Some lists: 4

I don’t remember what I was reading that started this scribbled list of foods I find unpleasant. Maybe it was my 100 things list. Anyway, it’s time to write it up.

Foods that I once thought were disgusting but now enjoy:

  • Peanut M&M’s: It took a while to convince me that all three tastes and textures weren’t repulsive, that they actually could go together.
  • Cream cheese (as on a bagel) and cheesecake: Blame my Midwestern upbringing for this one.

Foods that I really don’t like but will eat if there’s no alternative:

  • Melon: I eat a lot of this in fruit salad, and otherwise never.
  • Most salad dressings: Though I do like a nice vinaigrette.
  • Hummus.
  • Eggplant.
  • Brie, hot or cold.
  • That squidgy asparagus-and-artichoke dip: In other words, most of those mushy white gluppy things you get served as appetizers.

Foods that I eat mostly on a dare:

  • Organ meats.
  • Raw shellfish.
  • Sushi: Though my cousin introduced me to vegetable sushi the last time that I was in California, and that was yummy.

Foods that are imported from Yuckistan, don’t try to feed me these, if you and I are stranded with nothing to eat but this you’re going to be fat and happy:

  • Flavored Doritos, otherwise known as Doritos with crap on ’em: Doritos are perfectly nice corn chips. They should taste like corn and salt. Not something called “cool ranch.” What is that?
  • Blue cheese salad dressing: Hey! This stuff is spoiled.
  • Tomato soup: I like gazpacho. But hot pureed tomatoes take me back to a nastier time from my childhood, a time when I would be stuck each afternoon with a couple of bratty kids from the neighborhood until my mother got off work.
  • And the #1, super-icky food: Cottage cheese.

As you might suspect, there is a story to go with the cottage cheese.

For a time, when I started grammar school, I would go to day care at the end of the day until Mom got home. Or I would be there for the duration on one of those oh-so-inconvenient teacher work days when the rest of the world was on a normal schedule. Anyway, I don’t remember how it happened, maybe I missed my taxi, but I had a lunch on a tray at the day care center, and I was eating by myself. And at the corner of the tray, where a treat ought to be, was a scoop of something white. Could it be ice cream? Oh boy! Well, I ate the rest of my lunch like a good kid (don’t get my mother started on what a good child I was) and then I took a spoonful of the inviting white mound, the mound that was a little too perfectly white and round.

I don’t recall where that sour mouthful ended up. I was a good kid, so I probably swallowed it.