Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Capers . . . hate 'em!

Cooked cabbage, YUCK! I like it raw when its nice and crunchy but when it's cooked it makes me want to gag!

Love everything mentioned so far . . . my own food nemesis is the oily and sodium-enriched anchovy.

Raw tomatoes. I know I should be ashamed of myself but I just can't stand the texture and the weird sweet/savoury taste! Even the best Italian tomatoes...just can't do it!

Got to add my support to the Tomato comment, actually I don't really like them cooked, but they are very hard to avoid so I have to get by. However I can't ever eat them raw just not possible.

Great question!! I have a reputation for being a really picky eater, despite my adventurousness, because I hate a few really common vegetables: raw onion, mushrooms, and green bell peppers. (I also can't stand eggplant or turnips, but that doesn't come up very often.) Mushrooms literally give me nightmares when I eat them, raw onions make me gag, and green bell peppers just taste to me the way body odor smells.

Green Bell Pappers without a doubt. I can't even stand the smell of them cooking! I'm so glad others share this aversion.

Count me in on the anti green bell pepper group. Other ordinary foods I don't like...cottage cheese (taste & texture thing), jello (texture thing) and pickles...these cannot even be near anything I eat.

while i can deal with eating bananas plain, i can't stand the taste of them in any other preparation. when i was younger (and embarrassingly bratty), i used to refuse to go to the local smoothie place for this very reason - i insisted that they didn't scrub out the blenders well enough between orders and that i could always "still taste the banana" from the smoothies made before mine. looking back, though, i'm pretty sure i was just delusional.

commodity meat such as battery raised chicken or beef by any of the big players.

Another banana hater here. I don't like the taste and they give me heartburn. Nothing else gives me heartburn, just bananas!

And JEP, my daughter shares your hate for onions. I used to think it was only a problem if the onions were visible in her food. One time, I put a minuscule amount of grated onion in a dish. She tasted it and said that she couldn't see them, but she knew there were onions in there!

I hate, hate, hate celery too! I can pick it out of soups, dips, salads, pretty much anything... It's disgusting! The only time I ever use it is if I'm making dressing for Thanksgiving, you have to use it then.

Olives and capers. Which is weird because I love other salty things.

On the texture end as opposed to taste, I cannot stand any chunks in my yogurt, which limits me to things like vanilla, or here in Canada, lovely maple flavour. I'm pretty wacky about texture, hate flan, love mushrooms, I have no idea why.

Me too on capers.

Pickles. I find them so detestable that if a restaurant puts a pickle on a plate, it means, drat I forgot to tell them not to, and it also means I can't eat any of the chips/fries/parts of the bun that were near the pickle, and got contaminated.

Also peas - I pick them out of the buffet fried rice at Wegmans.

Mayo or any type of cold mayo-based salad like noodle salad, egg salad, potato salad.

I'm a supertaster, so these foods aren't just unpleasant - they give me the dry heaves. Fun fun!

I can't tell you how pleased I am to hear from all my fellow celery haters! Whenever I tell people I can't take the flavor, they say, "But celery doesn't have a flavor!" Yeah, right.

But then they must simply be as mystified by me as I am by the garlic, caper, onion, mushroom haters here. Although I'm definitely on the green pepper train....

It might not be considered basic, but I can't handle anything with an almond extract flavor. If a cake or baked good tastes of almond extract, I can't eat it. The smell is intoxicating--the bad intoxicating!

On a side note, I HATE marzipan. Truly, absolutely, wholeheartedly hate the flavor and the smell.

cooked fruit -- no pie for me, thanks.

Any kind of raw onions, I will eat onions only if they have been minced very finely and have been cooked for a long time. I can't handle the texture of onions at all, I thought I wouldve grown out of this by now, but nope still hate it.

Ketchup.

Definitely cilantro. Fresh cilantro has the ability to ruin anything it comes in contact with for me.

Cinnnamon - too overpowering. I usually sub allspice.

Cilantro - tastes and smells like dish soap to me. Parsley gets a nod instead.

Water chestnuts are probably the only thing I would refuse to eat. I can't taste them, but the crunch when you accidentally bite into one delivers a shock that makes the rest of whatever the water chestnuts are in unpleasant. Maybe they're not really a basic ingredient, but they're still pretty terrible.

Fresh cilantro, raw carrot, and anything that even resembles licorice. I can't even stand root beer. I like the taste of mushrooms, but can't eat them because of the texture. I also don't like pepperoni.

Celery haters, I never knew there were so many of us!

Mayo (taste, texture, and allergy), Ham (texture), Hersheys (why waste the calories on something that tastes like wax? give me GOOD chocolate instead), Black Olives, and Button Mushrooms

Celery and green pepper haters unite!

When raw they both have an unpleasant watery crunch and a weird taste-residue that refuses to leave my mouth. Even worse cooked!

I hated chicken for a long time because I'd only eaten it roasted with celery, and I thought all that gross taste was coming from the bird.

I'm also with you on water chestnuts, Amy_Leigh. An accidental bite of one ruins the rest of the dish for me.

I can't believe that I dont agree with a single thing on this list. In fact at the moment I can't come up with a single (simple ingredient)thing. I used to say I hate raw tomatoes but read here to see how that changed. Black olives sort of (not on my pizza) but I am starting to come around to those "in" things. I had a high school Home Economics (I don't think they even have that class anymore) teacher who used to say at least once a class. "Your taste buds change every 4-7 years" I am beginning to agree.

How the heck can you be allergic to Mayo? It's mostly oil, a tiny bit of egg, a tiny bit of vinegar or lemon, and a tiny bit of seasoning.

A friend wouldn't touch Mayo. I finally narrowed it down to the mustard used to season most Mayo, he hates mustard. Of course when I quizzed him carefully it turned out he ate all kinds of things made with Mayo that he didn't know were made with Mayo, like blue cheese dressing.

I hate celery too! My mom always jokes after a big family meal she knows which plate is mine because there is a little pile of celery left.

Peekpoke--the doctor says its a reaction between the egg and vinegar... and it is really hard to ignore the hives/uncontrollable headache that pop up whenever I eat mayo/mayo based foods.

peekpoke, you're certainly entitled to your opinion about this all being in our minds--but what preconceived notion could I possibly have about celery, which I have hated since I first encountered it as a child?

I've had the ones made with lemon. Still get hives. I've never had a eggless mayo though...

I can't stand tomatoes or green peppers. My mom's side of the family is Italian, so these two dislikes were particularly difficult growing up(sausage & peppers, peppers and eggs, tomato salad, caprese salad...) I've only recently come around on red peppers. And cooked tomato things like sauce and ketchup are fine by me. Raw tomatoes, though, are horrifying to me and seem always to be added to otherwise perfectly good things in order to "enhance" them; e.g. guacamole, spinach and artichoke dip (garnish), black bean soup (garnish), fajitas and burritos (you didn't tell me there'd be pico de gallo!!)...

i hate raw tomatoes...