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Comment by 9rx | Hacker News Reader

> we all have foods we like and dislike

For dislike you mean like rotten or spoiled food? I'm not sure I've met food in proper edible condition that I didn't like.

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I think a person who has liked every single piece of food (in edible condition, to use your phrase) they've ever put into their mouths is a pretty rare specimen.

Not really, I am one. I have tried all kinds of "exotic" foods like Swedish Surstromming etc. I can definitely relate to how people eat them and can find some way (of eating it) that it's delicious, like in sandwiches etc. This is a skill (I think) and many people just don't have it. If someone eats it, and especially if they have eaten it for centuries, you can just win by trying to figure out how to eat it. There is no downside.

That being said, I won't eat food that is obviously (and provably) dangerous like Korean live octopus, Casu martzu (cheese with maggots) etc.

Ah, this is where nuance comes in. For instance, I do not like carrots - it's a taste thing, I don't enjoy the flavor a bit. I've kept trying them for years and if something is carrot-forward, I don't enjoy it. I tried some miso-glazed carrots that I'd whipped up for my family just this past weekend and they just weren't for me (I appreciated how tender they were, and enjoyed the miso glaze on it, but the carrot taste put me off). Now, if you shred them up, or dice 'em, and toss 'em into a salad, a sandwich, or in some slaw and I can't taste them at all? Sure, I'll devour them along with the rest of the meal.

But they're hiding in there, you can't tell they're there. I still don't "like" carrots, but I don't mind eating them if I don't taste them. There's a difference between the two, I think.

That said, to your point, I was super picky as a kid, and that approach (trying food I didn't like in a dish that I did like) helped me quickly not be picky when I was a younger adult. My palette is tremendously wide now and there's only a relative handful of things I don't "like". I'm also now always down for an adventure and experiencing something new, so I'm happy to try weird shit, whereas I never used to be.

Yes, I too have "less favorite" foods. Carrots being one of them, celery - another. But I try eating them regularly and this definitely helps. And no, I don't mask them to the point of them being completely undetectable. On the contrary, I do increase their concentration with time and there are foods where I enjoy them even when they dominate the flavor. For example, pickled celery is delicious.

My dad, a holocaust survivor, was one of these people. I have a much more expansive palate than most of my peers because of it but I draw lines at brains and organs presented as such, that sort of thing.

I've tried most cultures' foods, at least.

Why is it that, specifically with food, people who have absolutely no taste seem to hold a strange pride about it?

You don't see this with e.g. film or music, somebody pridefully saying "I'll listen to anything anybody considers music" like it's some sort of badge of honor to have no preferences.

I'm not trying to knock you here, it's just weird to me to be proud of having no preferences.

I don't know, but why do we find this struggle to differentiate between fact and feeling so often here?

In a very direct way, humans need calories to live. You can just opt out of movies entirely without much impact, so I don't think they're symmetrical.

A "picky" movie watcher isn't really the same thing as a "picky" eater. The eater is doomed to be locked in a cycle of working around their preferences for as long as they live.

Not to mention that we've been carefully curating the best of the best foods over millennia. In a few thousand years we'll likely have forgotten the movies that weren't so good, so chances are at that time you will enjoy all the movies that survived as well.

>I'm not sure I've met food in proper edible condition that I didn't like.

Have you ever tried hákarl (fermented shark)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A1karl

I think if you tried enough things, you'd come across some edible food that doesn't suit your taste.

The term "food" is not defined in a universally agreed-upon way. A delicacy in some cultures is offal or garbage in another.

I can buy "I'll eat anything." If what you mean is "I like everything that someone somewhere will consider to be food," well, color me skeptical.

If someone can reasonably consider it food, fair to say that is food for the sake of this.

Like I said, I haven't met the food I don't like yet. It is impossible to know how I feel about the foods I haven't yet met. There is an infinite selection of food out there. Perhaps something will cross my plate someday that turns up my nose. I always try new foods when I have the opportunity, but that day hasn't yet come.

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