Jonell Galloway is the host/moderator of a Facebook group (The Rambling Epicure, Mastering the Art of Food Writing). This morning, she posed the following question:
I knew an Englishman who was a pilot during WWII. He had to eat 2 kilos of carrots a day to keep his vision sharp. He could never look at a carrot again. In fact, he got nauseated at the thought of even eating a carrot. Have you ever had that reaction to a food?
I suspect that everyone can identify with the phenomenon. It’s a particular category of food aversion… not cultural or physical, but felt viscerally. I’m not thinking of aversions in response to the coincidence of illness (that is not caused by food) that the mind associates with the experience of illness. It’s a misplaced example of something that supposed to function as a survival mechanism. For example, I cannot bear canned tuna—which I suspect was caused by tasting and smelling it when I was ill as a child. Hypnosis therapy might be able to cure me of that aversion, but I don’t see any reason to change the status quo.
Today, we’re talking about aversion as a response to over-indulgence in a particular food.
My father, when he was an adolescent—and had the uncontrollable appetite typical of adolescent boys—once ingested a huge bowl of pineapple that his mother was preparing for something else. Was it jam, dessert, or what? Who knows; the story’s details are lost in the mists of history. His excessive eating led to a life-long disgust for anything containing pineapple. It’s possible that he was punished for his piggishness (which might explain his later revulsion). He did start tasting, very hesitantly at first, a little pineapple when he was in his seventies, and almost liked it.
Almost.
Oddly enough, my own over-consumption-based food aversion) was—as it had been for my father—to a tropical fruit. The story of my feelings about bananas, appeared in The Digressions of Dr Sanscravat: Gastronomical Ramblings & Other Diversions and in an earlier substack post (“Flashback,” March 25, 2023).
Like my father before me, I’ve also reached well into my seventies—but, unlike him, I have no intention to return those loathed fruits to my diet.
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Back in the 80s I was enjoying a carrot juice in a bar on the shore of Lake Ajijic in Mexico. Started talking to a handsome man at the next table who had been a pilot in the Luftwaffe. He had a similar aversion to carrots.