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"These were the most tasteful wedding invitations I could find. (licks one envelope) Mmm... whipped cream flavor... (licks another) Mmm... mango passion fruit... (licks another) Mm— Eeyuck! Spinach! How did that get in there!?"
Some foods are just far more likely to show up as a hated (or outright universally hated) food for a character, be they Picky Eaters or not. Weird allergies are a form of Televisually Transmitted Disease.
The foods which generate Foreign Queasine falls into this trope by default.
It is not being forced to eat a food generally considered disgusting in one's culture, that's Alien Lunch or Eat That.
Strangely enough, there's a reason certain foods, such as liver and leafy greens, tend to show up on a lot of kids' "Most Hated" lists—they actually taste different to children, and generally, they taste worse. Children are more receptive to bitter compounds in foods than adults (likely an evolutionary measure to prevent us from dying of plant poisoning while young), and tend to be put off by the bitter taste. Also, about 25% of people are "supertasters," having a higher concentration of taste buds than others: they tend to be repulsed by sprouts, spinach, coffee, alcohol, grapefruit, green tea, olives, soy, chili, soft drinks and tonic water. 50% are medium tasters, who have "normal" likes and dislikes, and 25% are non-tasters, who don't mind anything. Another reason children grow up hating vegetables is that parents often overcook them, removing much of the taste, texture and nutrients in the process.
Compare If It Tastes Bad, It Must Be Good for You, Does Not Like Spam and Haggis Is Horrible.
Examples
Dairy products
- Blue cheese, especially stinky Gorgonzola.
- In The Muffin Fiend by Daniel Pinkwater, the muffin thief is deduced to be an extra-terrestrial, because even the Gorgonzola muffins were stolen and no human would ever eat a Gorgonzola muffin.
- UHT milk is looked down upon in Europe and elsewhere.
- Jokes about limburger cheese are common due to its very strong smell.
- Looney Tunes is full of gags about limburger. For example, in one short where Sylvester is trying to keep Speedy Gozales from stealing cheese from a ship, Speedy tricks him by locking him in a room full of the stuff. Poor Sylvester almost suffocates before he is able to free himself.
- In Mark Twain's "The Invalid's Story" a shipping box containing a corpse being brought home to the deceased's parents by train was accidentally switched with one containing rifles, which had had a piece of limburger left on top of it at some point. The smell eventually became so strong that a railroad employee riding in the same car remarked to the title character that the burial really ought to have been carried out the previous summer.
Fruits
- Coconut is very frequent; this is probably from how old (1990s and earlier) "coconut" filling for chocolates was acrid, foul, and not very coconut-like.
- Angelica Pickles from Rugrats said she hates coconut when she took a box of chocolates (with the help of Chuckie who was her slave after she saved him).
- In Codename Kids Next Door a little girl grew to Hulk-like proportions because the Delightful Children from Down the Lane had a coconut cake at their birthday party.
- And after Peter Griffin (Family Guy) cut into a giant cake, he was more upset that the frosting was coconut than the fact that he cut into the stripper who was hiding inside the cake.
- Most of the characters in Peanuts hate coconut, just as creator Charles M. Schulz did.
- There's a line in a Heroes deleted scene revealing that Matt hates coconut. And is allergic to avocado, which suggests that getting out of L.A. may have been the best thing he could possibly do for himself.
- Tallahassee is rather upset to find a Hostess truck full of Sno-Balls when he was hoping for Twinkies. He hates coconut, you see. Not the taste - the consistency.
- Fuck coconuts.
- Stuart from MADtv hates coconut and spits out any cake that has any in it.
- At Susie's birthday party, Calvin makes an offhand remark about how he hates it when "the birthday kid chooses something gross [for their cake] like coconut."
Meat, organs, etc.
- As recently the 70s, tongue was frequently foisted on unsuspecting kids because it was the cheapest cut of meat on the market. That's where it got its stock yuck status from (there's a famous scene in one of the Ramona Quimby books where the sisters enjoy their "pot roast" until they discover that it was actually tongue and revolt). Then, word that it was actually quite tender and tasty got out. Although most people still wouldn't eat it on a dare, enough people would that they now sell it at gourmet prices.
- It also makes a nice lunch meat, especially with mustard.
- Lobster and oysters had this happen to them as well, and now they're the most expensive things at the fish counter.
- For that matter, it seems like most of the meat from any given carcass (be it beef, pork, chicken or anything else) that is readily consumed is the skeletal muscle while most of the organs and other body parts are usually met with disgust. Mostly due to reminding people that it was once a living animal. However, depending on the culture and the resourcefulness of the chef, all of these parts can be used in something rather then letting it go to waste. Oxtail Soup is a good example. There's also a sect of chefs and foodies who are trying to bring organ meat back into chic status.
- Bill Cosby has a bit where he expresses distaste for various animal parts, including chitterlings (pig intestines; "That's part of the lower tract. Ain't no food down there!"), tripe (sheep's stomach), sweetbreads (albeit with the popular misconception that they are calves' or lambs' testiclesnote Actually the thymus and pancreas; "It took me ten years just to kiss my wife, no way am I gonna have the stomach for THIS!"), and brains ("I can't bite down on nothing nobody's been thinking with.")
- Anchovies. In fiction, when a pizza order is phoned in, "no anchovies" may be specifically mentioned.
- In the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, Michaelangelo, on the phone with the pizzeria, is saying: "...no anchovies, and I mean no anchovies. You put anchovies on this thing and you're in big trouble, okay?"
- Inverted in the Garfield and Friends episode "Nighty Nightmare," where Garfield complains because a pizza doesn't have anchovies on it.
- After all, Garfield's a cat.
- Then again, there is one strip where Garfield is pretending to be a shark, and attacks a pizza in a feigned "feeding frenzy". His game is ruined in the last panel where he spits out the bite he took and says "Yuck! Anchovies!"
- Played with in Futurama. Fry buys the last can of anchovies in existence to serve to his friends on a pizza. He enjoys them, but his friends (except Zoidberg) do not (which he puts down to them being an "acquired taste").
- It is - they taste like little meaty strips of pure salt, or at least they do if you've never eaten them before.
- An episode of M.A.S.K. featured a Blob Monster that was vulnerable to salt. This was discovered when it always passed on Anchovies in foods it consumed. A Running Gag throughout the episode was someone saying "I can understand about the anchovies!" every time they came up.
- In The Batman, the Penguin likes pizza with anchovies. (He tends to like fish in general in most incarnations.)
- Another group of villains that like anchovies are the Delightful Children from Down the Lane in Codename Kids Next Door. The Kids Next Door, however, are repulsed by them.
- For some people, any fish at all is gross.
- It has to be said most children in the UK will only eat cod and tuna, so the idea of eating other fish is offputting for them.
- For Norwegians (and Americans of Norwegian descent), lutefisk tops the list. It's cod soaked in lye until it resembles fish-flavored gelatin. To make it more bearable, it's usually drowned in butter and wrapped in potato flatbread called lefse.
- The heroine of Gai-Gin hates seafood and complains that one of the things she hates about living in Japan is that "they eat absolutely any crap that comes crawling out of the ocean". She also hates tomatoes, and this causes problems when eating with a very traditional Japanese family who consider leaving food on the plate to be very rude.
- Escargot is often viewed unfavorably outside of Europe, as the thought of eating snails makes a lot of people uncomfortable. It's one of the very few foods that Garfield will not eat. This is most likely due to the fact that in most people's minds, snails are often lumped in with "bugs", which aren't readily eaten or really considered a food in western cuisine.
- Dave Barry, in several of his writings, claims that the French do not actually eat snails, but get a huge laugh from tricking tourists into eating them.
- In an inversion of the usual trope, hot dogs and chicken nuggets are a favorite of many children and picky eaters... Until they find out how they're made and what they're made with. They'll end up being put off by these foods when they're adults.
Multi-ingredient dishes
Vegetables
- Brussels sprouts, and other greens like broccoli, cauliflower or spinach. The quote at the top of the page is from a New Yorker cartoon about broccoli, covering two at once.
- If you read the news tickers, you'll see how the SimCity games since 3000 turn broccoli into Serious Business. Good humor for an otherwise hyper-realistic game.
- The second Megamorphs book established that broccoli was introduced to earth by vegetarian aliens who colonized the planet during the time of the dinosaurs. After the defeat of rival colonists, they planted broccoli as a sort of victory dance. That's right kiddies, broccoli is a sacred alien plant and that is why we hate it so much.
- One of the "Treehouse of Horror" episodes of The Simpsons revealed that Broccoli is in fact a deadly poison that "tries to warn you off with its terrible taste."
- The Power Puff Girls had an episode where the children of town had to help them defeat the evil Broccoloids by (shudder!) eating them.
- Brussels sprouts are a traditional accompaniment to the British Christmas Dinner. No-one knows why. They are traditionally prepared, like so many British vegetables, by "boiling them until the vitamins give up," goes the traditional joke. (This is, of course, the entire cause of the problem. Properly cooked sprouts are awesome - overcooked sprouts are reeking mush.) A Running Gag on Terry Wogan's morning radio show is people complaining that it's June already and they've left it too late to get the sprouts on for Christmas.
- In Fallen the mother of one of Harry's friends commented that "Nobody likes them and they just ruin good food."
- From Bottom:
Richie: Will you stop whingeing, Eddie. Nobody likes sprouts.
Eddie: Well why are we 'aving them then?
Richie: Because it's Christmas!
- Numbah 4 of Codename Kids Next Door accidentally ate a brussel sprout once while blinded by boredom, causing the rest of his team to undergo an Fantastic Voyage Plot to get it out before it caused a viral infection that would make him an obedient, well behaved child. Broccoli is also universally disliked, adults hate them and pawn them off on kids but can handle them, but to kids, it's kryptonite, when 362 is forced to eat through it to stop an Evil Plan, it sends her into a coma for two weeks.
- Recently, as TV cookery shows and celebrity chefs make an increasing impact, the Brussels Sprout has made something of a comeback as people learn to cook them properly - lightly blanched and then tossed with some bits of bacon and onion.
- Or one could simply sautee brussels sprouts cut in half in a little rendered bacon fat along with onions and fresh garlic, sprinkle a little salt and pepper, and serve them with crumbles of the reserved crispy bacon on top. Delicious.
- In Family Guy, Stewie once created a weather-controlling machine so he could wipe out broccoli.
- President Bush (Senior) once famously declared that he hated broccoli. Histeria! naturally did a skit about this.
- Reportedly, American broccoli farmers sent him several tonnes of broccoli for saying that.
- One thing all those vegetables (except spinach) have in common is their ancestral plant: the wild cabbage. The bitter taste is a family trait for plants in the cabbage family. They also become nasty and sulphurous if overcooked which is somewhat easy to do.
- Just to be absolutely clear: Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, kale, kohlrabi, and gailan (a vegetable called "Chinese broccoli" even though people only really eat the leaves) are descended from one kind of plant that lived on the cliffs lining the English Channel. They are all one species. Scary, innit?
- In one episode of Rugrats, Angelica took her hatred for broccoli Up to Eleven by suing her parents for trying to make her eat it. (Though the episode turned out to be All Just a Dream.)
- Played with in Return to Ravenhearst, with a list of rules the tyrannical Charles Dalimar imposed on Rose's young daughters. To showcase just how child-unfriendly their diet was, one of the rules is: "No broccoli until you finish your cauliflower".
- In the comic strip Ernie/The Piranha Club, broccoli is the only thing Sid's pet piranha and live trash can Earl has ever refused to eat.
- In Ed Eddn Eddy, Eddy scares and chases Ed with some broccoli. Then Ed attempts to chase Eddy with it. Then at the end of the episode Edd chases the other two away with it.
- Oddly enough, in Japan carrots are considered a Stock Yuck for picky children.
- Usagi from Sailor Moon doesn't like them either; ironic as her name sound exactly like the word "rabbit".
- Ryo Hazuki from Shenmue didn't like them as a child, until his pop schooled him on all the hard work it took to put them on his son's plate.
- Kou Uraki from Gundam 0083 is famous for his hatred of carrots.
- Omochao says something about promising to eat all of his/her carrots in Sonic Adventure 2 (Battle) if held long enough.
- In the Harvest Moon series, most children (and even a few adults) respond disfavorably to being given carrots.
- In Tales Of Symphonia, carrots are Bratty Half-Pint Genis' least favorite food.
- Even giant Zentraedi children hate them in Macross Frontier. Although these particular carrots are rainbow-colored and the size of preteens, so whether or not they have a point is up for debate.
- A little girl in Tampopo has one with a hole in it strung with a piece of a string and a sign that says "Do not feed me sweets". A man getting over a toothache gives her his ice cream.
- Turnips.
- Alton Brown of Good Eats has a habit of addressing why so many vegetables are Stock Yuck, and seeing if he can't turn them into something edible. The Stock Answer is usually that somewhere along the line, some parent who couldn't cook worth monkey feces did their horrendously substandard best, so that's how their kids learned to prepare it, and so on and so forth, until modern kids are subjected to something hellish and only nominally identifiable, prepared so horrendously wrong that all the nutrients have probably been wrung out of it anyway, defeating the purpose and proving that forcing your kids to eat their veggies is just another sign you don't really love them.
- The canned version of anything here, and everything that isn't. If it's good, they've found a way to ruin it. If it's bad, Eldritch rites have been employed to keep it in stasis, and what they sacrificed was what little the vegetable had that was worth preserving.
- The exception to this is Baked Beans (which are considered the stereotypical student food in Britain, being cheap but relatively tasty). Notwithstanding the side effects.
- Particular exceptions also include corn and beets. While not as good as the fresh variety, most children (and adults) won't mind eating either in their canned form.
- Tofu, especially in the context of those accustomed to a Western diet forced to eat healthier. However it's the texture of tofu that many people find disagreeable, not the taste.
- As well as natto.
- Lima beans.
- An episode of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh has Tigger mention his dislike of lima beans several times.
- On The Simpsons, when Marge is praying while awaiting the impending nuclear meltdown, she promises that if she survives, at the next canned food drive she will give the poor something tastier than old pumpkin and lima bean mix.
- In The Adventures Of Jimmy Neutron, Carl Wheezer hates lima beans so much he has nightmares about a killer one, so he can't sleep. He gets better.
- Mushrooms. To many people, they look horrible unprepared, and the fact there are poisonous ones in the wild which can kill you is enough to put anybody off.
- The Stock Yuck for children in Japan is green bell peppers.
- In Tales Of Symphonia, every character has a least favorite food as part of the cooking mechanic; green bell peppers are Colette's.
- BlazBlue: Bang Shishigami has just two things in this world that he cannot stand: lies, and evil, and LIES and BELLPEPPEEEERRRSS.
- Shin has a disgust for green peppers in Crayon Shin Chan.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS: Vivio doesn't like green peppers and initially refuses to eat them.
- Combining two Stock Yuck on one character, there are three things Misty from Pokémon hates: carrots (see above), peppers, and bugs.
- In the Garrett, P.I. novels, Garrett regularly criticizes Morley's vegetarian restaurant's fare, particularly the fact it serves green bell peppers. He sometimes points out that they're one of the very few foods even pigs won't eat.
- In Through Hell or High Water Neville refused to eat a green Bertie Botts bean because it might be asparagus-flavored and "They're disgusting! Especially when you cook them, all slimy and gross."
- In I Wish, I Wish Snape said that brussels sprouts were the work of the devil.
Sweets
- Even chocolates aren't spared from this trope. Every box will have an undesirable piece, often the one filled with orange creme. Sometimes one character searches futilely for the legend.
- In The Simpsons, one of Homer's attempts to get Mr. Burns to remember him failed after his face remained covered by a "sour quince log".
- The Revel adverts play with this trope making it into a Russian Roulette style game. Coffee
- Peanuts had a running gag with coconut chocolates, which no one ever wanted. Naturally, the subject of any gag would get nothing but.
- Susan Sto-Helit hates nougat. Guess what the first chocolate she pulls out of the box is.
- The main character in Jack Ritchie's "For All the Rude People" hated chocolate-covered cherries.
- Black Jelly beans.
- Many of Jelly Belly's beans are like this, due to the fact there are so many and naturally they have to stretch into unappetizing flavors.
- Jelly Belly "buttered popcorn" flavor beans are notorious for invoking this in some people - and for having equally ardent defenders. If buttered popcorn jelly beans are mentioned, expect two characters to get in an argument over whether they're a Stock Yuck or Ambrosia of the Gods.
- Subverted on The Office with Dwight who cleans out all the black jelly beans on Pam's desk dispenser, looking for more.
- Licorice, especially the aniseed variety.
- This is rarer in Scandinavian countries, where liquorice is quite popular.
- Numbuh Five kinda likes black licorice.
- The salmiak to almost anyone outside Finland. Then again, when you take a mineral salt and turn it into candy the reaction can't be that unexpected, at least until people get used to the idea of salty, bitter "sweets".
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