Foods I Hate

I probably eat things no one else you know eats. I like thousand year old eggs. (I was the only foreigner in China I ever met who actually wanted to eat thousand year old eggs, or, as they are more commonly called, preserved eggs.) What I don't like is Red Bean Paste. Red Bean Paste is the dessert filling of China. Red Bean Paste is in Moon Cakes. In glutinous rice balls. Red Bean Paste kept turning up in all sorts of places. In China, not liking Red Bean Paste was a sort of like not liking...say, caramel. Imagine you didn't speak or read English and you craved chocolate but didn't like caramel. Life would be a crap shoot. I craved dessert in China, but lots of times, I got dealt red bean paste. I can't tell you why I don't like it. For one thing, I haven't eaten it in fourteen years (because I don't have to.)

I like goat, I like lamb, I like sweetbreads. Okay, I like sweetbreads a lot. Not liver. Liver makes me gag. I justify it now by explaining that the liver's job is to filter out toxins so it's full of all sorts of unhealthy stuff, but the truth is, you can deep fry liver and I'll know. It's still liver. And it still has that...taste.

I used to hate lima beans. I used to not much like beans at all. But now, I like garbanzos, great northern, kidney beans. Black beans. Pinto beans. I figure if I tasted lima beans now, I'd eat them. Oddly enough, what I really don't like now are hot dogs. I was never a hot dog fanatic, but hey, they were fine, but now I'll go to some lengths to avoid hot dogs, or their sliced cousin, bologna. I never cared a lot for bologna. There were so many perfectly fine things you could eat instead. Ham. Turkey. Meatloaf sandwiches. Bologna, like spam, always struck me as having been synthesized out of the food category and into some other category, the food-like substance category. There are other foods in the food-like category, many of which I do eat, like Velveeta processed cheese (good in grilled cheese sandwiches and good for that dip where you microwave it and stir in salsa) and popcorn (which is really a packing material that we eat, but still tasty with butter) and cotton candy (more an experience than a food, like freeze dried ice cream for astronauts). Somehow hotdogs and bologna have crossed a line for me.

Well done beef. Not my thing. I can eat it in pot roast and braised stuff, but really, it can border on inedible to me.

I always wondered what chefs do about foods they don't like. I've only had foie gras once, but if you were a really good chef, would you have to serve fois gras? Would you have to like it? What if you like your meat well done? It's pretty much de rigueur that meat today is not cooked much. I figure we're pretty susceptible to training and peer pressure (I read once that a baby will be attracted to meat with maggots, until learn not to.) But I don't think there's much hope of me ever loving beef liver.