The mystery of why some people hate raw tomatoes

I'm really glad to see I'm not alone haha. The first part of the article read like my childhood.

I think a big part of it, at least for me, is the mucoid layer around the seeds. If I seed raw tomatoes, they go down fine. But those seeds: it's like eating someone else's boogers.

Yeah that was the only question I thought the article would answer.

The title should have just been "Why I Hate Raw Tomatoes and You Don't: Who Knows?"

for me, its texture.

I hate the goop and love the flesh of raw tomato.

I cannot stand cooked large chunks of tomato.

Yes that was a really annoying title, very poor form by the scientific american.

Thanks for digging out that bit for the rest of us.

We've changed the title accordingly. If someone suggests a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.

I don't hate them and they don't make me gag. I'm fine with a nice Caprese Salad with fresh summer tomatoes. That said, I routinely pick tomato slices out of sandwiches and generally avoid them in situations where they're the norm. With me it's at least as much of a texture as a flavor thing.

Is it the texture? Texture seems to be a significant component of taste. What I might perceive as "juicy/tangy" in a tomato (positively), someone else might experience as "slimy/acidic" (negatively).

Expectation matters a lot, as well. Have you ever, perhaps while half-asleep, drank orange juice thinking it was milk, or vice versa? That first half-second is weird...

thanks, I was really lost skimming the article, fishing for the mystery

I'm the opposite. I don't like heirloom tomatoes. I prefer the pink-ish, barely ripe, fast food tomatoes.

It depends why people don't like tomatoes. If your problem is that your supermarket tomatoes seem kind of tasteless and with bad texture.... You're right. They are.

Get an heirloom or other flavor first tomato fresh out of the ground so all the aromatics of the earth haven't faded away yet, different experience entirely.

Exactly the same experience for me. I can remember my surprise when I bit into a ripe, fresh, yellow heirloom at the instigation of friends that wouldn't shut up about how good they were. I love _that_ sort of tomato, but every time I get some weird artificially delayed/ripened thing in the winter, no matter whether it is "on the vine" or not I am nauseated. I would say there is a faint rotting sea-food odor to them, especially to beef tomatoes.

This is why tomatoes are a big reason for my vegetable garden. It's near impossible to get a good-tasting tomato in the store. The ones that taste really good either don't look good (marketing suicide) or can't make the thousand-mile journey through our food supply chain.

Of course some people may still have an aversion to fresh tomatoes for other reasons. We're all wired slightly differently when it comes to food.

As an aside, the article mentions brussel sprouts. They have a very different taste when they are fresh (usually if they are not sold on the stalk, they likely aren't fresh). I've suprised many people who told me they didn't like brussels sprouts then tasted fresh the ones I cooked.

Same for peas. Growing up in France, we'd get peas that were harvested less than 4 hours before eating. Past that threshold, the sugar becomes starch and the taste changes significantly.

Yes, organically grown tomatoes taste just fine (though I'm not a big fan of tomatoes in any form, in general. Don't mind small amounts in salads, and also like ketchup - again, the kind without preservatives or added sugar). Used to grow them at home as a kid, in our garden.

Yeah. When I came to the US, one of the bad food surprises for me was how terrible the tomatoes are everywhere. Those poor creatures were obviously bred for something else than being tasty, and I've by then eaten a lot of proper tomatoes, and they shouldn't be like that. Since then, I've found out US does have proper tomatoes, but you need to look for them. And you will almost never find them in any restaurant or other mass-food establishment. Those are uniformly horrible.

You wouldn't believe the hassle I have to go through getting good tomatoes for a restaurant.

Don't get me started on potatoes -.-

Note: this is currently due to Japanese tastes, but in Australia I still had a fair bit of work getting good quality tomatoes with a decent flavour.

I'm with you on the main point you're making generally, but regarding vegetables, those people often have a point also. Many of the vegetables in grocery stores are bred to deflect armor piercing bullets and last a thousand years- with the side effect of tasting like poison.

I am one of the people who gags from eating raw tomatoes, but I've found that I have absolutely no problem eating those brown tomatoes - the ones that grow mold after 2 days.

The point of this article and those other studies does not have much to do with personal taste directly. These examples are of interest because they offer clues of where to look for chemical sensors the body has. We do not often get such direct clues about how sensory input maps back to protein sensors and the genes that encode them.

So this is less an exploration of taste preference and more of an exploration into how and why some things taste fundamentally different between individuals.

Yeah, you might think that and then meet my friend who HATES both chocolate AND coffee (at the age of 45... plenty of time to adapt to coffee, but not liking chocolate is unfathomable to me), and go "WTF, seriously?" ;)

Tastes are one of those things that we just can't (no matter how hard we try, or want to) grasp rationally. These entirely subjective experiences are just... not rationally conveyable.

This spills over into sexual preferences as well, btw (not to derail the topic, but thinking of sexual preferences as mere "taste variation" is useful IMHO).

My parents grew heirloom tomatoes 30 years ago. I wasn't able to enjoy them raw. Cucumber and tomato salad with a bit of oil is tolerable though.

If someone offers you Kopi luwak, refuse.