HAD FOODS YOU HATED AS A KID?

We all had ‘em, growing-up time. You know, foods you hated.

As an adult, most of the hatred disappeared. But the memories linger.

Here’s an admission from the memory bank.

I hated raw, sliced tomato. You know, the sliver that came with most burgers and some sandwiches. What I did was glide and remove the red veggie from the burger to the plate.

But there were other foods that were a struggle to swallow; over the decades, I learned to get accustomed to some:

• Raw celery. The taste was, well, offensive. Can now eat ‘em if chopped small in a salad; in stews, it’s OK now.

• Natto. The icky, sticky fermented soy bean thing. In my book: This. Was. Not. Food. Still can’t handle it.
• Peppers. Green ones, red ones, yellow ones. Recall the time I went to a luncheon and a tuna-stuffed red pepper was the meal. I only could eat the tuna. Now, I can handle red and yellow peppers, raw or cooked. Still don’t enjoy the green ones.
• Pickles. Large, small, chopped – still don’t eat them. Yep, they’re removed from my Big Mac at McDonald’s. Have tried to appreciate Italian dills, particularly the ones that taste like local-style pickled cucumbers.
• Raw onions. Will eat the sweet Maui onions, even raw; cooked sliced onions are OK. Chopped fine in salads, OK.
• Siracha hot sauce, the kind of heat that makes you sweat. In the “hot’ realm, I don’t enjoy buffalo wings, really hot kim chee, and anything seasoned with the heat, from chips to anything “flaming.”
• Raw oysters. My biggest faux pas, as an adult, was ordering a dozen oysters that I thought would be Oysters Rockeller (cooked). Still can’t handle raw oysters.

What foodstuff couldn’t you handle when you were growing up?…