Pie Lady wrote:I was happily chewing away when I realized there was something foreign in my mouth. I pulled out a LONG hair with a large chunk of masticated sandwich tangled up in the end...that ended lunch, any future meals in my room, and peanut butter in general for quite a while. I'm back on peanut butter but only in the kitchen.

Then you might want to stay far away from Rotterdam where Wim T. Schippers' Peanut-Butter Platform (1962) is on view through May 31st. Me, I practically fetishize peanut butter, so it's well worth a ticket to Holland.

i remember seeing a guy on tv once that ate nothing but oscar meyer hotdogs and buns. i don't remember it being described as a phobia, but allergies don't seem logical. but he was a reasonably fit and healthy man, otherwise, and did a hundred pushups every day.

A few years ago, I spent Sunday afternoon making cornbread, and ate it for breakfast every day that week. On Thursday, I noticed that there was a bit of a tangy, almost citrus kick to some of the bites. "That's weird", I thought, and didn't think anything of it.

On Friday, I accidentally knocked over my plate before eating it, and noticed green mold growing on the bottom of my cornbread.

It was over a year before I touched the stuff again.

You should have seen my apple last night.

That reminds me of the time I was babysitting some unholy terrors in my youth. The mother sent them over with a box of Ding Dongs. I opened one individual Dong and thought the texture was odd - I turned it over and noticed I was holding a wad of white fuzz. I don't remember keeping away from Ding Dongs specifically after that, but perhaps that's the reason I always found Ho Hos superior.

I agree. Once you get sick it takes forever to begin eating it again. It once happened when I ate shrimp and also something with cherries but I love both of them so much I got over the feeling but it took a while.

Not just when something made me sick, but when I happened to get sick, coincidentally, after eating something. As a kid I came down with the flu the night my mom made her sour-cream chocolate cake; that damn cake appeared in every one of my fevered dreams, endlessly rotating.

That was thirty years ago and I haven't touched it since

I agree about finding hair in food, I can barely finish.

I do have 2 other "phobias". The first is biting into gristle or any other unchewable part of the animal in a portion of meat. I have been known to nearly spit the mouthful across the table.(at home only!)

My second phobia is finding nerves and / or blood vessels in meat. I was put off SPAM for 15 years after finding a piece of vessel that was fully 1/4 inch in diameter. Now as to why I eat SPAM at all, well that is a subject for another thread!

Suzy Creamcheese wrote:Not just when something made me sick, but when I happened to get sick, coincidentally, after eating something. As a kid I came down with the flu the night my mom made her sour-cream chocolate cake; that damn cake appeared in every one of my fevered dreams, endlessly rotating. That was thirty years ago and I haven't touched it since

I think the term for that is "conditioned nausea." If a particular food has made you very ill once, it's possible (which is to say, this happens in some cases, not all) that not only the taste of it but just the smell, the sight, or the thought of it can trigger nausea and revulsion in the future.

Katie wrote:

Suzy Creamcheese wrote:Not just when something made me sick, but when I happened to get sick, coincidentally, after eating something. As a kid I came down with the flu the night my mom made her sour-cream chocolate cake; that damn cake appeared in every one of my fevered dreams, endlessly rotating. That was thirty years ago and I haven't touched it since

I think the term for that is "conditioned nausea." If a particular food has made you very ill once, it's possible (which is to say, this happens in some cases, not all) that not only the taste of it but just the smell, the sight, or the thought of it can trigger nausea and revulsion in the future.

This is me with ginger ale. The very thought makes me nauseous. Now ginger beer, that's different!

When I was about ten years old, my parents went out and left my brother in charge, which means we stayed up late and watched SNL. John Laroquette was the host (not important to the story but my brain remembers this detail nonetheless), and was in a skit about a man who dies and gets to ask God anything he wants. He asks God, what was the most disgusting thing I ever ate? And God tells him he can't handle it. He then says, ok, what's the hundredth (or something like that) most disgusting thing I ever ate? And God tells him that he ate a cockroach that was in a bowl of butterscotch pudding and he didn't notice because he was watching tv.

after a few years, I could eat butterscotch pudding again. however, to this day, I cannot eat yogurt with chunks of fruit in it because my brain is absolutely convinced that I am eating bugs.

ETA: Conditioned nausea is extremely common. many patients undergoing chemo report they start feeling nauseous and sometimes even vomit just from seeing the hospital or clinic where they get treatment. For me, it means I can no longer shop at the Target on Touhy, because I spent too much time there distracting my older daughter when I was miserably pregnant with her younger sister. And Sprite/7-up/ginger ale are absolutely out of the question, an aversion dating to childhood.