Are there any foods you hated as a child that you cant live without now?

I was a very picky eater as a child – these days I’m better about fruits and veggies (ha, I have to be, as a vegan) but still a picky eater about pretty much the same things, I guess – I always hated roasted onions or anything related to sour cream.

@poisonedantidote Mine are the exact thing as yours. I couldn’t stand onions or olives during my childhood but now I eat them every chance I get.

Salad – As a child I would not touch anything with the word salad in it. Now I couldn’t imagine life without them.

There is, however, one food I hated as a child and still can’t stand as an adult. Green peas! Ok, if you hide them in a pot pie or perhaps a few floating around in the soup are tolerable, but put a plate of those little green hork inducers in front of me and you are likely to see a re-creation of that famous scene from the Exorcist.

@poisonedantidote How funny. I immediately thought of onions, as I was carmelizing some yesterday for chicken fajitas. As I was cooking them I thought of all the different kinds of onions that I like and the different things each one goes with. I hated them as a child.

For the longest time I was unable to stomach waffles as they were the last meal I ate before I got hit by appendicitis and that experience left me with an aversion to waffles I just couldn’t shake. Now I love my Belgiums!! YUM!

Almost all vegtables. As I kid I wanted meat, potatoes, and gravy, and would tolerate sweet corn, raw carrots, or raw peas. Now, I could almost be a vegetarian.

Spinach and Fish.

I wouldn’t go near them as a child. Now I lurve them.

I hated raw onions, PIZZA, sour cream and pickles. I can’t live without raw onions now, esp Vadalias. I still won’t touch sweet potatoes or olives. eeewwwww

@Aster You hated pizza?! The only other person that I’ve heard of that hated pizza was Maniac McGee. And he wasn’t even real!

@Aster: Shame…Sweet Potatoes are one of the healthiest foods on the planet.

Tomatoes.

I’ve always liked tomato sauce, but I hated pico de gallo and sliced tomatoes and all that, but now I’ve grown to like them more. I still won’t bite into a tomato and I don’t like the tomatoes put in In’n’Out burgers, but other than that, I like them alright. I also will eat mushrooms now, but I still don’t love them or anything.

Other than that, most things I hated I still do, like seafood, eggs, etc.

tomatoes

I would not eat pizza because the first one I saw my sister ordered and the cheese smelled so bad to me. I got over it really fast!!

I would not eat fish, mushrooms, broccoli, spinach, tomato sauce, asparagus, and I literally could not eat brussel sprouts – they would make me gag. I remember wrapping each leaf of brussel sprout in a heap of mashed potatoes to be able to swallow it. I used to flush fish down the toilet and stick other vegetables in the drawer of the little plastic table I would eat at.

I eat and like all of those things now, except fish. But when I wasn’t a vegetarian I would eat it quite regularly.

Blue cheese. Love it now!

Mac and cheese. What was I thinking? It must’ve been a texture thing back then, I don’t really know why I wouldn’t have liked it.

Asparagus!

I used to HATE avocados (a sin when you are from CA), but now I love them. I can, however, live without them.

steamed veg’s… like broccoli…my tastes didn’t change just the quality of the food…I get my veggies from Take-out and the one’s I make I make in a crock-pot

Raspberries. It was probably psychologically-formed dislike from having to serve time tending to the large garden patch of them in the back yard. Hours spent picking Japanese beetles off of the bushes and tossing them into a smelly jar of gasoline with the sun beating on my back. Once, a bug crawled out of a berry while it was nestled in a bowl of cereal. That did it for about 20 years. Then, at a restaurant, they were served on top of a dessert, and it was love at first bite.

I can’t remember but I know for sure that maybe 5 years ago I didn’t as much tea as I do now :P

As a child, I hated mushrooms, peas and tomatoes. Now, I love mushrooms and tomatoes but I’m still not so keen on peas. I’ll eat them only if no other vegetable is available.

Oh and coffee, which I didn’t like until I went to university. Funny, that. :)

The old wives tales tell us that our taste changes every seven years. this may or may not be true.

As a child, i hated spinach. as an adult, i now love spinach. go figure.

Spinach and swiss chard, but now I like them, fish and seafood remain off my list.

I hated mushrooms and bananas, and now I can’t live without them. it’s true what @john65pennington said. Our palate does change every seven years.

When I was a little younger I hated meat! But now It is so delicious. I love every last juicy bite. From poultry to cows and deer. But I still don’t eat pig.
On the flip side I used to love potatoes even plain now not so much.

There were many things I hated as a kid. Sausage, hamburgers, steak, fish, bacon, and ham are some things I really like now. I didn’t start to enjoy them until I was an adult and realized the foods aren’t bad, I just never liked the way my dad cooked them! He’d make these really thick burgers and cook the shit out of them, so they were dry and tasteless. Same thing with steaks, just way overcooked. I don’t know what he did to ham and bacon, and I think he usually cooked fish that tasted too “fishy” to me. I like flounder, cod, and sole, sometimes salmon, and am more likely to try different kinds of fish now that I know there are a lot of milder tasting options.

I also like a lot of cheeses that I didn’t like/wouldn’t have tried as a kid. Goat cheese, brie, fresh mozzarella, manchego…now I’m craving cheese. I love cheese!

There are also foods I didn’t like as a kid that I still can’t stand. Olives, lima beans, liver, and fried corn are things my parents made often and always forced me to eat. I did not decide they were any tastier as I got older!

Spinach and grapefruit. Love them now.

tomatoes and avocados for me as well… i recently started accepting tomatoes and embracing them and i don’t know why i didn’t like avos but i couldn’t live without them today!

I have always and always will hate tomatoes. I couldn’t stand mushrooms until a couple of years ago, and shrimp was a favourite of mine. Now it makes me want to throw up everytime I see or taste it.

Alcohol.

Mayonaise, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, mushrooms, and avocados were some of the things I hated as a little kid. I’m a vegetarian now and I love all of those things. I have heard that the number of tastebuds on your tongue decreases as you become an adult. Babies apparently have about twice the number of tastebuds as adults. I have heard it described that people who have more tastebuds on their tongues than the average person are called “super tasters” and they tend to experience flavors more intensely, and usually in a bad way. Here’s an article about this phenomenon supertaster So bitter things (like I used to think Brussels sprouts were) taste awful to most kids and those people with more taste buds. But I have also learned that if I keep tasting something over the course of several times, I will usually develop a taste for it. Some things are an acquired taste. I think Brussels sprouts falls into that category. There’s one vegetable that I still don’t like, eggplant, but I think it has more to do with the texture. It always seems like biting into a piece of soggy corregated cardboard.

I was a horribly picky eater as a child, and a diabetic. I feel bad for my parents for that.

I didn’t used to like onions, and while strictly speaking, I could live without them, I am not sure how I would cook without them!