D - Disgust
We love to get all misty eyed and lyrical about the food we adored as children but few of us care to remember the things we really hated.
Any adult who’s ever tried to feed something to an unwilling child will know that the disgust reaction is profoundly physical and all but impossible to overcome. If a kid doesn’t like spinach, no amount of intimidation, cajoling or bribery will make him eat it.
When was the last time, though, an adult refused something you’d cooked them? Clearly, we lose some of that visceral disgust as we mature. Except for dieters, vegetarians and those with psychosomatic food ‘allergies’ who, I hope, you have no need to dine with, grown-ups are properly omnivorous or at least polite.
But surely those infantile revulsions were every bit as formative of our adult tastes as the things we loved.
A brief and unscientific survey of childhood food phobias reveals some interesting facts. There was a surprising gender split amongst respondents with women remembering things in vivid descriptions of revolting tastes and smells and men seeming much more moved by texture. It also appeared that the things we really hated were most often the sort of nonsense that no adult would ever serve to another.
This correlates with my own particular loathings. Packet vegetable soup that seemed indistinguishable from vomit, containing imperfectly reconstituted cubes of dried and nameless vegetation, now sticks in my memory as intractably as it once stuck in my gullet. Worse, if possible, was a concoction by our school dinner ladies - a ‘Russian Salad’ comprising inadequately drained tinned diced veg with the terrifying addition of a lumpy, floury white sauce. This was called ‘Macedoine’.
It was Kilgour, a classicist and limp-locked Ganymede of the upper sixth who remarked that, if the Macedonians really ate like this, it was little wonder that Alexander the Great laid waste to Asia Minor.
Aaah, the heady days of youth. I believe he’s a mobile phone salesman now.