I love sour tastes like lemon, lemon iced tea, not too sweet, my favourite! Don’t like low quality, crap tasting cheap tea though… I drink the slighty pricier stuff with a taste!

The odd thing though, is that I like olives. A lot. Been eating them my whole life. Maybe that’s why?

I can generally eat anything (I would love to show you my blog of all the crap I taste, but it’s in Norwegian. Translators just f* up everything.), but grapefruit? I’ll run through fire to avoid it. Tasted gin and tonic first time? I’d sacrifice my first born.

I did read somewhere that too sweet flavours could be a problem as well – I have never liked overly sweet stuff. I can tell the difference between high fructose corn syrup (we don’t have to much of that in Norway/Scandinavia, thankfully!), and sugar, even though both are sickly sweet for me.

Foods I don’t like include grapefruits, cilantro (can’t STAND it), olives (can taste even a little rind of it buried underneath stuff on a pizza), mustard, or lemons. I hate accidentally biting into an orange rind when I’m trying to get the peel off as well. Bitter tastes are just horrible or tastes of carbonation (without something to cover it, like the sugariness in Coke/Sprite/etc).

There was an experiment I did in biology in high school where we each were given a little piece of tissue paper that had had a certain substance put on it. For each one, certain people couldn’t taste anything other than paper while the same substance would produce horrible bitterness for others (me) and some would taste only a little bitterness. It turns out that a lot of it is genetic. My dad has very similar tastes to me, but my mom, it seems, is the exact opposite. She loves coffee, grapefruit, mustard, and olives. It’s all very interesting.

Don’t like mole. While I’ve learned to put mustard on my hotdog in general I can’t stand pickled anything. Not pickles. Not cabbage.

I also love broccoli and cauliflower. And spinach, which can be bitter.

Hmmm. I have a smooth tongue. That makes me a non-taster. Right?

Zahavah — Cilantro is one of those polarizing foods, too. I didn’t used to like it when I was a kid, but I was never one of those people who could notice the tiniest bit of it. Now I really like it.
I think there are a few reasons why people don’t like certain foods. Some of it is nature, as I explained, but a lot of it is nurture. Some people don’t like “the idea” of certain foods. These are picky people who don’t grow out of their childhood selectiveness. I think another problem is that a lot of people haven’t had really good versions of some foods. If you’ve only had certain vegetables canned or frozen, or overcooked, of course you might not like them. I love to make asparagus and brussels sprouts in ways that show people how delicious they can be (as long as they’re not supertasters.)

Tara — Another theory I have about the broccoli, cauliflower and brussels spouts is that I grew up eating them. I don’t think I ever disliked the taste really, but it probably helped that they were regularly in my house, cooked in different ways, etc. Question, do you prefer the stalk or the flower of broccoli?
As for raisins, that might be one of those things that has more to do with your associations with the food than its chemical composition. Are grapes ok for you? Do you like other dried fruits? Do you hate golden raisins as well?

Thanks for an excellent post.

Any explanation as to why I think raisins are of the devil?