When I was three or four, I ate raw onions. This is what my parents tell me, anyway. My mom would give me a peeled white onion and I would eat it like an apple. I must have been a pleasant kid to come home to at the end of a long workday.
I have no memory of this. But I do know that as an adult, I’m anti-onion. I will eat onions when they’re fully cooked, caramelized or hidden in soups as mirepoix. But don’t you dare try to feed me raw onion. I don’t care if it’s in the world’s most delicious fresh salsa, sliced thinly on top of smoked salmon, or diced on a hot dog. I won’t eat it. I must have exceeded my raw onion quota when I was a kid.
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2 responses so far ↓
Joseph Wu // March 3, 2009 at 9:30 am
Were you chronically congested as a kid? Apparently, onions taste like apples if you can’t smell them. One of my psych profs in university told the story of some other psychologist who went to a party and gave everyone a pill to swallow. Then he gave them raw onions to eat. Whatever was in the pill temporarily cancelled out the sense of smell, and the onions tasted like apples.
David // March 4, 2009 at 12:01 am
I feel the same way about raw onions. Why do those restaurants that cater to old people always load their salads with them? I suspect its because they can’t taste anything any more.
For me, the ‘no more forever more’ item was black olives, the rather bland, slightly metallic tasting ones that come out of cans with names like ‘Super Colossal’. My parents had a party and I ate so many of those shiny black things off the hors d’oeuvre table that I was quite sick. Now, I rarely if ever eat them. They are the Wonder Bread of the olive kingdom.