Stuff I Hated to Eat



When I was a child, I used to hate peas. My Mom always served them for dinner and I just couldn’t stand them. I would hide them under the chicken bones, under mashed potatoes, under noodles, or even in my napkin. It was a very dramatic event, trying to get Marc to eat his peas.

Mom and Dad would tell me that I couldn’t leave the dinner table until I ate them. I would hold out and once even sat there for an hour after dinner until Mom finally gave in and let me go. There the peas sat on my plate, cold and mushy.

I think it had to do with the peas being canned. They may have been hot when served, but still ended up being mushy. Mom bought the canned peas because they were readily available and more importantly, cheap! Once we could afford the splurge of fresh frozen peas, with their fresh “snap” when you ate them, the tide began to turn for those peas. Now they still weren’t my favorite, but they were now palatable.

There are a lot of foods I disliked as a kid but began to like as I got older. Sour cream is another example as well as marmalade and rhubarb. My Dad grew up with marmalade and rhubarb pie. I shuddered at the thought as a kid. Now, not so bad! One food item I still don’t like to this day is cottage cheese. BLECH.

My Nana used to love cottage cheese and would serve it with fruit or jam for lunch. I refused to eat it and would go hungry. People must have thought she neglected me. My Nana’s friend Mrs. Block once asked what I had for lunch and I would say exclaim curtly, “She didn’t feed me at anything at all!!!” She gave my Nana this look of horror. Nana would roll her eyes and sigh.

Lastly, my brother Adam and I tried dog biscuits when we were 7 or 8. Now before you go “ICK!” it happened just a couple of times and more out of curiosity. We dared each other to eat one, I don’t know who went first, but I remember them being in different colors: brown, yellow, and green. We ended up snacking on them.

Gretchen, our German Shepherd, looked up to us sadly begging for her cookies back. We hid the box under Adam’s bed until Mom discovered them. She was completely mortified. She screamed to my Dad, “BOB! The boys are eating dog biscuits!” Dad hid the biscuits up on the highest shelf in the top cabinet of the breakfast room so we couldn’t get to them. Looking back at my dog biscuit eating days, I figured I have eaten far worse.