Couple examples from personal experience:
Spicy Food
I didn’t like spicy food for a (relatively) long time until I was 25.
2/4 of my roommates did. We’d order two pizzas, one spicy and one not. But the asshats who liked spicy would eat half the non-spicy pizza first knowing the other one was safe from us.
Well… we’d see about that!
I bought a jar of pickled little yellow banana peppers. At first all I could manage was a tiny little bit of one. But I had that tiny little bite every evening, every day. Eventually my tolerance grew until I was eating a whole one, then multiples. In a few weeks I realized I was crunching through them and loving it. (Didn’t love the first time I overindulged and found out what goes in can still burn going out, oof, lol.)
Beer
First time I had beer I did the movie-style stereotypical spit-take. Tasted like something I’d never want again. I drank when I was 18-19yrs old but it was usually Smirnoff Ice or some other “bitch-pop” as was said at the time by those around me.
When I was in my early 20s I supervised for a company that had us do a lot of traveling. Particularly three months of the year I was in a hotel more than at home.
There was a consistent crew of people who lived in a town nearby that I saw fairly frequently for those three months but not too often elsewise. As I said I was in my early 20s, 21-23ish. And they were in their late 20s to mid thirties.
They were inveterate drinkers, and they loved beer. And they undertook a self-imposed mission to teach me to love beer too. Them being older and me being impressionable, I went with it.
Every evening after work we’d hit up the local pub and I’d order three beers, based off their recommendations. One was an inveterate drinker as mentioned, the other a mid-thirties redheaded British woman I grew rather fond of and who was rather fond of me, along with some other crew. Basically, people who knew beer and in the case of the brit, someone who I would’ve listened to for a few reasons.
Didn’t take too long but I certainly “acquired” a taste for it. Eventually acquiring my own preferences to the point I was recommending them ideas.
Bourbon/scotch, but a bigger problem is that most is made poorly
Coconut water. I didn’t care for the taste but liked its ability to hydrate. Just kept drinking until now I sorta enjoy the taste. Has to be chilled though. Warm coconut water is nope.
I’ve never been a fan of mushrooms. I did attempt to tolerate them though.
Turns out, canned mushrooms are the problem. Those are basically large boogers and not fit for human consumption. Fresh mushrooms don’t have much flavor and I’m relatively indifferent to those. They are now just something I chop up with onion and garlic sometimes now.
I found out that a lot of stuff I thought I didn’t like was because it wasn’t made very well
So many people hate vegetables because they were raised on bland and over cooked soggy plant matter.
Roasted veggies are so fucking good.
Personally, I also found that it’s something you have to get used to. I used to barely eat greens and wouldn’t feel terribly great, if I did.
Then, earlier this year, I spent a month eating lots of greens. I’m guessing my gut microbiome adjusted, because yeah, now I can eat a whole salad bowl for a meal and if I don’t have greens at home for a few days, I will start to feel unwell.I love boiled mushy Brussel sprouts way more than caramelized or roasted.
Opposite here, hated them mushy and one time I got some roasted and it was like a completely new vegetable!
Everyone can have their own preferences of course.
Wine. I’ve never been much of a wine person, and I prefer beer with my food, but at some restaurants and events, the food is usually paired well with a wine. Because of this I tried to actually like it, and I am now at the point where I can enjoy white wine that isn’t too sweet.
Yes. I tried mangoes every year untill I liked them, avocado too. Raw tomatoes I keep trying, can tolerate, can’t like.
Last year I made a deal with my coworker, who is a wine person but such a picky eater he went to Japan and just ate chicken tenders, same in the middle east. I told him if he honestly tried eating new foods I would try wines. He found some foods he likes, and I found I like dry elegant white wines (nothing sweet) and most wines made of Nebbiolo grapes, like instead of just sort of holding my nose and tolerating them, I can affirmatively like them .
I truly believe a wide palate is a positive quality, I gave my kids lots of different tasting foods when they were little and that helped them to enjoy more flavors. I think technically I’m picky (have strong likes and dislikes) but like so, so many foods it’s not limiting. And yes, I do try to like some of the foods I don’t.
Kombucha, the first couple bottles taste like fizzy vinegar, but then I got hooked on it. I was trying to get my gut microbes in a healthier zone.
I worked at a health food store in college. I thought the people who drank that stuff were nuts til enough vendors came by with free samples. Free shit to a college kid is irresistible. By the time I quit that job I was drinking 1 a day, sometimes more. Additionally, I preferred the weird multi green one to the fruity ones (those were for noobs obviously). I still grab one from time to time, but them not being 5 feet away from me 40 hours a week put a real damper on my consumption of them.
Ridiculously easy and cheap to make your own booch I’d you get the craving
I feel like it’d make my house smell awful tho
Pretty much just smells like vinegar
It is demanding in the long-term, in that a starter will live perpetually and as such you must produce the booch perpetually.
Like $1/10 minutes of input a month for infinite booch is a pretty sweet deal
Honestly, I always believed that if people like something, it’s “like-able” for anyone. It’s just a matter of understanding why and putting yourself in the shoes of the people that do like it.
So many many things that I at first didn’t understand or like, I tried hard to understand better and like as well.
From music, to food, to movies etc.
“Taste” is something that you build. It’s critically engaging with everything, and trying to understand it as best you can.
100% agree with this, to the point that if you haven’t taught your child to eat all the common vegetables by the time they enter the real world, you have failed as a parent.
I feel such strong second-hand embarrassment when somebody has to excuse “I don’t like onions” (like wtf onions is THE number 1 vegetable) or tomatoes or something.
I will admit to have shamed my girlfriend about not liking celery until she ate it daily for a week to learn. Now her favorite drink is bloody mary because of the free celery snack.
I like your general idea. My girlfriend however has the coriander soap gene and a horrid distaste for artificial sweeteners. She can taste trace amounts and she describes it as vitriol.
I don’t have the soap gene, but have the same issues with artificial sweeteners. I don’t understand how anyone can be fooled by them, they taste horrible.
Ah yeah well, that kind of stuff aside of course. But dude, my grandpa also has the soap taste gene, and he started growing coriander and eating it and now he loves it. Idk if he likes the taste of soap now, or the taste itself changed. But he eats coriander all the time now.
Coffee. I really wanted to be able to enjoy black coffee, cuz it smells so deceptively good, is cheap as fuck, and basically zero calorie. Except it tastes like concentrated dirt. Bitter. Acrid. None of the appeal promised by the smell makes its way to the taste.
Unless I acquire the taste!
Typically my coffee has a similar cream and sugar content to a milkshake, so I actually measured it out to get a baseline, then over the course of about two months phased down to just black coffee. …and over the course of two months, my coffee phased more and more into tasting like shit. But I tolerated it - eyes on the prize. After that, I spent another month drinking it black. At the end of that month, I finally accepted that black coffee tasted just as much like shit as it did on day one.
My coffee is back to resembling a milkshake… fuck.
I tried.
New hypothesis: there’s some kind of generic factor at play like there is with cilantro. That shit is delicious to some and absolutely vile to others, and no amount of trying to acquire it will flip that switch. I drew the short straw on that horrid plant, too.
What you’re looking for is the super taster gene, read up on the Wikipedia article. I have it and agree coffee tastes like shit.
What kind of coffee are you drinking? See if there’s a local brand or cafe to try. Some coffee brands are usually much worse when they don’t have additives to hide the flavor (ex, Starbucks)
Starbucks is among the worst. I tried grounds from a good variety of brands, all prepared with a normal coffee maker which another poster suggested is not actually a good way to brew coffee. They all fell somewhere on a spectrum between bad and REALLY bad. Didn’t go for the crazy fancy stuff - my favorite ended up being a hazelnut flavored whole bean from the bulk section of WinCo. Which is still my favorite, I just milkshake-ify now.
Fresh ground beans, ~93°C water, pour-over or immersion brewed. If the coffee tastes dirty, acrid and bitter, it’s because it was poorly made or it had gone bad. It should be sweat and caramelly or chocolatey.
A lot like how rancid meat is often hidden by added spicy flavourings, bad coffee is hidden by added sweat flavourings.
Bitterness in coffee comes from overextraction, acidity in coffee often comes from underextraction.
On top of that darker roasts tend to be more bitter, and lighter roasts tend to be more acidic.
The main problem is usually the wrong grind size and brew method.
Grinding the coffee too coarsely makes it hard to extract flavours, leading to underextraction (sourness). Grinding too finely makes it easier to extract flavours (both desirable and undesirable) leading to overextraction (bitterness)
Regular coffee makers, pour over, and espresso are all percolation brews. That means that the water flows through the coffee and extracts flavours while it does these kinds of brews can develop channels while the water flows through, which causes the water to overextract the coffee where the channel is, but underextract the rest of the coffee, which can lead to a brew that is at the same time sour (underextracted) and bitter (overextracted)
The other general method of brewing is immersion brewing. This is where the coffee and the water hangs around for a while during the brew, and is then strained away from each other. Good examples are French press, aeropress, siphon, and cold brew. Since these methods can’t really develop channels, you don’t have the same problem with over and underextraction, and therefore these methods are also much easier to “get right”.
So if you want an easy method too get better tasting coffee, try a French press, and be careful grinding too finely. If there’s a layer of silt at the bottom of your cup you are grinding too finely. Pregroud coffee is usually too fine for French press.
I had a similar journey… adding a splash of coffee to my cream and sugar slurry 😂
What did it for me was experimenting with different beans, brewing methods, and grinding fineness/coarseness before finding a combo that tasted rather sweet on its own.
My new problem is that I don’t enjoy coffee made elsewhere clownface.jpg
Try doing lattes then americano’s with cream, then drop the cream. If you can do americano’s it’s a baby step above black coffee, and when you get a black coffee just accept that it’s shittier than an Americano, but OK more or less.
The quadfecta of disgusting foods that are commonly enjoyed are coffee, raw tomatos, peanut butter and pickles. For coffee, the smell is so gross. I’d rather be in a barn than a coffee shop. But l love tomato sauce and peanuts. Well peanuts by themselves and not mixed in anything like ice cream or candy bars.
I was having a crazy busy day of work and didn’t have time to cream or sugar a coffee and developed a taste for it black right on the spot. It’s just so earthy. I still drink things like a mocha (with extra shots) now and then but black drip is my go to.
Yes for black coffee and tapioca pearls, as well as hot food because good lord the dopamine is so nice.
And in reverse I’ve conditioned myself to be disgusted by alcohol.
Like… all hot food?
Sorry, I mean like adding a ton of spices. Make my mouth fight for its life a bit before a ton of flavor. So good.
Oh yeah, probably should’ve been able to figure that one out on my own (although I’ve heard the opposite, where people don’t like food that’s supposed to be served hot once it’s cooled off)
It’s perfectly valid to get confused there. Temperature does change how palatable some food is as well. Cold soup isn’t that awesome.
Yeah I hate the pearls, my wife loves them.
Black cofee can be really great from a good place. Mink Cafe was the best black coffee I’ve had, where milk took away from it.
I had almost the reverse with coffee. I always liked the smell of coffee but not really the taste. Then my family bought a Nespresso machine when i was in high school, and i started adding espresso shots to hot chocolate. Then i started occasionally making espresso shots and drinking them straight. Then several years later i found myself in a hotel for work, at 6am before a shift, and they automatically brought me black coffee. I took one sip and was like “oh i guess i like coffee now” and never looked back. Yep, regular old hotel breakfast coffee got me hooked.
I love the créme from Nespresso.
I’ve tried so hard with celery and onions. Turns out I like the flavors just fine, it’s the textures I can’t handle. So I just have to chop them up into the tiniest pieces so they don’t squeak when I bite down. Food shouldn’t squeak when I bite down.
The cheese curds in poutine must squeek when you bite down.
Haahaha, ew, no! J/k, thanks for letting me know something I should never try 😂💜
I prefer them melty from the fries / gravy. I hate when it’s just a hunk of unmelted ass cheese.
Some melted, some hunk of unmelted ass cheese is the way to go.
A squeaky onion is an undercooked onion imo, same for celery and carrots. I give those vegetables a big headstart on everything else. They’re basically impossible to overcook and their best flavors come out when they’re soft through and through.
For sure! I can handle them cut up small and cooked forever, but it took a lot of willpower on my part to get to that point 😂
I love onions and prefer raw onions on burgers and sandwiches. I usually snack on them when I’m cutting the onion. But I absolutely can’t stand raw tomatos or pickles.
I still barely fuck with raw onions, but grilled onions are great, and were the gateway drug to my appreciation for Onions in general. When I was a kid, I’d pick them out of everything. Had a burger unknowingly with grilled onions. Shit changed my life. Started to appreciate the flavor and even incorporate it into my cooking. Now, most things I cook have onions in them in some way, shape or form.
Hmmm. Do they still squeak like a mouse tho? 😂
Onions can have all kinds of textures and tastes depending on the type, condition and cooking method you use. Try raw red onions in a salad or caramelized for half an hour to put on a burger. Also I suggest removing the first layer (after the skin) as it’s often tougher than the rest.
Bud Ice. It’s $1 a can of 5.5% beer and I’m in poverty. Gotta drink something, so I made myself tolerate the cheapest.
Gotta drink something
Nah
Dude, just drink whiskey. A 1.5 oz spirit at 90 proof (45% ABV) is roughly the same amount of alcohol as a 12 oz can of 5.6% beer.
A 750 ml bottle of whiskey is about 16, maybe 17 1.5 oz glasses. So basically any liquor/spirit that’s cheaper than $17 for a 90 proof bottle, or like $15 for an 80 proof bottle, is a better alcohol per dollar value than Bud Ice at $1/can.
Isn’t cough medicine more cost effective per alcohol percentage? That’s what I remember the alcoholics drinking when I was younger.
you know there’s sites that track abv/$ cost for the real alcoholics out there, right?
if the purpose is to get drunk then abv/cost is the only thing that matters
I tried and failed with blue cheese.
Every year, I try again and fail a different way.
Same here. I’m not a very picky eater at all, but I can’t seem to eat blue cheese and it’s not for lack of trying.
Blue cheese is best as an addition to something else, like on a burger or salad. By itself or on a cracker it can be very overwhelming because of the strong flavor.
If you tried it those kinds of ways then it might not be your thing.
One year, I tried different varieties. The next, I tried walnuts and honey.
Maybe 2026 will be the year of blue cheese burgers.
The first time I tried gorgonzola was on a buffalo chicken pizza at the pizza place I used to work at. They used franks wing sauce for the chicken. The vinagery spice mixed with the creamy funk of the gorgonzola is amazing to my taste buds. (Which is weird because I am generally a picky eater and it sounds like something I would hate) So maybe try it with chicken wings or on a buffalo chicken pizza.
Yeah, the buffalo chicken pizza at my old job was on point. I still don’t mess with blue cheese really. Even with actual buffalo wings. I think the fact that it was melted into the regular pizza cheese helped…
Not that you *have * to succeed — but have you tried it with honey and apples?
Not yet, but it sounds like a promising strat.
I worked very hard to like beer when I was in high school. It didn’t help that I was “borrowing” warm Old Milwaukee from my dad’s case in the basement.
