My theory on this is that some of the hate for a lot of vegetables comes from either eating canned ones or poorly cooked ones. My girlfriend didn’t know she liked green beans until she started living with my family and my father made her some. My dad sautéed the in butter with garlic, and she only had ever had those extremely mushy canned ones and had concluded on that basis she hated green beans.
Fun fact: Brocollis is the ‘veg kids don’t like’ in Amercia mostly. Pixar even edited scenes in ‘Inside Out’ where a dad feeds his daughter broccoli, turing it into bell peppers for the asian market:
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-inside-out-has-different-scenes-in-other-countries-2015-7?op=1
This shows some really nice attention to detail.
Broccoli, cauliflower, and green beans we (brother and I) were always fine with as kids. It was the asparagus and spinach I never cared for as a kid. Turned out it wanst the spinach’s fault, my mother would just buy bags of frozen spinach, put it in a microwave safe container and turn it on. So if tasted bad. As I learned to cook I started to like it as I actually used it in other ways. Asparagus though… I rarely give a chance, and usually if I do I’m trying it in bacon freeze which defeats the purpose of eating a vegetable I feel.
Both my kids favorite veggie was broccoli when they were small. I’d prepare it the way you’d get it in an Italian restaurant - small parts of it just bleached for a short time, so it stays firm, served with nice olive oil and salt. (And a bit of lemon, if I have it on hand)
Broccoli (like so many veggies) tastes awful when overcooked into a soft and mushy consistency (and then it also changes its taste in a bad way).
Here in Germany grandmas typically are amazing cooks, with the sole exception when they cooked veggies. That generation loved their vegs really soft and overcooked.
I only like raw asparagus. If it is cooked, it tastes nasty as hell
Never had it raw, thanks for the tip. I’ll give it a try
It’s the only cooked vegetable my kids like.
What, no sweet carrots?
Nope
I too choose this guy’s mom.
If you are a super taster, broccoli taste like grass smells. At least for me and my daughter. Its so bitter that I threw up one time when I was a kid being forced to eat it. So lets accept that to someone with a lesser/different sense of taste/smell its okay. To those of us who can smell when someone has been in their house five hours after they left it taste completely different. So no thanks I don’t want to eat grass.
Do you think that your special taste buds not liking broccoli are so widespread that they’ve made not liking broccoli a common cartoon trope?
How do you find out if you are a supertaster? I’m curious because growing up I couldn’t stomach any vegetable that was bitter. Broccoli, brussel sprouts, celery, etc. were enough to make me gag just from the flavor. Nowadays, I can cope with the bitterness by focusing on other flavors and textures but I’ve definitely been in positions where I have a single bite of celery and then can’t muster up the courage to eat for a solid hour.
Fellow super taster though it’s more like a curse. It also extends to wine, beer, coffee, onions, and numerous other things because my sense of bitter is too strong.
404
das a dead link for me. just forwards to the main page
wth it still works for me
There are just a ton of foods that input in my mouth that immediately make me feel like I’m going to vomit. I really hate it.
Did you get sick a lot as a kid? Like long term, not just related to food?
I don’t think so, no. Why?
I think they’re asking because you can develop taste aversion by eating something and getting sick (even if the sickness is completely unrelated).
My sister got H1N1 when it was proliferating, and she had a box of nilla wafers before the symptoms started hitting hard. Now she inexplicably can’t eat a single nilla wafer.
Ohhh. No, I think it’s because my parents didn’t make me try many foods when I was young and then once they began it was the big ordeal of never letting me leave the table until I tried some. Many times I would wait them out because things just disgusted me that much.
I’d still describe myself as a pretty “picky eater” and I loathe trying anything new in public, but I’ve gotten a lot better and I have pickier friends too now. (It helps not being the most picky lol.)
Broccoli and cheese is awesome. Other preparations like steamed are not as delicious, but ymmv.
In almost all cases, I frankly detest steamed vegetables. Probably due to my grandmother steaming the absolute piss out of ANY vegetable when we visited. My mother didn’t overcook them nearly as bad, but to this day I just don’t enjoy the flavor of any vegetable steamed nearly as much as I do roasted in the oven. High heat + short time + delicious, crisp, lightly charred goodness
Steamed broccoli + garlic salt, just done overdo the brocc until it’s mushy
I think that’s where the reputation comes from. Overcooked broccoli is inedible, and I know people who refuse to leave any bite to it at all, which seems insane.
I feel like crunchy, fresh broccoli is a relatively new trend. I found out about it on my own, at my place as a kid it always looked like green boogers and tasted the way you imagine that would.
That and canned veggies. Don’t know if it’s because we were low income or if produce was just a lot more expensive back in the 80s and 90s. But, I remember eating a shit ton of canned “mixed vegetables” at my house and at friends houses.
My mom was a good cook, but I feel like we didn’t get a lot of fresh veggies unless we were living on a military base where the groceries were subsidized.
I think it used to have to be cooked to hell because in the past it legitimately didn’t taste as good as it does now. Selective breeding has taken a lot of bitterness out of many vegetables.
I don’t know, man, this was the 80s and 90s, it’s not that long ago. It still tastes like I remember if you overcook it.
30-40 years is a lot of time to selectively breed vegetables.
Yeah, no, it’s not that it isn’t enough time, it’s that I’ve been eating broccoli and beans all this time, I would have noticed.
I mean, we all noticed the tomatoes becoming water balloons, it’s not like it’d be unheard of.
You wouldn’t notice slight changes over decades. You’d need to do a side by side comparison to say for sure.
It got cooked to hell because most people can’t cook and that’s what they know. If anything broccoli tasted the better in the 80s, because it wasn’t as maximized for shipping.
My mom used to have a microwave cookbook and would make most veggies in the microwave oven. This cemented my love for crunchy cooked vegetables. I can’t eat green beans in a restaurant because most of the time they are almost the consistency of porridge.
Steamed broccoli with a little soy sauce & Sriracha is one of my absolute favorite snacks. Cauliflower, too. I’m gonna go make some.
Steamed is my default method of cooking broccoli.
I cut the stalk up for soup and pasta. Then I lightly steam the florets and I like it.
Nice to read about a person that so appreciated the kindness of another that they were willing to extend a kindness to them
Had me in the first half, not gonna lie
Same for meatloaf
You can absolutely fuck meatloaf
You wanted to fuck your friend’s meatloaf?
The “kids don’t like broccoli” has a scientific reason. Kids have a lot more receptors for aromas tasting bitter (10 to 15k different chemical compounds taste bitter to them) which reduce to 5k or less when growing up. So some types of food that adults can eat without problems because they lack the receptors have bitter and vile flavours for kids.
I always assumed this is also why adults love disgusting cheese (I do to a degree as well nowadays). We just lost our sense of taste and call it refined taste.
The “losing taste” is actually a beneficial thing. Most things that kids don’t like are either risky (e.g. coffee) or difficult to digest (all kinds of cabbage), so it is good that kids don’t like them. For adults being able to expand acceess to available foods helps feeding the horde in difficult times.
Doesn’t help a lot of people used to just boil broccoli without seasoning. Doesn’t do the flavor any favors.
My stepmother was that way so I couldn’t stand broccoli growing up. Most vegetables were blan and tasteless without salt and boiled.
I rarely buy them now because I can’t physically handle cooking every day now. So most vegetables go bad in the fridge.
Plant breeders have also been busy reducing bitterness/tannins in various vegetables like brussel sprouts and canola oil, so things are in fact less bitter than 30 years ago.
Any word on if this impacts nutrition?
I’m mostly familiar with animal feed, where nutritional quality weighs quite heavy during selection. For human consumption I assume there are some base nutritional standards when applying to enter the market with a new breed, but might heavily depend on your region.
Brussels Sprouts are another one… I don’t think I had properly cooked Brussels sprouts until I was in my mid-to-late-20s, and they’ve become one of my favorite vegetables. They’re so fucking good dude.
That’s interesting. Do you have any sources on this phenomenon?
This one, for example: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4654709/
Or this one: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22197939/
Originally, I had read a cluster of those articles some years ago, but scientific articles like to hide behind paywalls nowadays.
And at old age, it ends like this: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/05/05/526750174/why-taste-buds-dull-as-we-age
his source is that he made it the fuck up!
~(MGR:R joke)~
I sympathize with the bottom part so much. My parents absolutely refused to cook anything ever and bought the worst, most unhealthy prepackaged foods from the grocery stores. I spent the first years of my life thinking that things like apples just weren’t sold at my local Kroger because we never had them. I felt like shit mentally and physically for pretty much the first 18 years of my life because of it.
I grew up, moved out, and holy shit I love eating “rabbit food,” as my dad used to call it and I never would have learned before is that cooking is fun
I feel you. I weirdly did have vegetables and things growing up, but my mom self admittedly hates cooking. So most of what we ate consisted of casseroles made up of things dumped out of a can and any veggies likely also came from a can and we’re heated up on the stove. She also over cooked all the meat to make sure people wouldn’t get sick. So all the veggies were bland and mushy and all the meat was dry as fuck. I’ll never forget the first time I ate fresh pineapple at my inlaws house and it was one of the best things I ever tasted. I’m pretty good at cooking now and I’ve managed to help my mom improve in all ways as well. She now uses a meat thermometer that I got her for Christmas. I cooked her some fresh broccoli in a pan with salt, pepper, and garlic powder and she loved it and started making hers that way instead of boiling it. Baby steps, but we’re making progress.
Rabbit food? What the fuck
Some dudes live their whole lives afraid their balls will fall off and roll away if they eat anything but brown meat.
Hey, c’mon, there’s all kinds of dudes that love going to town on some brown meat.
We get it you’re in the kkk
Enjoying meat and two veg on a daily basis is traditional.
I’ve heard it be said from many men that I knew growing up that the more processed food is, the better, because it kills all the germs that come out of the ground. I’ve not seen that man eat anything green that wasn’t on top of a fast food cheeseburger in all my years alive.
In the 90s people started suggesting eating veggies occasionally and the American populace reacted predictably, i.e. as if someone were threatening to literally emasculate them.
Kind of like the modern anti-vax/anti-mask freaks.
Fellas, is it gay to eat healthy?
Gays, is it healthy to eat fellas?
Did you to wish you could fuck your friends mom‽
Yes but that was irrelevant because she never cooked for me, she was just hot. Still is, in fact.
We always joke that he has a Wine Mom. He thinks that we’re calling her a drunk. It means that she gets better with age.
Relevant username if I ever saw one
Man I was tormented with that crap as a kid. “HOLY CRAP YOUR SISTER IS HOT!!! That’s your mommmmmm? Whoa!”
Same crap with my sister.
I see them both as living farts.
Well now we need to see pictures of your hot mom and hot sis so we can judge for ourselves in the name of science and research.
Commenting to come back to see that guys mom
I had a running joke with this lad in school where he’d say “your sister’s fit” and I’d punch him in the arm. No idea why we did it or how it stayed so friendly. Just remembered it for the first time in maybe 20 years. Thanks!
The good news is if your mother and sister are attractive, There’s decent odds your good looking as well. Unless your mother fucked an ogre, and if that’s so… Well at least Shrek’s your dad?
I’m not ugly, but I’m the least attractive member of my family.
My brother looked like a Greek god, my sister looked like a model. My dad was so sought after that his name was spray painted all over our town with hearts and love confessions. Bridges, buildings, love for him was everywhere. He was chased by women aged 18-90.
I was born with crossed eyes and had to have a corrective surgery. Every man in my family is over 6ft tall and I’m only 5’7. I still randomly message my mother to thank her for going through with the surgery.
I definitely lost the lottery, but it could have been worse.
Well incase no one has told you that you are attractive lately, you’re fucking beautiful man. May every road rise up to meet you
Well thank you. :p You’re beautiful too!
Love the interrobang.
We all did. The hot moms anyway. The big milfy moms, I just wanted them to make me some food.
What did you think milf stands for?
He knows what he said.
Mums insanely lovely food
I hated broccoli as a kid and I still hate it as an adult. It tastes the way farts smell. 🤮
If you ever feel like giving it another go, try roasting it up with the florets coated in some olive oil, crushed garlic, salt, pepper and a bit of smoky paprika if you’ve got it around
I guarantee it’ll at least be the best version you’ve had
Found my dinner tonight. Thanks!
