The most reviled ad campaign of my childhood

“I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor,” Julia Child said. It was no grotesque vermin that prompted this declaration, no poisonous bit of flora. It was cilantro, an ingredient that many foodies would eat by the fistful.

She’s hardly alone. It’s rare to find someone who really and truly enjoys eating everything. My father winces at the sight of asparagus, my boss gags on any tomato sauce that is too sweet, my friend Dave turns pale at the thought of white substances located anywhere along the mayonnaise/sour cream/Alfredo sauce continuum. What’s more, I’d be hard-pressed to name the favorite dish of any of these people. The items that repulse them are just weirder and more interesting.

But where do these strange food hatreds come from? Is it cultural? Physiological? Psychological? There’s a whole field of psychological research behind the notion of conditioned food aversions (also called Sauce-Bearnaise Syndrome). One nasty encounter with a food, and our minds can turn us against it for years to come. The theory is based on the idea that our foraging ancestors had to learn to stay away from noxious berries and such, but anyone who ever did too many shots of Jägermeister will be intimately familiar with the basic concept. The thing is, many foods become guilty merely by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was hardly the fault of that can of red cream soda that I drank it right before I got a bad case of the stomach flu when I was eight years old, but it was many years before I could drink any of its brethren.

But the conditioned response explanation seems to me, at best, incomplete. For most of my childhood, I hated eggs and, despite a battery of science experiments run by my siblings over several nights of babysitting, I couldn’t choke them down in any form. But I don’t recall any precipitating incident that caused me to register the sight and smell of them as so disgusting. It felt as if I was born hating eggs. There is, actually, a study that seeks to prove that food preferences are in our very genes, and it revolves around Julia Child’s old enemy, cilantro. Some people are genetically programmed to be more sensitive to the aldehydes in cilantro, the story goes, which gives it a soapy flavor. But that research is much-disputed.

Even harder to prove (but the one I like the most) is the idea that our food tastes are extensions, conscious or subconscious, of our personalities. I once watched our beer columnist, Llalan, down a paper cup of coffee that looked and smelled a little like dishwater, the sort of thing many people couldn’t bring themselves to swallow. When I asked her if it was horrible, she shrugged. “You can only be a snob about so many things,” she said, “and I’m already a beer snob.” Maybe the reason I started to like eggs in my early twenties is that I had become a vegetarian and didn’t like the idea of being tooooo picky. After all, no one wants to be insufferable…but maybe just a tiny pinch of strong-headed food opinion (like beer snobbery) is what gives us our edge. I love that Julia Child hated cilantro; it makes her seem quirky and real.

Of course, trying to completely untangle the knots of our food preferences quickly becomes a fruitless enterprise. When I made the mistake of quizzing my coworkers about all of this, we dissected one guy’s assertion that he “doesn’t like fun in his food” (think chocolate chips in pancakes) until we had managed to relate it, through a series of wild leaps and bounds, to West Indian culture, childhood eggplant trauma, his taste in women, paintball and the history of slavery.

Regardless of their genesis, I encourage you to hold onto your strong food opinions. But be prepared to adequately defend them. When asked why he didn’t drink water, an inebriated W.C. Fields purportedly replied, “Fish fuck in it.” Who can argue with that?

Have more thoughts about hated foods? Comment below, or write to us at submissions@pitchknives.com.