.

[naguere]

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.

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Spot on with that. Germany 1960. In my army mess a double rum cost less than the Coke, the whole thing was duty free. So easy to drink, but the after effects were horrendous

[dumplin]

I love seafood bisque. I had a lobster bisque at a very nice restaurant that gave me food poisoning. I didn't eat bisque for a while, but I can't say that it is ruined forever.

Sweet and Sour chicken is. My mom made it from a box mix which was bad enough. I didn't feel good anyway, and she made me eat it. I'm sure you can guess what happened next. I'll never ever eat sweet and sour chicken again.

[ScorchedPalate]

I have a number of things that fall into this category, for different reasons:

Southern Comfort -- I don't think I need to explain this one. (Not that I miss it, anyway... but I can't even be near someone who's drinking it.)

I couldn't eat ice cream sundaes for years after having worked at a gourmet ice cream parlor during college; luckily, this aversion has passed -- though in general I am still not a big fan of sweets. I still have the same problem with Danish pastries, as the result of too many years at the bakery in high school.

I got really sick as a kid after eating an over-ripe banana. To this day, I can't handle the texture of bananas (this includes smoothies) without gagging, no matter how firm they are, but I love the scent and flavor. Banana bread and other banana-flavored items seem to be OK.

My mom refused to make roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for 25 years; she'd served it to my dad the night he had his heart attack, and never could shake the association. One Christmas, he begged her, and she made it. I haven't seen it since, though.

~Anita

Edited December 11, 2004 by ScorchedPalate (log)

[jess mebane]

meatloaf. Mother made it with fritos and pickles.