Sure, “hate” is a strong word. But as applied to food, it can be entirely appropriate. Food, after all, is an essential part of life and it can inspire serious physical reactions—for good or bad. You don’t have to be a picky eater to have one food you really, really can’t eat (for reasons other than health).
It’s a holiday weekend, so let’s chat. What food or foods do you hate? Is it because of texture, taste, or a past experience that put you off it for all time? Is it based on what you think about the food in question, like a vegetarian shuddering at the flesh qualities of meat?
First, though, one very big ground rule:
Cultural issues often come to play in discussions of food. Flippant dismissals of a nation or culture’s entire cuisine are out of bounds. If you find yourself tempted to say something like that, at a minimum you ought to stop and contemplate whether it’s because you’ve been told it’s acceptable to dismiss that culture’s food. Let’s not have any “I just can’t eat [Indian/Mexican/Thai] food” type generalizing comments—these are big, diverse cuisines that you are unlikely to have experienced the whole of—and especially let’s not join in the racist tradition of blaming food poisoning disproportionately on food from non-European cuisines.
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