The Foods You Will Never Eat Again

[ Let Inga Tell You, La Jolla Light, published September 2, 2024] 2024

Probably everyone has associations with certain foods that they will never eat again after having a negative experience with them.

In my parents'  case, it was lots of experiences. After the Second World War, they lived in Boston while my father got an MBA, our family of four living on $91 a month on the GI Bill and subsisting by necessity on mackerel and baked beans - two foods banned from our household in perpetuity thereafter.

I have similar feelings about broiled chicken breasts, steamed broccoli, and cottage cheese the default diet foods of my teenage years. Cottage cheese seems to have made a comeback, given all the TV ads I see these days, where they actually try to make it look like a food one would choose to eat for any other reason that it's allegedly low calorie. Sure, they dress it up and make it look pretty but I can t be fooled. Underneath it all, it's cottage cheese and it is vile and should be banned from existence. Even though I haven't eaten it in decades, I can still hear it screaming "you are being deprived!"

Of course, one reason people would shun a particular food is if they've ever gotten sick on it. It doesn't even matter if it was the actual food's fault or some other affliction - a stomach flu, for example. Your gag reflex remembers forever. It s probably a good evolutionary adaption if you think about it.

My first husband, a New Jersey boy, had a particularly sad saga in this regard. Growing up, he'd practically lived on the submarine sandwiches (also known as heroes or hoagies ) which were pretty much the state food of New Jersey. But by the time I met him, however, he had suffered a severe submarine sandwich trauma the likes of which precluded his ever consuming another one again.

As he told the story, it all started back when he was a young college student just being initiated into the ways of the world. Kind of a nerd in high school, he hadn't seen a lot of what might be called "action." So he was delighted to make the acquaintance of a coed who had a reputation for loose morals and indiscriminate taste. To his surprise and delight, he was able to procure a date with the lady for "dinner and a show"  which at that stage of his economic life meant an Italian sandwich at the diner around the corner from the movie theater.

He ordered a submarine sandwich and his date a salad, after which they adjourned to the movie theater where he sat with agonizing late-adolescent anticipation waiting for the show to end and the entertainment to begin.

He doesn't remember quite when the queasiness started but somewhere towards the end of the movie, he excused himself and made it just out of view of his lady friend before throwing up all over the cigarette machine outside the men s room.

And yes, you used to be able to smoke in movie theaters, sometimes to the point you could barely see the screen. Honestly, that should have been enough to make you throw up, never mind the sandwich.

Despite his limited savoir faire, he knew enough to stop at the candy counter for some breath mints, on the theory that even a young lady of loose morals and indiscriminate taste might draw the line at a kiss that tasted like mortadella marinated in hydrochloric acid.

He felt better briefly, but by the time the movie ended, he had the terrible feeling that the second wave of gastric instability was not far away, and he rapidly felt compelled to change his priorities from trying to "score" to trying to get his date home without being sick on her.

The young lady was meanwhile oblivious to his difficulties, suggesting a moonlit drive in the Silver Streak (his Rambler with the reclining seats) and was dumbfounded when her date (sobbing quietly to himself) instead suggested taking her home.

After a hasty kiss on her front porch, she slipped quietly into the house, whereupon he turned around and threw up in her bushes.

She told him later that he was "weird"  and refused to go out with him again. And he never had a submarine sandwich again, despite Jersey Mikes literally opening up right in downtown La Jolla which at one point in his life would have been absolute nirvana.

Of course, sometimes you can overcome negative associations with food. When my siblings and I were quarantined with polio during the summer of 1955, the family ate a lot of canned food since we couldn't grocery shop. I'm not even sure we could have gotten Uber Eats to deliver if they had existed at the time. People were terrified - justifiably - of polio.

I remember eating canned Chun King chow mein and chop suey - or trying to eat them, anyway. I found that stuff so slimy and inedible that I assumed for many years afterwards that I simply didn't like Chinese food. It was only after my first husband, a medical student in New York City, - and yes, the submarine sandwich guy - finally persuaded me to go to China Town and eat actual Chinese food which I instantly fell in love with.

Of course, there was no version of either mackerel or baked beans (even homemade) that would ever have changed my parents'  minds. Sometimes, aversion just can t be overcome. Especially when it s compounded, as my first husband experienced, by profound social trauma. There are some things the body just can t forget.