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My husband hates anything with the bone in it...it makes him think too much of the animal it came from. In my opinion we should be more conscious of what our food is and where it comes from. However, I understand that he's squeamish and if I do roast a whole chicken or something else on the bone I remove the meat for him and serve it boneless.
Beets and any kind of melon are my phobias. I've given them seven, eight, nine chances throughout the years. A cat only has nine lives, I figure the same is true on beets and melons--no more for me. They prompt an immediate gag reflex that sends me looking for the nearest bathroom.

It's not so much a phobia as something normal I really dislike. Prepare yourselves.

I DO NOT LIKE CEREAL WITH MILK.

Yea, I said it. I like cereal. I like milk. But not together. The milk makes the cereal mush and the milk left over in the bowl has pieces of cereal still in it. ICK. And I've had this fear that if I don't eat the cereal fast enough the milk will go bad. But that's an extension of my supreme dislike of spoiled food. (I won't drink milk if it's even one day after the sell by date. Drives my mom nuts)

Liver. As a kid, my parents made liver and onions often because liver was cheap meat, but I hated it and still do to this day. Something about the texture, it makes me gag just looking at it.

Any type of tomatos raw that is. I can have them stewed, soup, sauces, even in salsa fine chopped, ect just not raw slices, chunks, whole.
Any type of offal whether chopped in stuffing, sausage with a lot of herbs and spices in it, froi gras, anything.
Last is clams, oysters, mussels......Gross!!

Liver.

Any organ meats.

Cottage cheese. There's something about how it looks - like brains - that makes me queasy.

Ripe bananas.

I don't know that you can call it a phobia, but there are very few organ meats that I will eat. I think my aversion for them is closely related to my extreme dislike for the taste of liver. I do like chicken gizzards though and will eat way too many of them.

This kind of foolishness puts me in mind of a "nutritionist" I once listened to on the radio. He was telling his listeners to avoid any vegetable in the nightshade family, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, eggplant and what have you, because the nightshade is a poisonous plant. Well, he's right about the nightshade. It is poisonous. What he did not seem to realize is that there are more poisonous legumes than there are poisonous nightshades and he said nothing about avoiding beans or peas. Nor did he say anything about avoiding mushrooms. "Bad" or "dangerous" by association is just silly.

@Grumpy Old Man - I agree that the fellow on the radio had bad reasoning. Nightshades are thought by many to be questionable, but not because they're "poisonous."

They are highly inflammatory foods, and contain compounds that may inhibit the body's absorption of calcium (which may explain why many traditional dishes containing nightshades also contain dairy).

Some people (like myself) find that consuming nightshades in any quantity (especially, but not only, tomatoes) can cause canker sores, while others with arthritis and other inflammatory conditions have found a reduction in symptoms when eliminating them from the diet, which is regularly recommended for arthritis by Western doctors in addition to alternative practitioners.

I've had to eliminate tomatoes almost entirely from my diet due to a stomach issue + the aforementioned canker sores (which is awful; I love them), but I don't think I could go very much further into abandoning nightshades, because cooking without chilis is too sad to imagine.

The only foods that I'm really phobic about are the artificial/processed kind, because I just don't know what they're going to do to my body twenty years from now.

Mayo. Just the thought makes me gag. And if I'm making a sandwich (not for me, natch) and get the tiniest bit on my hands, I have to wash my hands and get a new knife. And I can't rinse the knife afterwards, too. And I don't breathe when I'm scooping / spreading it.

My son won't eat meat with bones in it, so you're not alone on that one! My aunt refuses to eat anything orange -- carrots, yams, whatever ....

cheezies or cheezits...those florescent, crunchy worm-shaped things. when i was six my babysitter hid the bowl we were eating, and convinced me someone had broken in and stolen them. hand in hand we searched the house for the intruder, my terror mounting every minute. when we returned to the living room, the cheezies had magically reappeared. i still hate those things, i suspect they have secret, evil powers.

Yeah, I probably wouldn't call it a "phobia" so much as a really strong aversion. BEETS. I'm not talking about the taste, as I can't even bring myself get them to my mouth. There are things I dislike but try from time to time, to see if I maybe now like them, however, beetroot will never cross my lips. Even if I have to starve to death.

That, and dried fruit. If I mistakenly eat something with a teeny-tiny piece of raisin or dried whatever in it, I spit it out as fast as I can. Still, it's probably not as bad as beets.

Not really a phobia, but three things I'm not eating are avocados, hummus and tofu.

I would also agree that most of these are not phobias, merely dislikes. To me a 'food phobia' is when someone insists that even one bite of something containing carbohydrates will make them 'blow up like a balloon' or people who won't eat fat because 'fat makes you fat' (although this is less common than it used to be). Or a child's fear of being force-fed greens by a parent, although in that case it is more the experience than the food. My 'fear' of foods with sugar alcohols/olestra (fortunately, also less common) have to do with the unpleasant, er, aftereffects those products cause so I am literally 'afraid' to eat them, even by accident, like some of you are afraid of some additives in food and their effects on your bodies. To me, merely disliking say, mayo, isn't a phobia, but being petrified of eating something with mayo for fear it will make you throw up in public=phobia.

Okay, a real phobia: a few years back, I started getting massive gastrointestinal distress from eating shellfish. So I basically avoided it like the plague, for my health. "Just a tiny bit," a friend said, "and you could die."

Flash forward to about a year ago. I finally go get the damned full battery of allergy testing, and I'm not actually allergic to any fish or shellfish. "Must be a gastric intolerance," the doc said. "Try eating a very small amount and then ramp up gradually, so you can see your tolerance level."

Nope. I cannot do it. Not even because I'm afraid of the gastrointestinal distress. I'm afraid that my throat will close up. I literally start to panic when I try to put a shrimp to my lips for a bite. My throat will *not* close up, I know this... but I'm too freaked out.

And I'm someone who regularly eats tendon soup, tripe, kimchee. I eat the fat off of steaks and sometimes don't bother to wash my fruit, two things that I'm certain *are* actually killing me. But shrimp? Hell no.

Now that's a phobia.

*Raisins
*Peas
*Yams
*Mangos/Guava/Papaya
*Bananas
*Mushy Tomatoes
*Shitake Mushrooms
*Eggplant (for the time being)
*All Carbohydrates (other than the ones that come from vegetables)
*Pork Products of ALL kinds
*Corn & Corn Fed Animals
*Dairy Products (ALL OF THEM)
*Sugar (That's right, I don't eat sugar - only the "sugar" in vegetables)

I would rather skip lunch than eat a sandwich with mayo but the food I'm really afraid of is jello. The thought of being in a situation where I have to eat jello has kept me up at night.

Also hate steak and kidney. Love steak; just don't mix it in with kidney...

I don't have phobias. Aversions, sure. Lima beans and cooked red cabbage. Black licorice. Those are aversions. I go out of my way not to eat those.

There are things that might freak me out if I was ever in a position to have to eat it (trapped on a desert island...finding out I'd have to try and eat this or face death): live octopus, that Sardinian cheese with the live maggots living in it, cow eyeball tacos (although, I'd have to see what that looked like - I like other offal). But the likelihood of me coming in contact with any of these things is pretty slim.

"Phobia" implies that there's something IRRATIONAL about the aversion. I don't think aversions to some of the things that people have mentioned--offal/organs, cartilage, exotic animals, insects, and even tentacled sea creatures--are considered all that irrational in American and European culture. LOTS of people find those things distasteful.

So, who out there has an inexpicable fear of carrots?

For 25 years I was a seriously picky eater, but living in Japan now, I've had to get over that. Recently I've met Remy through YouTube. He's an American boy who's put us all to shame with his adventurous food quests.
Check him out with key word: foododdities in YouTube or through his blog. He's amazingly brave and fearless! He faces all your worst food phobias with grace.

I don't really have food phobias, but I do have food aversions. :) Which are much more common and therefore more fun to talk about...

My main aversion is fennel seed. I have not tried fennel root but I assume it has the same sort of smell/taste as the seed.

If I even smell it in my food, I don't want to eat it. Blech. It just doesn't smell or taste good to me at all. My body must be trying to tell me SOMETHING (even if it's just that I'm a nutball) and I'm gonna listen.

I have a similar aversion to bell peppers. I don't like how they smell and they don't taste good either. Green is the worst - I can tolerate red and yellow, although I still don't like the smell. But for me, if something has green peppers in it, it's essentially ruined. The taste permeates the whole dish. It ruins salsa for me.

My friend is literally afraid of donuts. if she even sees a dunkin donuts box she flips out. she has no idea why they scare her. she says it's everything about them. it's not even a taste thing. she hates the way they look, everything. she will literally run out of the room if she sees one. strangest thing i've ever seen.

I know it's a little late but I'm glad I'm not the only one with strange food phobias. I won't eat condiments, cooked veggies (except corn), seafood, anything with a sauce, cheese that's the slightest bit warm, milk on my cereal (because it gets soggy), salad dressing, or anything warm and mushy (mashed potatoes, thick fries, etc). Also I don't mix some things like cheese and crackers... the texture is just gross. Oh and most breakfast foods. The only thing I'll eat for breakfast is fruit, a bagel with a little bit of butter, or cereal. If I'm served any of this I'll starve instead of eating it.