Stock "Yuck!"

L - R, top to bottom: Broccoli, anchovies, raisins,◊ and Hawaiian pizza.

Eddie: Oh not sprouts! I hate sprouts!
Richie: Will you stop whinging, Eddie. Nobody likes sprouts.
Eddie: Why are we having them, then?
Richie: Because it's Christmas!

— Bottom

Some foods are just far more likely to show up as a hated (or outright universally or universally with one exception hated) food for a character, be they Picky Eaters or not. Weird allergies are a form of Televisually Transmitted Disease.

The foods which generate Foreign Queasine falls into this trope by default.

It is not being forced to eat a food generally considered disgusting in one's culture, that's Eat That.

Strangely enough, there's a reason certain foods, such as liver and leafy greens, tend to show up on a lot of kids' "Most Hated" lists—they actually taste different to children, and generally, they taste worse. Children are more receptive to bitter compounds in foods than adults (likely an evolutionary measure to prevent us from dying of plant poisoning while young), and tend to be put off by the bitter taste. Also, about 25% of people are "supertasters," having a higher concentration of taste buds than others: they tend to be repulsed by sprouts, spinach, coffee, alcohol, grapefruit, green tea, olives, soy, chili, soft drinks and tonic water. 50% are medium tasters, who have "normal" likes and dislikes, and 25% are non-tasters, who don't mind anything. Another reason children grow up hating vegetables is that parents often overcook them, removing much of the taste, texture and nutrients in the process. Not to mention certain places tend to use less, if any, spices than others, so already bitter vegetables are not gonna taste appealing to kids. Therefore, there might be some dissonance in what one group of people considers disgusting compared to another, and it can all be traced back to how the food is traditionally cooked.

Subtropes about specific food include Kids Hate Vegetables, Everyone Hates Fruit Cakes, Garlic Is Abhorrent, Haggis Is Horrible, You're Drinking Breast Milk, Anchovies Are Abhorrent, Pineapple Ruins Pizza, Disgusting Vegetarian Food, and Roadkill for Dinner.

Compare If It Tastes Bad, It Must Be Good for You, Does Not Like Spam, It Tastes Like Feet, Haute Cuisine Is Weird, and Foul Medicine. If the character is unaware of what they've eaten until it's too late, that's "I Ate WHAT?!". If an adult tries to get a child to eat a vegetable Stock Yuck with the promise of a dessert afterward, that's Greens Precede Sweets.

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Examples:

Dairy products

• Blue cheese, especially stinky Gorgonzola.
  • In The Muffin Fiend by Daniel Pinkwater, the muffin thief is deduced to be an extra-terrestrial, because even the Gorgonzola muffins were stolen and no human would ever eat a Gorgonzola muffin.
  • In the Friends episode "The One Where Joey Tells Rachel", Monica bemoans that Chandler won't even let blue cheese into the apartment.
  • In the English dub of the Yo-Kai Watch movie, Jibanyan says that the farts of the main villian smell worse than blue cheese.
  • Gorgonzola has gotten a slight reprieve, as despite the smell it's one of the mildest cheeses in the blue cheese family. In fact, gorgonzola-and-fruit combinations (particularly grilled cheese sandwiches) are a bit of an epicurean fad as of the mid 2010s.
  • In the Donkey Hodie episode "Cheesy Con", one of the songs in Donkey and Panda's version of the Cheesy Con Sing-Along is about Donkey having a very stinky piece of gorgonzola cheese.
  • In Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, when the weather starts turning bad, it rains gorgonzola all day long. The people in the illustration are shown walking through a rain of gorgonzola with clothespins on their noses.
  • In Chowder a green anthropomorphic rat who usually acts as a jerk towards Chowder is named Gorgonzola possibly in reference to this.
• Skim milk. Most would agree that it's an acquired taste, but it is all-too often grouped with tofu in media as "disgusting health food". Buttermilk isn't well-liked either.
  • In Animaniacs, it was hinted that buttermilk was what made Slappy so grouchy and bitter.
  • In The Petri Dish, some coffee is sentient (presumably due to one of Thaddeus's wacky experiments) and refuses to mix with skim milk because it's so disgusting.
  • Parks and Recreation: Ron says the two things he can't stand are liars and skim milk, which is lying about being milk.
• UHT^note (ultra-high temperature processed – storable without refrigeration for up to 12 months) milk is looked down upon in Northern Europe and North America. It's more popular in Southern Europe, South-East Asia and South America where the warm climate makes transporting fresh milk by refrigerated trucks expensive.
  • The Father Ted episode "Speed 3" had Mr. Fox tell Dougal that "Milk gets sour, you know. Unless it's UHT milk. But, there's no demand for that because it's shite."
  • Because of the way it's processed^note It's passed through the extremely hot (~400°C) ceramic filter, UHT milk is basically the same thing as scalded or boiled milk, which itself was a Stock Yuck for a long time before refrigeration and pasteurisation was a thing, because it has that characteristic slightly burned taste that many find off-putting.
• Jokes about Limburger cheese are common due to its very strong smell. It doesn't help that it literally smells like feet (the same compounds responsible for foot smell are found in Limburger; the mosquitoes that specialize in human feet have been shown to be attracted to Limburger).
  • Looney Tunes is full of gags about limburger. For example, in one short where Sylvester is trying to keep Speedy Gonzales from stealing cheese from a ship, Speedy tricks him by locking him in a room full of the stuff. Poor Sylvester almost suffocates before he is able to free himself.
  • An episode of Our Miss Brooks, "Public Property on Parade", sees Cordon Bleugh Chef Mrs. Davis cook a limburger omelette for Miss Brooks. Brooks wisely declines, so Davis leaves it in the front yard for the birds. Cue a flock of birds flying a frantic retreat.
  • In Mark Twain's "The Invalid's Story", a shipping box containing a corpse being sent home to the deceased's parents by train is accidentally switched with one containing rifles, which had a piece of limburger left on top of it at some point. The smell eventually becomes so strong that a railroad employee riding in the same car remarks that the burial really ought to have been carried out the previous summer.
  • Chubby's Limburger cheese is a Running Gag in The Little Rascals.
  • On My Name Is Earl, Earl is enjoying a picnic with his ex-girlfriend Natalie, and states about a cheese (likely Limburger or a similar cheese) that, "You know, for smellin' like feet, this cheese is pretty damned good!"
  • In an episode of Family Guy when the Griffin family had to relocate after Chris was placed in the Witness Protection Program, they wonder what the foul smell is in their new home. Brian replies, "It's either bad meat, or good cheese."
  • The Queen in Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs injects poison into an apple, proclaiming "This'll make Snow White weak in the knees." A worm jumps out of the apple, coughing and choking, and exclaims "Man, that smells like Limburger cheese!" He and a whole group of worms flee the apple.
  • A What A Cartoon! Show short, the aptly named Yucky Duck, is set in a restaurant where one of the customers orders a Limburger cheese sandwich. It smells so revolting that Yucky keeps it under heavy lock and key, and when he tries to lift the lid of the container, the cheese tries to attack him. Even customer himself, who actually LIKES the cheese, is so offended by the smell every time he tries to take a bite that his Dodgy Toupee keeps flying off.
  • The Donkey Hodie episode "Acornball'' features a rock called Stinky Cheese Rock that the characters have to smell if the acorns miss the bucket.
• Goat's milk is occasionally featured in a joke where someone is offered 'milk' and assumes they're getting regular old (cow's) milk, since they're indistinguishable to look at. Expect the recipient of the gag to take a big gulp and follow with a Spit Take. That being said, goat's milk is actually pretty good - the yuck factor comes from how different it tastes from cow's milk - and the recipient may ask for more after they recover.
  • A featured Stock "Yuck!" in the The Elenium and The Tamuli. Styrics (like Sephrenia) have historically raised goats and prefer goat's milk while Elenes (like main character Sparhawk) find it too robust compared to cow's milk.
  • In Sonic the Hedgehog 2: The Official Movie Pre-Quill, the boss of the Mean Bean Coffee Shop, Karen, is given one of Agent Stone’s iconic goat’s milk lattes… and spits it in his face in disgust. He frames for money laundering and thrown in jail, leading to him taking over the store.
• One odd inversion of this is some commercials from The American Dairy Association, which show cheese making other Stock Yucks like broccoli and peas taste good.
• The idea of drinking milk from any animal that isn't a cow or sometimes a goat skeeves a lot of people out. Sometimes, sheep and horses are seen as OK animals to drink milk from, but never cats or dogs or anything like that. Human breast milk is considered fine for babies and occasionally toddlers, but gross and/or inappropriate for anyone older than that, which is where the trope You're Drinking Breast Milk comes from.
  • The Red Dwarf episode "Kryten" has a scene where Holly informs Lister that they ran out of cow's milk and Lister is actually drinking dog's milk, to Lister's instant disgust. Holly goes on to claim that dog's milk lasts longer than all other milk because nobody wants to drink it, and "when it goes off it tastes exactly the same as when it's fresh".
• Cottage cheese tends to get this both for its slightly bitter taste and its perception as a diet food. Some also find the mushy, liquid texture off-putting. At least, in the English-speaking world. Central and Eastern Europe consider cottage cheese an everyday foodstuff and an ingredient in many dishes - also, apart form the liquidy sort, we have the more solid sort (with more whey drained) and that's the "regular" cottage cheese. A funny observation - the further east you go, the more sweet dishes contain cottage cheese. Germans only consider it good for a sort of a cake, Poles will happily add fruit and stuff it into crepes, but draw a line at adding chocolate, while eastern Slavs will add sugar, chocolate and whatever sweet stuff they want.
  • In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Dudley has to eat cottage cheese as part of his diet, and doesn't seem to enjoy it much.
  • In The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, Beth mentions cottage cheese as one of the awful foods you have to eat if you go to fat camp.

Drinks

• Many varieties of whiskey, which are made by fermenting various grains or combinations thereof and then aging the distilled spirits in a wooden barrel (usually oak)^note It sounds gross, but aging them in wood actually makes the result less icky, as they pick up pleasant notes from compounds in the wood such as vanillin and mellow the longer they age, losing a great deal of their alcohol "burn". Strongly peated Scotch whiskies in particular are an acquired taste, which for the uninitiated can be described as tasting more or less the way a permanent marker smells. Others have likened its smell and taste to gouache paint.
  • A flashback in Daredevil (2015) has Matt stitching his father's wounds. His father has Matt take a drink of scotch to steady his hand, which causes Matt to retch and say it burns.
  • On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, one of Stephen's "confessions" is that he hates the taste of whiskey, and only drinks it to seem manly. He then sips some, cringes, and washes it down with Gogurt.
• Jokes tend to be made about prune juice a lot, seeing how useful it is as a natural laxative.
• Tea is often this for American characters. Americans don't drink quite as much (hot) tea as people from many other countries do and are more associated with coffee. Younger characters may also be put off by the bitterness of tea.
  • The Cat Who... Series: Qwill generally disdains tea, though he'll drink it to be polite if there's nothing else.
  • One episode of Teen Titans Go! has Robin trying to stop his team from drinking tea. He believes that it's a British attempt to take back America. He's right.
  • Time Squad had the episode "Tea Time For Time Squad" where the participants of the Boston Tea Party, including John Hancock and Samuel Adams, are instead holding actual tea parties and have transformed into foppish dandies with no interest in revolting against England. They finally snap out of it after Otto feeds them all coffee.
  • In Learning to Breathe Underwater, Pearl likes tea, but Amethyst (who will eat almost anything, including engine oil and five-year-expired burritos) comments that she can't believe Pearl's favorite drink is "dead boiled leaves".
• On the flipside, Coffee is seen this way in parts of the world where they don't drink it as frequently mostly due to its powerfully bitter taste if you don't mix it with lots of sugar/and or dairy creamer, especially to children who don't respond to bitters well, which sorts Coffee into "gross adult food". Also, jokes abound about American work culture's terminal dependency on the stuff, the addictive level of caffeine and the fact that it's a diuretic so you will be going to the bathroom more frequently are all frequent reasons people will swear off the stuff.
  • A Chainsaw Man omake has Aki taking Denji and Power to a restaurant where they have coffee for the first time. Both being outstandingly childish, they hate its bitter tastes, saying it's like water full of mud or that came from a ditch. Denji pretends to like coffee in a later chapter while visiting Reze's cafe, but can't hold it for more than a few seconds.
  • In an episode of Dexter's Laboratory Dexter and Dee-dee break into Mom and Dad's coffee supply to figure out how it triggers an almost magical transformation from morning horrors to functional human beings. They find the taste absolutely disgusting, but end up coming back for more after the caffeine inside hyper-charges them. They drink all of it and end up having a hard caffeine crash, after which they swear it off. Then Dad tells them that nobody drinks coffee for its flavor and adults hate the taste too, but kids still have the energy of youth to keep them going while adults need their caffeine to function.
  • In Stardew Valley, Jas and Vincent (the only two children in the game) will respond negatively if given coffee as a gift, while all the teenage/adult characters like it.
• Non-dairy milks, such as soy or almond milk, are typically considered "disgusting health foods" and the province of vegans, hipsters, the lactose-intolerant, and those with outright dairy allergies. Almond milk has a taste and consistency that's closer to dairy milk, and has actually made inroads outside of the typical demographic of non-dairy milk drinkers (which isn’t exactly news—as we note in Medieval Food In Europe, the medieval European aristocracy prized almond milk for its great taste and being acceptable for Lent).
  • In one episode of Regular Show, when Mordecai and Rigby are forced to look after Death's son, Mordecai looks around the fridge for something to feed him. He reacts normally at seeing goat feet and soul juice, but acts completely disgusted when he sees almond milk.
• Health shakes are also joked about a lot for being "hippie drinks".
• Water sometimes gets treated as "the boring drink" due to it having nearly no taste.
  • Roys Bedoys: Loys doesn't like drinking water in "Your Brother's Too Shy, Roys Bedoys!".
• Cranberry juice is sometimes seen as nasty, due to its bitter/sour taste and how people sometimes drink it to relieve period cramps or treat infections, especially UTIs.

Fruits

• Coconut is very frequent; this is probably from how older (1990s and earlier) "coconut" filling for chocolates was acrid, foul, and not very coconut-like. The stringy gritty texture certainly didn't help. Additionally, some coconuts can't be eaten raw and when it's not cooked properly it has a very bitter aftertaste. Adding to this is that coconut juice, which is sour with a salty aftertaste, is not exactly thirst-quenching.
  • Angelica Pickles from Rugrats said she hates coconut when she took a box of chocolates (with the help of Chuckie who was her slave after she saved him).
  • In Codename: Kids Next Door Laura Limpin grew to her huge Hulk-like alter-ego Big Badolescent because the Delightful Children from Down the Lane had a coconut cake at their birthday party. Inverted with Numbuh 4 who loves any candy with coconut, but is also highly allergic to it. This does not stop him from eating it anyway.
  • In one Family Guy Cutaway Gag, after Peter Griffin cut into a giant cake, he was more upset that the frosting was coconut than the fact that he cut into the stripper who was hiding inside the cake.
  • Most of the characters in Peanuts hate coconut, just as creator Charles M. Schulz did.
  • There's a line in a Heroes deleted scene revealing that Matt hates coconut. And is allergic to avocado, which suggests that getting out of L.A. may have been the best thing he could possibly do for himself.
  • In Zombieland, Tallahassee is rather upset to find a Hostess truck full of Sno-Balls when he was hoping for Twinkies. He hates coconut, you see. Not the taste - the consistency.
  • The Alt Text on this xkcd comic, which lists various fruit on a chart based on how tasty and easy to eat they are.
    "Coconuts are so far down to the left they couldn't be fit on the chart. Ever spent half an hour trying to open a coconut with a rock? Fuck coconuts."
  • Stuart from MADtv (1995) hates coconut and spits out any cake that has any in it.
  • At Susie's birthday party, Calvin makes an offhand remark about how he hates it when "the birthday kid chooses something gross [for their cake] like coconut."
• Raisins are a common one, especially when used in lieu of chocolate chips. Their wrinkly, shriveled appearance and their jarringly sticky texture definitely contribute to their soiled reputation in medialand.
  • Garfield hates Raisins. Several strips feature him spitting out every single raisin at Jon and saying "I don't like Raisins." This is more accurate than intended, as grapes and raisins are poisonous to cats like Garfield.
  • A message you can receive in Borderlands 2 involves Tiny Tina freaking out because they had the audacity to put raisins in their cookies. She then gives you a mission to destroy all of the vending machines with cookies in them.
  • A Tumblr blog mentioned an April Fool's prank where the blogger's mother baked chocolate chip cookies... but used raisins instead of chocolate chips.
  • Dolly tells Jeffy that raisins are "dead grapes" in one Family Circus cartoon.
  • In Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the school replaces the chocolate chip cookies in the cafeteria with oatmeal raisin cookies as part of an effort to get the students to eat healthier. Greg comments, "I have a theory that oatmeal raisin cookies were invented as a practical joke a long time ago and that they were never actually meant to be eaten." He illustrates his point with a drawing of a Pilgrim at a Thanksgiving dinner spitting out an oatmeal raisin cookie ("Ptoo!") and a couple of Native Americans laughing at him.
  • One Ed, Edd n Eddy episode had Rolf indignantly ask "What know-nothing would dimple the cookie biscuit with the doohickey of a rabbit?"
    Kevin: Those are raisins, dude.
    Rolf: ...Same thing!
  • For Unikitty, raisins are quite literally a Berserk Button. In fact, this is how Lucy is able to get her to awaken her inner rage in The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part.
    Lucy: Poverty! Pollution! People putting raisins in stuff!
    (Unikitty finally snaps)
    Unikitty: IT WAS PERFECTLY FINE WITHOUT RAISINS!!!
  • Spider-Man: In the arc Go Down Swinging, a Carnage-possessed Normie Osborn is attacking Aunt May, and when she reminds him of all the cookies she baked for him over the years, tells her that she deserves to die because she put raisins in them.
  • The lyrics of the "Chanson fausse" skit from Les 2 Minutes du Peuple consists of random ramblings which starts with the singer saying he bought a cake and removed the raisins.
  • In the first episode of Harley Quinn (2019), Harley bakes Joker some bread pudding, but he's so frustrated over the media thinking that Riddler is funnier than him that he shoots it several times because he thinks it has raisins in it. Harley then informs him that they were actually chocolate chips.
  • An early interaction in Starkid's Twisted sees Aladdin threaten to kill a baker for putting raisins in the loaf he stole that morning.
  • In Brainbent, when the cast is asked about their least favorite foods, Sollux brings up that he hates carrot cake with raisins in it. His reasoning is "why would you ruiin a perfectly good cake wiith liittle 2quii2hy grape turd2??"
  • In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, one of the things that Gullivarrr can say in his sleep is "SNRRK, snrrk...Arr! If I find even a single raisin in these cookies...I'll keelhaul the lot of ye! Zzz..."
• Jokes about prunes — and prune juice — are common, as some people think of them as natural laxatives. (They do contain some mild natural laxatives plus dietary fiber; however, there is no actual proof that they are effective as a home remedy for constipation.) Their very chewy skins and (in fresher ones) gushy interiors can be unpleasant to some, and they just get drier, chewier and tougher the longer you take to finish them. Many people don't get past these qualities to get used to the flavor, so it remains weird-tasting whenever they do have one. The word "prune" has also been used as an epithet directed at old women (as wrinkled as the fruit). Some distributors have stopped using the word "prune" on packaging labels and called them "dried plums".
  • In the Wayside School books, it's revealed that Jenny hates prune juice, and was once late for school because her mother wouldn't let her leave the table until she finished it. She later threw up during class. It was purple. For the record, real prune juice is a clear brownish liquid: the blue pigment is only found in the skin of the plum, and it gets destroyed by drying and reconstituting the fruit, while the interior of any color of plum is usually brownish-yellow.^note Plums are a Prunus species: drupes related to the cherry and peach.
  • In one Judy Moody book, Stink gets sick and Judy offers him a prune because it's supposedly healthy for him. He only agrees to eat one if she'll eat one at the same time. Neither goes through with it; Judy throws her prune in the trash when Stink isn't looking and he immediately spits out his when it gets in his mouth.
  • In one episode of Doug, Doug and Judy are stuck with an ultra-strict babysitter, Mrs. Stinson, who feeds them nothing but prunes.
• Pineapple gets a lot of flak from pizza purists. By their standards, the moisture of it dampens the crust, and the sweetness overtakes the other flavours of the mozzarella and other toppings.
  • Amphibia: In "Hop Luck", it turns out Anne has some very strong feelings about pineapple on pizza when Sprig suggests they add some to the pizza they're making.
    Anne: Don't you dare talk about pineapple on my pizza. Ever.
  • Inside Out has this gem, although implied.
    Anger: [pointing out the broccoli-topped pizza] "Congratulations, San Francisco, you ruined pizza! First the Hawaiians,^note Despite the name, Hawaiians have exactly nothing to do with the pineapples in pizza. "Hawaiian" pizza was invented by a Greek chef in Canada, and was named after a brand of canned pineapples he used, not that young Riley could be expected to know this. and now you!"
  • The European versions of the first Splatoon had a Splatfest (an online competition where people pick one of two sides to join and face players on the other side) themed around pineapple pizza: Team Delicious was the one that likes pineapples on pizza, while Team Disgusting dislikes pineapples on pizza. Team Disgusting won that Splatfest.
  • Inverted with Starlight Glimmer from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, whose voice actor has confirmed that she likes pineapple on pizza because "she's contrarian like that."
  • A scene in Futurama had the Planet Express crew trapped in a cave. They thought they could at least last a few days since they had quite a few boxes of pizza. They immediately threw them out, however, upon discovering all the pizzas had pineapple.
  • Inverted by the subreddit r/KnightsOfPineapple, whose members defend the use of pineapple on pizza.
  • American burger purists similarly have reason to complain about Australian burgers, thanks to the existence of the "Works" burger, one of Australia's most iconic "home-grown" fast foods that puts either raw or grilled pineapple rings on a hamburger, along with lettuce, tomato, cheese, either a beef patty or a small steak, bacon, a fried egg and beetroot (which has its own loathers).
    • Hungry Jacks^note The Australian version of Burger King, essentially also offers the "Tropical" flavored Whopper as a Summer exclusive, which adds raw pineapple, bacon and smokey BBQ sauce to the normal beef patty/lettuce/tomato/cheese/mayo burger.
  • In a non-pizza related example, in Tales of Symphonia, if at certian point on the game you chose Sheena to cook curry, Lloyd will say that it's very different from other curry he has tasted. Sheena reveals that she uses pineapple on her recipe, which Lloyd immediately calls out as weird, despite having said he liked it.
  • The pineapple on pizza thing is inverted in Filipino culture, where Hawaiian pizza is one of the most popular pizza varieties, if not the most popular. All major pizza chains and many lesser ones will have their own version of it. As pizza stands offer at least two options, one will be Hawaiian. Hearing of the uproar in other countries will leave Filipinos surprised and bemused. Germans Love David Hasselhoff is in full effect.
  • It's not just Filipinos. Typically, Asians are much more accepting of pineapple on their pizza as a whole. The reasons range from symbolic^note in Chinese, the word for pineapple is a homophone for "wealth, come [to me]!" to historic^note that Hawaiian pizzas are among the first types of pizzas introduced when pizza was introduced to the region in the early 80s to that an Asian's sense of taste is just structured differently^note the sweet and sour taste of the pineapple combined with the tartness of the tomato puree sauce is said to make the pizza just taste better, and thus more appetizing, to Asians. Many pizza joints in Asia carry some form of the Hawaiian pizza, some even carry two or three variants of the flavor^note Pizza Hut Malaysia breaks the record of having the most types of Pizzas with pineapple as a main ingredient - with three variants of the Hawaiian pizza itself (differing only in the sauce used as well as the chicken meat type), plus several other variants that swap out chicken for a variety of seafood chunks or even a completely vegetarian option.
  • In Psychonauts 2, Raz comes up on a zealous knight preparing to attack a pretty laid back and friendly dragon in Cassie O'Piea's library-like mindscape. If you choose the dialogue option where Raz tries to defuse the situation, the two very briefly connect over their shared love of pizza right before they say their favorite ingredients and the dragon says he likes his "Half maidens and cheese - half ham and pineapple." Guess which of those ingredients makes the knight hate the dragon even more than when the conversation started?
  • Inverted in a humourous Polish copypasta, claiming that pineapple on pizza is delicious, and the distaste for it is proof that "Polacks" have their taste buds "burned out with counterfeit cigs and shitty vodka". The pasta goes so far as to claim that WHO and UN "admit" there's a corellation between alcoholism, drug abuse, incest and dislike of pineapple on pizza.
  • In NIMONA, when Nimona tries to kidnap Diego for interrogation, he throws a bunch of random things at her in desperation, including a slice of pineapple on pizza. It hits her in the face, and she's so disgusted she momentarily lets him go.
• Though relatively obscure compared to the above fruits in the western world, durians are widely disliked on the Asian continent, due to their garbage-like smell and how they're heavy and covered in spikes. The durian has the dubious distinction of being the only fruit banned in public places in many countries, like the Philippines and Indonesia, solely because of how unpleasant it is to be physically near a durian. Durians DID receive a Colbert Bump in familiarity with the fruit by being featured in Super Mario Sunshine (notably being the only fruit Mario cannot pick up and hold) and Animal Crossing: New Leaf (they're one of the new fruit introduced in that title), but their lack of availability in western grocery stores means few westerners will get to experience one in person (they do tend to get sold in Asian-themed grocers, but these tend to only appear in communities with a significant Asian population). They also received another Colbert Bump in Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern for being the only food in the entire series Zimmern refused to eat. However, the Thais have developed durian strains that lacks the pungeon odor and are working to remove the thorns on the fruit next, in hoping to increase their appeal to westerners. Naturally Malaysians, Singaporeans and Indonesians, who believe the smell to be part of the experience, are against it.
  • The Mighty Durian is among the many foods Link can find and eat in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. They offer good health recovery and he seems completely unbothered by the smell and spiky texture. But then, Link will also happily chow down on just about anything, including rocks, so he's not exactly the most discriminating of gourmands.
  • Durian Juice is the worst (out of 5 levels of quality) juice that can be bought in Fable II. The description of the juice speaks for itself.
  "The sensory experience of this exotic, spiny fruit has been likened to 'custard passed through a sewer pipe' or 'eating one's favourite ice cream while sitting on the toilet'. The juice is not much better."
  • While they aren't eaten so the flavor goes unsaid, Durians in Super Mario Sunshine probably left a metaphorical bad taste in many gamers' mouths due to their role in the basket lady sidequest where you'd have to deliver three fruits to Pianta ladies for Blue Coins. Unlike other fruits, the durians couldn't be picked up because of the spikes so you had to kick them to their destination. With finnicky physics, several high walls and a large canal between where Durians spawn and the Pianta that wanted them, meaning you had to go for a football punt that could send them into the water or down a hill right next to the basket, it's one of the most infamous and obnoxious parts of the game if you're going for 100% completion.
• Canned cranberry sauce is the butt of many autumn and winter jokes. Not cranberry sauce itself, just the jellied version that comes in cans.
  • In the movie Pieces of April, April's neighbor teaches her to make homemade cranberry sauce when she sees that she's planning to serve the canned stuff. When April insists that her family likes it from a can, the neighbor says, "Honey, nobody likes it from the can."
• Umeboshi, the pickled Japanese plums,^note Actually, salt-fermented (they're made exactly the same way as sauerkraut) and closer botanically to apricots than to plums. with their intense, biting sour and salty taste, are quite a divisive thing, to say the least. The ones traditionally dried after fermentation and then parboiled to reconstitute them also add the slimy, mushy texture to the questionable taste. Still, they are a real cache of vitamins and minerals,^note to the point the "keeps the doctor away" adage uses this where the West uses apples; it was featured once on Iron Chef: the episode where Rokusaboru Michiba returned after a two-month hiatus due to illness. and break the blandness of the plain steamed rice well enough to have a lot of fans.
• Lemons get this, mostly from younger children, due to how sour they are.
• Grapefruit, including grapefruit juice, is often derided for its bitter taste, association with diet regimens, and risk of adverse effects if taken with certain pharmaceuticals.
  • Inverted in the "Chocolate Cake for Breakfast" routine from Bill Cosby: Himself. After serving a slice of cake to his four-year-old daughter, Cosby considers what she should drink with it and decides on grapefruit juice. It's the audience who reacts negatively, leading Cosby to pause with a stern look to the crowd before shouting, "This is not your child!"
• Pickled cucumbers (known as gherkins outside North America) can be divisive, usually when it comes to hamburgers. Many, especially children, don't appreciate their stark, sour taste contrasting the rest of the burger's more savoury flavor.
  • The "Excuse me, he asked for no pickles" meme, where a bossy character embarrasses a shy character by complaining to restaurant staff about the presence of pickles in an ordered hamburger.
  • Pearl of Splatoon 2 is staunchly against gherkins, thinking they ruin perfectly good burgers because they have a bitter taste and add a disliked texture to them. This was part of a Splatfest about whether gherkins should be in burgers or not: Team Gherk-OUT had a player popularity of 55%.
  • One of the bosses from Turnip Boy Robs a Bank, Uncle Rigsby, a surviving mutated human who was merged with the sandwich he was eating when the nukes dropped, appears to be picking the pickles out of his food to avoid eating them.

Grains

• Puffed rice cakes, the tough, flavorless staple food that Americans on diets have to suffer through. Expect jokes comparing them to coasters, as well maybe a joke about "putting a little something on them for flavor," which is usually something like cheese or bacon.
  • In Family Guy, Peter is trying to lose weight and decides to try rice cakes to help, only for him to begin screaming in pain, cough it up and wonder who would make something so horrible. In a characteristic cut-away, an evil Chinese man knowingly mentions [Peter] does not like rice cakes to have a jingle play: "Ricey ricey rice, no-one likes rice cake."
  • In FoxTrot:
    • Roger goes on a diet. His wife thoughtfully allows him to have a strawberry with his rice cake on account of having had a bad day.
    • In an earlier strip, Roger is complaining about how dry and raw his throat is and earlier that week he had been pushed into exercising, but it turns out to have been caused by rice cakes.
  • In The Simpsons, Homer goes on a diet, and Marge gives him rice cakes. She tells him to put something on them for flavor, and Homer loads it up with cheese, ham, bacon, and such, topped off with an olive.
  • In Big Nate, Nate's father Marty once handed out rice cakes for Halloween. Either Teddy or Francis's mom (the two were off-panel at the time) still uses theirs as a coaster.
• Oatmeal is often considered a stereotypical "boring food", as is plain bread with nothing else, and both might be Poverty Food.
  • In Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin refers to his dad's oatmeal as "pasty, bland, colorless sludge" while trying to get him to try his favorite cereal, Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs. Another has dad count a big bowl of plain oatmeal as part of the "crazy hedonism of weekends" to demonstrate his uptight stodginess.
  • A Muse Magazine article about language development in children includes an illustration of a toddler's speech bubble in three stages: "no want oatmeal", "I no want oatmeal", and "I don't want oatmeal". A footnote at the bottom of the page reads: "'Get that horrid slop away from me!' comes later."
  • Bert from Sesame Street is often the epitome of Incredibly Lame Fun. Naturally, he loves oatmeal.
  • Potter Puppet Pals: In "Snape's Diary," Harry, Ron and Hermione decide to steal Snape's diary and read it. The first entry reads, "Dear Diary, today I ate some oatmeal for my breakfast. It was flavorless and watery. I thought of my mother. I cried."
  • In the Animaniacs cartoon "The Sound of Warners," the Maria Expy Prunella serves oatmeal to the Warner siblings for breakfast. Their response is "We don't do oatmeal."
• In Russia, the classical Stock "Yuck!" is semolina porridge, often called simply manka. Some say a good portion of the hatred is due to the grain having once been too expensive for common people to learn how to cook it properly.

Meat, organs, etc.

• As recently as the 70s, tongue was frequently foisted on unsuspecting kids because it was the cheapest cut of meat on the market. That's where it got its stock yuck status from. (There's a famous scene in one of the Ramona Quimby books where the sisters enjoy their "pot roast" until they discover that it's actually tongue and revolt.) There's also the idea of tasting and eating a tongue with your own tongue which doesn't sound very pleasant. Then, word that it was actually quite tender and tasty got out. Although most people still wouldn't eat it on a dare, enough people would that they now sell it at gourmet prices. It also makes a nice lunch meat, especially with mustard.^note There's a catch, though. Tongue is tough (as in one of the most-exercised muscles in any animal). It has a lot of connective tissue, so requires extensive preparation to make it edible: either by slow-cooking it or by using a pressure cooker. When cooked down like this, tongue becomes so tender that it can practically be eaten with a spoon
  • Lobster and oysters had this happen to them as well, and now they're the most expensive things at the fish counter.
• For that matter, it seems like most of the meat from any given carcass (be it beef, pork, chicken or anything else) that is readily consumed is the skeletal muscle while most of the organs and other body parts are usually met with disgust. Mostly due to reminding people that it was once a living animal. However, depending on the culture and the resourcefulness of the chef, all of these parts can be used in something rather then letting it go to waste. Oxtail soup is a good example.^note Oxtails are among the less bizarre applications, since it's basically a very bony cut of ordinary meat — bone, skeletal muscle, fat, and connective tissue. That said, you have to be careful with that for different reasons — oxtail is so fatty that if you aren't assiduous about at least partially skimming the soup, you'll fall asleep after eating it. Traditionally, this distaste was strongly influenced by class, since such cheaper cuts of meat were often the only ones poorer people could afford; today, however, there's a sect of chefs and foodies who are trying to bring organ meat back into chic status.
  • Bill Cosby has a bit where he expresses distaste for various animal parts, including chitterlings (pig intestines; "That's part of the lower tract. Ain't no food down there!"), tripe (sheep's stomach), sweetbreads (albeit with the popular misconception that they are calves' or lambs' testicles^note Actually the thymus and pancreas; "It took me ten years just to kiss my wife, no way am I gonna have the stomach for THIS!"), and brains ("I can't bite down on nothing nobody's been thinking with.")
  • Odd organ meats are the main ingredients chef Aimsbury uses in Making Money because he became a chef for a dog, and they're very much Moist's Stock Yuck. On the other hand, they're virtually Adora's Trademark Favorite Food, and she asks Moist, "Do you think the head goes off thinking 'well at least he didn't eat me'?"
  • The one "outside" body part which freaks most people out the most is the animal's head and face. Eyeballs especially so. That tender, yummy "barbacoa" found in street tacos where you can't quite put a finger on which cut of beef it's made with? It usually comes from the head and face of the cattle.
  • In the case of chitterlings mentioned above, if the fact that they're pig intestines isn't off-putting enough, the pungent stench they emit while cooking will. It's usually enough to make people who haven't had them before never want to try them, and why it's often suggested that they be cooked outside.
  • Organ meat also remains popular in African-American cuisine, commonly known as "soul food". As mentioned above, this grew out a class division, as many modern day black Americans are descendants of slaves, who were often given the parts of the animals their white, rich owners didn't want. As well, chitterlings gave their name to the "chitlin' circuit", the network of venues frequented by African-American performers during the 19th and early 20th century.
  • An In Living Color! sketch involves two men who are trying to eat at a "soul food" diner, but everything on the menu is either not available or is messily made. One thinks about asking for chitterlings but questions the waitress how it's served. They leave the restaurant when she misunderstands and tells them how they cook it (specifically, the part about removing feces from the intestines and letting them sit in bleach for a few days).
  • King of the Hill hits both ends of the trope when a new bistro opens at the local mall. Bobby ends up getting downright addicted to organ meat, to the point of developing gout from it and continuing to go there to the point it nearly ruins his relationship with Connie. Hank, on the other end, seems to think eating organ meat is downright barbaric; when the doctor tells him that gout can be developed by eating organ meat in excess and that's likely how Bobby developed it, Hank's response is "He's not a ghoul" and thinking it may have another cause.
  • When the restaurant patrons in Ratatouille demand something new from Linguini, the jealous Chef Skinner demands that he make a particular dish which calls for veal stomach. Even Collette gets a squicked out look on her face as she asks the other chefs if they have any of it "soaking."
• Liver in particular tends to get a bad rap, usually in any work of fiction where parents try to make children eat it. Despite the fact that it's a delicacy in some places (like France, Germany, South Africa, and Lebanon, where they have dishes where it's prepared raw) and it's high in iron and vitamin A, many people are turned off by organ meat, and documented cases of incredibly high doses of vitamin A being toxic are sometimes mentioned. (In truth, the only way that would become a problem is if you ate the livers of polar bears, walruses, certain seals, moose, and huskies, not beef, sheep, chicken, or fish liver like most do.)
  • The bitter taste it can get may also be a factor in the hatred by children, whose tastebuds are more sensitive to bitterness.
  • For many it's the texture (which, admittedly, can be a bit mushy), and the iron-like flavor (which tastes of blood); but the former can be overcome if you don't expect it to have a meaty texture, and the latter can be remedied with some (preferably raw) onion (which cuts the iron-like flavor remarkably well) or by soaking the liver in milk or wine (a technique called "masking," because it masks the off-flavor of the liver).
    • Liver and onions can also turn into a stock yuck for those who have not eaten it. An educational kids' website tries to introduce the human liver by mentioning the dish, and Kevin Meaney had a routine where he made fun of it.
  • An episode of Doug revolved around Doug trying to get over his hatred for liver and onions after Patti said she was serving it at a dinner party she invited him to. The end of the episode revealed that she was kidding as she knew how much he hated it.
  • The Loud House:
    • In "A Tale of Two Tables", Lincoln gets mad that they are having liver at the grown-up table, but when told that's how he needs to act, he accepts it and eats it.
    • In "Sleuth or Consequences", Lincoln is shown in a flashback attempting to flush his liverwurst loaf dinner down the toilet, but clogs it in the process.
  • One of the comics leading up to Lex Luthor's President Evil run in Superman was a comic where Luthor sees a sandwich shop with a number of Superman-based items. There's "The Kryptonian" (roast beef, salami, pastrami), "Superman's Super-Duper Sandwich" (sub with everything on it), "The Man of Steel" (Atlantic salmon), and "The Lex" (choice of liverwurst or tongue). Lex doesn't find the joke funny.
  • Besides the taste factor, there are yuck factors owing to animal cruelty. Take foie gras which is the liver of a very force-fed duck or goose. The gavage process is controversial at the least because there's a push-back from the French culinary industry which upholds it as a protected part of their tradition.
  • Fonzie from Happy Days hates liver, but forces himself to eat it anyway since he thinks refusing to eat a food just because he dislikes it is a sign of weakness.
  • In a Boy and Dog strip, one of Rowan's parents tells him a story where a troll is forced to eat liver as a kid and when he grows up, he puts a Curse on some villagers to make everything they eat taste of liver. This puts them off their food so much that they refuse to eat and end up malnourished, with the exception of one guy, who's branded a weirdo.
  • In Zits, Connie is trying to get Jeremy to eat his liver, stating it's good for him. Jeremy however counters noting that he's not too thrilled about the idea of eating another animal's poison filter. It's enough to convince his dad to want to eat something else.
  • The Powerpuff Girls (1998) episode "Lying Around The House" begins with a scene where the Professor makes the girls liver and onions for breakfast instead of what they actually requested, while he sneaks some pancakes for himself.
  • My World… and Welcome to It: John expresses significant displeasure over being served liver for dinner in "Monroe the Misogynist."
• For Norwegians (and Americans of Norwegian descent), lutefisk tops the list. It's cod soaked in lye until it resembles fish-flavored gelatin. To make it more bearable, it's usually drowned in butter and wrapped in potato flatbread called lefse.
  • Part of the Stock Yuck factor may come from the fact that if you use too much lye, the lutefisk will corrode cutlery, especially silver cutlery.
• For some people, any fish at all is gross.
  • It has to be said most children in the UK will only eat cod and tuna, so the idea of eating other fish is off-putting for them. The popularity of fish and chips in Britain is a common joke about "inedible" British cuisine.
  • In an episode of The Flintstones where the families go camping, Betty feels revolted by the idea of Fred and Barney bringing back any sort of fish for eating.
  • This mindset is also responsible for the Filet-O-Fish's reputation as the Butt-Monkey of the McDonald's menu.^note Truth is, they're just fillets of Alaskan Pollock: essentially cod, so less "yuck" and more "meh".
  • The heroine of Gai-Gin hates seafood and complains that one of the things she hates about living in Japan is that "they eat absolutely any crap that comes crawling out of the ocean". She also hates tomatoes, and this causes problems when eating with a very traditional Japanese family who consider leaving food on the plate to be very rude.
  • In anywhere but the English South, jellied eels. In the manga of Girls und Panzer, when one Anglophile character serves them, they are actually blurred out, to save the audience from looking upon their hideousness. Of course, this means the British have a seafood that the Japanese consider weird, which should make one proud to be British.
  • Sushi and sashimi used to be this in the west, and many assumed that only City People Eat Sushi: Who would ever want to eat raw fish? Sushi has grown in popularity now, though, and this has disappeared (although, decades later, it still hasn't sunk in with popular culture that "sushi" by definition is just the rice, and does not exclusively refer to raw fish — that's called "sashimi").
    • This has exacerbated in recent years due to the amount of mercury present in most fish due to biomagnification.
    • Impulse (Bart Allen) will eat just about anything ravenously, as speedsters are wont to do, but detests sushi.
    • When Terra (Atlee) decides to take up Power Girl's offer of friendship the Kryptonian takes her out for sushi since Terra doesn't know what surface foods she likes. Atlee ends up letting every bite she takes fall out of her mouth with a disgusted face until Karen interrupts their meal to take her for a burger instead.
    • The Lucas Miller song "I Won't" has the lyric "Don't order sushi 'cause you'll get a raw deal", which spoofs the fact that people despise sushi because it's raw fish.
    • An "Archibald's Book of Oddities" segment on VeggieTales on TV told the story of an explorer who wrapped himself in seaweed to scare away a sea monster because sea monsters despise sushi.
  • Jim Gaffigan created a bit in his stand up about her utter hatred for seafood, and how he can't understand how anyone can like it.
  • Fish have the benefit of being somewhat familiar in that they're vertebrates. Other creatures which are classed as "seafood" like crab, shrimp, shellfish and squid/octopus get no such luck... Unless they happen to be coated in batter and deep-fried. Raw forms are out of the question.
• Escargot is often viewed unfavorably outside of Europe, as the thought of eating snails makes a lot of people uncomfortable. It's one of the very few foods that Garfield will not eat. This is most likely due to the fact that in most people's minds, snails are often lumped in with "bugs", which aren't readily eaten or really considered a food in Western cuisine. This is all the more apparent when you consider how people who readily consume clams and scallops (both are bivalves—which are also mollusks) may show disgust at eating snails. Then again, bivalves don't secrete slime the way terrestrial snails do. For the curious, escargot can be described as tasting somewhat like a portabella mushroom (earthy and meaty) with a notably chewier texture, and usually doused in generous amounts of butter and garlic. Given that mushrooms and garlic are themselves frequent Stock Yucks, this may or may not make escargot an even tougher sell.
  • Dave Barry, in several of his writings, claims that the French do not actually eat snails, but get a huge laugh from tricking tourists into eating them. ^note  Don't say that in the Burgundy region though, them's fighting words! Oddly, across the country in Normandy, you too may get funny looks and ostracisation if express the same opinion. Other areas of France either wouldn't care less, or possibly even agree with you!
  • In World Mosaics 4 the player character discovers a fire pit and some empty snail shells while visiting the prehistoric era. The diary entry concerning this comments that if escargot is all the nearest human settlement has to offer, they'd rather eat their shoe.
  • The Fairly OddParents!:
    • In the episode, "Christmas Every Day", Timmy is on his way to save Santa Claus from the lesser holiday mascots. When he reaches Quebec, he runs out of food. Fortunately, the web-enabled kids there got his message to help him, and bring him baguettes and snails, the former he accepts, but the latter he tells them they can keep. And it's probably a good thing they did, too, as one of the snails was used to knock out the Grade-AA explosive egg The Easter Bunny was about to use on Santa Claus.
    • In the episode, "Fairy Friends and Neighbors", Timmy gets dragged into going to a fancy french restaurant when the Turners' neighbors bail on them. To add insult to injury, it's hard for Timmy to swallow the snails he doesn't like with a neck brace he has to wear from a game of Twisty he got dragged into the night before.
  • In one scene of Barney's Great Adventure, the children wind up in a French restaurant. While Barney entertains the patrons by singing, the children lift various trays to find the missing egg they've been searching for. Marcella finds one that contains escargot instead and reacts in disgust.
  • The U.S. Acres short "The Discount of Monte Cristo" has Aloysius complain that the catering department made Roy and Wade eat escargot in one scene, and says he would rather have pizza. He then tells them that spending money to eat snails isn't a good idea.
  • Inverted in one episode of the British children's puppet show The Riddlers. Mossop, who has spent the majority of the episode refusing to try French food, decides to give escargot a try. He's a little surprised when he learns that they're snails, but enjoys them anyway (much to the disgust of the other Riddlers).
  • Inverted again in one story from the Buster comic story "Deadly Hedly Vampire Detective". While meeting a French detective, Hedly accidentally promises that there is food for him at the office, due to having been unable to understand what he was saying. Once he discovers his mistake, he gives the detective some of his snail sandwiches, explaining that while Englishmen don't eat snails, vampires do.
  • In the My Dad the Rock Star episode "Chip Off The Old Rock" Rock, trying to impress his father, has snails at a restaurant. He tries to stomach it, but ends up spitting it out.
• Frog legs are another French dish that Americans often find hard to stomach. The thought of eating amphibians sounds unpleasant to folks in the States (although in certain parts of the Deep South, particularly the parts that were settled by the French, frog legs are a popular local delicacy).
  • In Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers both Zach and his girlfriend are put off by this after going to a French restaurant. In a different episode, Trini cooked escargot (which she made into brownies for some reason) for the rangers, who loved it - right up until Billy told them what it was, at which point they spat it out. On the other hand, Skull loves them; it's hinted his family is Secretly Wealthy and he's used to unusual dishes.
  • Frog legs in Australia go past this and into Masochist's Meal; environmentalists have been pressing people to eat cane toads, which are as edible as any frog (and much larger) if you can carefully avoid the deadly-toxic mucus glands lining the back.
• In the United States military, creamed chipped beef on toast (a common breakfast food, made by rehydrating chipped beef^note A product made of dried beef shaped into round flexible "chips." At one point, Hormel, which makes the stuff, described chipped beef on its website as being "like bresaola, but not as tasty." in a pale imitation of a bechamel and pouring it over toast) is the subject of a lot of jokes. In army slang it is known by the dysphemism "S.O.S.", meaning "Shit On a Shingle", "Stew On a Shingle", "Same Old Stuff", "Something On a Shingle", or occasionally "Save Our Stomachs". Jokes about it were common among other humor about the bad chow on M*A*S*H. (Strangely, people actually pay to eat this stuff in certain parts of the East Coast; chipped beef on toast is a typical breakfast item at diners in New Jersey.)
• It's hard to find anyone who will portray Spam (or canned meat in general) in a positive light in the mainland U.S., despite its popularity as a precooked food. When used in the U.S. Army during World War II, it was often called "ham that didn't pass its physical" or "meatloaf without basic training", and one of many interpretations of the name is an abbreviated form of "spare meat" (or, if you will, the more colorful "Shit Posing As Meat"). Most notable was a Monty Python sketch portraying Spam as tasting horrible (the Trope Namer for Does Not Like Spam), and it eventually became the word for unsolicited email messages after being used by amateur radio operators. About the only places where canned meat is appreciated are tropical places like Hawaii (where their compact size and long shelf life make them popular staples) and in South Korea (where meat was previously a luxury for centuries; the ready availability of canned meat after the Korean War made it so popular that Korea even sells premium brands of Spam nowadays).
  • From B. Dylan Hollis' video where he makes "Spam pie", a recipe from 1969:
    Spam pie from the 1960s! It's a little late for war crimes!
  • Pacific islanders also like to joke about Spam being the best legal alternative they can have to "Long Pork" like their ancestors used to eat. This is almost certainly meant in jest to freak out tourists, but given that spam, pork, and human do have relatively similar makeup when it comes to muscle, there may be a grain of truth in that joke.
• In Sweden, surströmming (fermented herring, sold in tins) has this reputation. While plenty of people do enjoy the flavor, even they won't defend the smell, which makes you feel you should be wearing a hazmat suit when opening the tin.
  • While Polandball likes making fun of all countries' national dishes, surströmming tends to get the worst of it. Icelandic hákarl (fermented and dried shark's meat) often gets a very bad rap as well.
  • In Sonic Unleashed, Sonic can purchase cans of pungent fish from the ice-cold Holoska region, implied to be the Sonic world's equivalent to surströmming and called "Canned Horror." If Sonic feeds it to Chip, he'll spout out Symbol Swearing after eating it, and Chip's friendship with Sonic will decrease.
  • In Scandinavia and the World, Denmark likes pickled herring, but is grossed out by Norway and Sweden eating surströmming, and especially horrified by Iceland eating hákarl, which is described (pretty accurately) as rotten poisonous shark that's been buried for 12 weeks.
• Kusaya, the Japanese cousin of the surströmming, is similarly a fish cured in the insufficient amount of salt, so it ferments in the brine for up to a week, but is then dried in the sun, instead of canning. The brine is then reused again, growing up in stench, if not the strength.
• Sardines get this often, due to their smell and taste.
  • In the American Girl book Meet Molly, Molly's mother tells her a story from her own childhood, where she refused to eat the dinner her mother had prepared of sardines on toast. Her mother refused to let her leave the table until they were gone, so she wrapped them in a napkin and hid them in her pocket. Later that night, the family's pet cats smelled the sardines, pulled them out of her pocket, and ate them all.
  • In the film adaptation of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the town only having sardines to eat motivates Flint to make a machine that changes the weather to food.
• Lamb, suckling pig, veal, and especially balut (unborn fowl) can be this, not because it's gross itself but because some people are unnerved about eating "baby animals". Many food animals are killed at rather young ages, but veal is more obvious (and it's arguably a matter of What Measure Is a Non-Cute?), not to mention raising issues of animal cruelty if the animal was raised on a restricted diet (veal and lamb were historically fed only milk so their meat doesn't turn red) or confined.
  • In this story from Reddit, the OP remembers a very nasty girl from his second grade class whose favorite animal was lambs. When it was his birthday, he brought kabobs of lamb meat instead of cupcakes for the class, waited until she had eaten at least three of them, stood next to her, and struck up a loud conversation with his best friend about what they were made of. The girl promptly burst into floods of tears and cried so hard that the OP could still hear her crying in the office when he left school at the end of the day.
  • In the South Park episode "Fun with Veal", the boys go on a field trip to a farm, are horrified when they find out what veal is made from, and then kidnap all the calves from a local ranch.
• Other animals such as horses, dogs, guinea pigs, and cats also get this reaction from westerners, regardless of age.
  • In the mid 2010s, there was a bit of a controversy where people discovered that Horse meat had somehow ended up mixed in with ground beef in the UK. In this case, it wasn't that it was Horse - Horse meat is actually a gourmet meat there - the issue was concern of the meat's unknown origin and it apparently being low quality enough to end up with the other "scrap meat" that gets put into ground.
• Brains. This is in part due to many being weirded out by eating something's brain and also in part because eating improperly-cooked brain can lead to several serious diseases, and in the case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) even cooking is not believed to make it safe.
  • In Total Drama Comeback, when Cody and Noah are pitted against each other during the "Screams of the Thirteen" competition, they're each presented with a brain and challenged to finish eating it before their opponent does. When Noah sees the brains, he screams in horror and runs for his life.
• Squirrel is only eaten in fiction by either Determined Homesteaders or the rural poor. Anyone else will find it disgusting.
  • In To Kill a Mockingbird, a schoolmate of Scout's is invited over for dinner. He's so poor that his main source of meat is squirrels. He and his dad go hunting, but they can't find much besides squirrels.
• Rabbits used to be a normal source of meat akin to chicken, but this has decreased since the 1900s. Many people associate rabbits with cute bunnies and pets. At minimum, they're considered a "non-edible" wild animal which is fine to hunt but not to eat. Characters that do eat rabbits are either weird or so poor that they have to hunt and eat varmints rather than buy meat.
  • Rabbits are still widely eaten in Europe and Asia, both bred on farms and hunted as a wild game, so this can make them a Foreign Queasine for, say, a picky American.
• In some cultures, eating insects, spiders, worms, etc. is seen as disgusting.
• The hot dogs on the rollers at convenience stores, movie theaters, etc. are the subject of jokes that they've been there forever. Hot dogs and sausages overall tend to get this due to their use of organ meat mentioned above, all the better to conceal the origin of the filling.
• Bologna sausage often gets this due to its strong smell, the slippery texture, and how it's often served cold. The hatred for this lunch meat is so strong that the word "baloney" is commonly used to mean "nonsense" if not "bullshit." "No matter how thin you slice it, it's still bologna," which spawned Memetic Mutations for several decades, has often been attributed to a 1928 speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt's political rival Al Smith, though the phrase entered American popular culture at least a couple of years before that.
• The Mystery Meat served at American grade-school cafeterias, military bases, and questionable restaurants is prone to jokes about the stuff being made of cats, horses, or even people.
  • In the Total Drama episode "I Triple Dog Dare You", Heather gets dared to drink a blended purée of Chef Hatchet's mystery meat. She gulps it down, but looks visibly sick afterwards.
  • In Les Misérables, Thenardier the greedy innkeeper serves cheap, unidentifiable meat to the patrons of his inn to save money.
    Food beyond compare, food beyond belief
    Mix it in the mixer and pretend it's beef
    Kidney of a horse, liver of a cat
    Filling up the sausages with this and that!
  • Treehouse of Horror: In the "Nightmare Cafeteria" segment of the episode "Treehouse of Horror V", Springfield Elementary is forced to start serving Grade F meat ("mostly circus animals, some filler") in the school cafeteria because of budget cuts. Then the staff gets the idea to turn misbehaving students into food.
  • A Song of Ice and Fire: At the Wall, Three-Finger Hobb's sausages are made of "grease and salt and things that did not bear thinking about." To be fair, the Night's Watch (for whom he works) is stationed in a freezing cold, isolated location and doesn't exactly have a ton of resources available.
• Duck sometimes gets this for similar reasons to lamb and veal, but some people tend to find it delicious.
• Bugs in general are basically passed up for food entirely, eating them in modern society is seen as something only done out of utter desperation (or due to the somewhat racist mentality that only "tribal" societies would ever want to eat them), or by force, to the point where conspiracy theories have arisen that meat will be replaced by bugs for environmental reasons. Bugs are thus viewed as disgusting carriers of diseases at worst and food for pet reptiles at best. About the only true insect that really escapes this stigma to be eaten commonly are shrimp, which while lumped in with shellfish like crabs and mollusks has way more taxonomically in common with terrestrial insects.
  • Crickets are described as a flat-out "wonder food", being extremely protein-packed, super easy to farm in a sterile environment in massive quantities, and with a taste described as almost being like peanuts. But good luck getting pretty much anyone who's not feeling explorative to give them a try in the West, due to a long-ingrained culture that crickets are carriers of famine and plague. Cricket farmers are trying their best to overcome the stigma, but the fact you don't see crickets on the store shelves probably tells you how that's going.
  • Witchetty grubs are an Australian Aboriginal delicacy, being big enough to take up the entire palm of an average adult male's hands, they're also safe to eat raw and wiggling, and apparently have a similar taste and consistency to chicken. Eating one is considered a peer-pressure rite of passage despite everyone who isn't put off by them enough to try agreeing they are, actually, quite good, though you'd have to go to very specific places usually around the Outback to find where they're on the "menu".
• Meatloaf sometimes gets this because it's cheap to make and can count as Poverty Food, and can be quite bland and dry if not prepared properly. Not to mention the Mystery Meat that might get mixed in. The stigma against it seems overwhelmingly more common in fiction than in real life, as it's not very hard at all to make meatloaf taste delicious with the right seasonings, fillers, and aromatics.
  • In one Calvin and Hobbes strip when there's a substitute named Mr. Kneecapper teaching class for a day, Calvin scares Susie by saying he heard that Mr. Kneecapper once took a boy out to the hall for talking in class and there were strange lumps in the cafeteria meatloaf that afternoon, which disgusts her. After she leaves, the last panel is him looking at the audience and gleefully saying, "Wait 'til she sees what's on today's lunch menu."
  • Dear Dumb Diary: Thursday is always Meat Loaf Day in the cafeteria at Jamie's school. No one ever eats it, which irritates the cafeteria monitor Miss Bruntford. When she actually tries it herself, her reaction is to yell, "Call 911!" And if possible, the meatloaf that Jamie's mother makes is even worse.
  • One of the traditional Audience Participation riffs in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when Eddie gets eaten:
    "Oh no! Not Meat Loaf again!"

Multi-ingredient dishes

• The Scottish dish, Haggis, is another one that shows up so often it has its own trope. Three things that lend to haggis' unfortunate reputation are 1: unlike most sausages, haggis is very up front about the fact that it's made from offal (i.e. heart, liver & lungs), 2: this offal is frequently described as being "cut up", which wrongly implies the organ meats are served in unappetizingly big chunks when they're really ground up or finely minced, just like most other sausage meat, and 3: "Traditionally" accurate Haggis is very upfront about being cased in a cleaned out stomach, which is much more identifiable and makes people think more than the usual sausage casing of intestine (which few people know/realize to start with). On the other hand, a lot of people also think sausages are gross for this reason.
• There are other meat loaf dishes similar to but less famous than haggis that get the same sort of reaction. Scrapple is of Pennsylvania Dutch origin and is made out of cornmeal and finely ground pork trimmings - "everything but the oink". Goetta is made out of pig parts and steel-cut oats rather than cornmeal, and is very popular around the Cincinnati Ohio area.
• Fruitcake in general, at least in the United States. "Christmas cake", or more commonly "Christmas pudding", has similar connotations in Britain. It's depicted as something everyone gives during the holidays but nobody actually likes. The old joke goes that there's only one fruitcake, and we've all been passing it around for decades and decades. It usually looks like a brick in wrapping paper and, when set down, makes a sound like metal clanking or glass breaking. There's even a trope about it.
• The classic British Stock Yuck is the Pot Noodle, which is borderline inedible without precision preparation. Red Dwarf did this one (where Lister declined eating one in favour of dog food and also proved the miracles of nanorobotic construction by claiming nanites could turn Pot Noodle into food), while in a Skins episode, Johnny White proved to Thomas how HARD he was and how he was a man Not To Be Fucked With by eating one.
• Rhubarb Pie. Frequently used by Disney Mouse and Duck Comics, where it's depicted as a pie filled with gray-green sludge. In reality, rhubarb may be an acquired taste, its tartness being comparable to that of a lemon, but its actual appearance is something like a celery stalk with a very pretty shade of red. Rhubarb being a vegetable, there are many more ways to cook it horribly than to cook it properly, and the pretty red stalk is the only part of the rhubarb plant that isn't poisonous.
  • In an old The Wizard of Id, when a thief was brought before the king for stealing a pie, his lawyer made an insanity plea, noting that it was a rhubarb pie.
  • A Prairie Home Companion plays on this with its Parody Commercial series for "Bebop-a-Reebop Rhubarb Pie", in which the pie company's "ads" present a long chain of horrible events happening to a person and that person becoming incredibly depressed, with the solution to the depression being rhubarb pie. The hated, hated, rhubarb pie. It's a subtle kind of humor (not surprising, given the show), which plays on the reputation of rhubarb pie in the Upper Midwest (i.e. the thing your parents/relatives/neighbors foisted upon you, which you were then obliged to eat, no matter how good or bad it was—and it was often terrible). Everybody else gets the benefit of "And the solution is...pie!"-type humor, but people (especially Midwesterners) of a certain generation get a bonus as well.
  • On Good Eats, the Grim Reaper offers Alton samples of raw rhubarb at the grocery store. Alton takes one, and proceeds to choke and gag, which naturally gets GR all excited. Alton responds that he's not dying (as the stems aren't toxic), it's just that raw rhubarb tastes pretty awful.
  • The villian of Sherlock Gnomes, Moriarty, is a mascot that was made for a goobarb pie company, possibly spoofing how many hate rhubarb pie.
• Garlic & Parsley Pizza is used (again, often by Disney Comics) as the punchline of "a disgusting version of something that is usually delicious" jokes similar to the rhubarb pie mentioned above.
• Oriental food is the subject of many jokes in fiction. No, not actual oriental food from such countries but fast food places that profess to be Chinese, Cantonese, Thai, and the like, which tend to serve low grade processed versions. Most jokes about it focus on the use of MSG and stories - mostly Urban Legends - about the meat they use (stories about hot dog production have similar jokes), both of which give off a distinct whiff of casual racism— westernized Chinese cuisine is often singled out as if it were the only food to use MSG (which is wildly untrue), while the Mystery Meat jokes tend to settle on "Fido" & "Mittens" as being the proteins of choice.
• Culturally traditional foods (sometimes called "heritage food") are sometimes this, especially due to generation clashes. Reasons can range from it being unhealthy, it using ingredients that aren't common in more modern foods, it being very labor-intensive or time-consuming to make properly (which doesn't gel with many modern lifestyles), it using other "gross" ingredients, it bringing to mind unsavory memories like slavery, poverty, colonialism, etc:
  • In the non-fiction book The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African-American Culinary History in the Old South, the writer narrates his childhood disgust at soul food.
• Instant ramen is considered to be fodder for broke college students in the U.S., similar to Pot Noodle in the U.K. Until fresh ramen restaurants became trendy, this was likely the only type of ramen that Americans had experienced.
• Sometimes, soup and stew are seen this way, because you can put just about anything into a soup or a stew, they are sometimes seen as Poverty Food (hence, the existence of the trope Soup of Poverty), and soup is sometimes associated with illness.
• While it can be amazing in the hands of a Supreme Chef, pasta sometimes gets this as another "boring food," due to its dead-simple preparation, as anyone who can boil water can make pasta. This is especially true when cheap jarred pasta sauce is used. And even then any self-respecting Lethal Chef would find a way to ruin even that, usually by overboiling it into a goopy mush — which is, actually, somewhat easy to do, especially with the cheaper, lower-quality pasta made from "soft", bread-making wheat. Overboiled pasta is as disgusting as it gets.
• Any spicy dishes, including curry, burritos, and tacos. There are jokes about how they give you indigestion or make you throw up, have diarrhea, or speak strangely, and if they don't give anyone physical symptoms, they're still shown as being too spicy to be palatable. As spicy dishes are typically associated with "ethnic" cuisines, there's also a bit of racism with these jokes, though spicy foods do contribute to gastrointestinal problems. Aversion to spicy foods might also be part of aversion to "poverty foods", as spices are often used to mask spoiled meat.
• Frozen dinners tend to get this because of their association with lonely singletons, as well as sky-high cholesterol and sodium levels.
• Along with frozen meals, food cooked from microwaves in general tends to get this, due to how it can dry out foods and make them taste rubbery. Or they take the slang term for cooking food in microwaves, "nuking," literally and believe that microwave ovens irradiate the food. Plus they have a penchant for inconsistently heating foods. It's one reason that using microwaves in restaurants is such a Berserk Button for Gordon Ramsay, and they are usually only used in commercial kitchens for specific tasks like melting butter or chocolate. From a nutritional standpoint, they're actually better for cooking vegetables than boiling because the cooking time is brief, preserving vitamins in the vegetables, and that goes double for the flavour.
• Sushi is sometimes hated, because people worry that because the fish is most often raw that it'll give them food poisoning. Pregnant women also worry that the fish will have mercury in it which will hurt their fetuses. Pointing out that sushi is not "raw fish" (it's just the rice) and is often made without any raw ingredients seems to do little good.
• Mayonnaise, like "vanilla", is often used as a synonym for "boring" for its association with WASP culture, but plenty of people are also put off by the lopsided high fat/low flavor taste ratio and greasy texture. It's still very popular as a condiment and sauce in many parts of western and eastern Europe (especially eastern Europe), but in the U.S., even those who don't mind it tend to look at it either as a base ingredient when making other foods, as a simple sandwich adhesive, since its relatively bland taste keeps it from overpowering the majority of sandwich fillings, or for specific useful qualities (for example, mayonnaise's fatty composition makes it useful for toning down the heat in a spicy chicken sandwich).
• During The '50s, savory gelatin dishes were all the rage, because refrigerators (as opposed to ice boxes) were becoming increasingly available in American homes (but were still relatively expensive), and were seen as something of a status symbol. (Thus being able to make gelatin meant you had a fridge which meant you had money.) Some of the combinations used in these dishes were...unusual, to say the least, and they are looked at with revulsion today. (Another reason many 50's housewives liked them was that they were easy to prepare, and were a good way to use canned foods and use up leftovers.) Thankfully, by The '70s, these gelatin dishes had gone out of style.
  • B. Dylan Hollis will never miss a chance to joke about dishes like this in his cooking videos.
    Nothing says salad like animal collagen!
• Sauerkraut sometimes gets this reputation as well due to its tangy taste being hard to get used to. The fact that it's a fermented food that you can smell from several rooms away doesn't seem to help matters.
  • This is implied for Stein in The Noddy Shop episode "We All Say Boo!", where he hates sauerkraut so much that he is afraid of it (though this probably might have been to rhyme with other lyrics in the song).
  • In the song "Albuquerque" by "Weird Al" Yankovic, the protagonist spent most of his Hilariously Abusive Childhood being served a big bowl of sauerkraut for breakfast every morning. When he tried to ask why he kept being served sauerkraut, he was then force-fed it until he was twenty-six-and-a-half years old. Towards the end of the song, it becomes a Brick Joke when he finally declares that the entire point he was trying to make was "I! HATE! SAUERKRAUT!"
• In an inversion with mayonnaise, ketchup often gets this, especially from professional chefs, because of its tendency to overpower flavors in other foods and its overwhelming sweetness. Like mayo, ketchup also has an association with WASP culture (in fact, "immediately drowning a gourmet meal in ketchup" is the quintessential "Ugly American" Stereotype, and a great way to piss off just about any chef or home cook), particularly from fans of even more strongly-flavored sauces like hot sauce, salsa, or British-style brown sauces like HP Sauce. For these reasons, it's seen as only appropriate for mildly-flavored foods like French fries or hot dogs, if at all.
  • But it should be noted that ketchup has found some uses in professional cooking if used carefully. For example, Iron Chef fans will be aware that Chen Kenmin, father of Iron Chef Chen Kenichi and the "god of Szechuan cooking", used ketchup to tone down the spice of his chili sauce when serving it with prawns, a trick Kenichi himself picked up; this was the secret to making his signature prawn dish palatable to Japanese tastes. Like mayo, it is handy as a base ingredient even for people who dislike it as a condiment; those who wish to try making East Asian-inspired food might be surprised at how useful ketchup can be in creating different sauces.^note Then again, the stuff did originate in Asia, just not the common tomato variety
  • Donald Trump gathered some non-politics related mockery on the internet when a White House aide confirmed that even as President of the United States, with influence and reach able to have any kind of cuisine you could imagine from the best in the world, he would still often drown his gourmet meals in ketchup, just like the aforementioned stereotype.
• Rounding out the toppings generally seen as WASP-y, Ranch dressing is considered to be stock yuck in any amount more extreme than a gentle drizzle or as a dip to a lot of the world, even in its native US. A lot of the reasons why are similar to mayonnaise (most ranch dressings use mayo as their base) but with the added herbs that adds a sweetness to it that can overpower the flavor of whatever you're eating to the point you're basically just using them to deliver the ranch to your mouth, much like ketchup. Drowning mildly spicy food in Ranch to kill off already-barely-there heat, or utterly drowning a salad in it to the point it basically cancels out any health benefit are just two of the most stereotypical usages of Ranch in the southeastern US, where it tends to be used the most.
• In older British media, jokes can be found about "Brown Windsor Soup", a substance associated with cheap cafeterias and hotels, where it's best not to ask what the actual ingredients were. Modern recipes for the soup (think a thinner version of beef stew) sound much more appetizing compared to the mysterious vile, watery concoctions of yesteryear that killed it off.
• Another British dish considered bizarre and off-putting by many is stargazy pie, which has fish heads sticking out the top.
  • James and the Giant Peach: In the movie, James' abusive aunts serve him a repulsive-looking stargazy pie for dinner.
  • The Infinite Loops: While Looping in a strange fantasy land, Nando wanders among the food stalls looking for something to buy; his inner monologue notes that "he was not a fussy eater, but a pie made from whole fish that was baked with the heads staring out was simply uncalled for."
• Minor villain Grandma Stuffum from Codename: Kids Next Door is an Evil Chef who tries to fatten up children to the point they can't move with an army of sentient food. Most of her minions are some form or another of just about everything listed above in this section, especially organ meats or mixed-meat dishes, which all the kids except for Numbuh 2 find utterly revolting - and even he can't handle the sheer quantity she tries to stuff them with.

Vegetables

• Brussels sprouts, and other greens like broccoli, cauliflower or spinach.
  • If you read the news tickers, you'll see how the SimCity games since 3000 turn broccoli into Serious Business. Good humor for an otherwise hyper-realistic game.
  • The second Megamorphs book established that broccoli was introduced to earth by vegetarian aliens who colonized the planet during the time of the dinosaurs. After the defeat of rival colonists, they planted broccoli as a sort of victory dance. That's right kiddies, broccoli is a sacred alien plant and that is why we hate it so much.
  • One of the "Treehouse of Horror" episodes of The Simpsons revealed that broccoli is in fact a deadly poison that "tries to warn you off with its terrible taste."
  • In The Powerpuff Girls (1998) episode "Beat Your Greens", several parents try and fail to get their children to eat broccoli. It quickly turns out that the broccoli is infected with mind-control spores planted by an evil race of aliens called Broccoloids. Since none of the children ate the broccoli (but their parents did), they're the only ones left in the town to fight the Broccoloids. They beat them by devouring them alive, pouring giant vats of cheese on them to help. At the end of the episode, the children are seen eating all the vegetables in the grocery store's produce aisle to root out any remaining Broccoloids, much to the adults' shock.
  • Brussels sprouts are a traditional accompaniment to the British Christmas Dinner. No one knows why. They are traditionally prepared, like so many British vegetables, by "boiling them until the vitamins give up," goes the traditional joke. (This is, of course, the main cause of the problem.^note Some people have a genetic ability to taste a compound in sprouts that others cannot. Most people who can taste this compound think it tastes horrible, so they do not like sprouts for largely the same reason most people don't like eating, say, lemon rinds. Properly cooked sprouts are awesome - overcooked sprouts are reeking mush.) A Running Gag on Terry Wogan's morning radio show is people complaining that it's June already and they've left it too late to get the sprouts on for Christmas.
    • In Fallen the mother of one of Harry's friends comments that "Nobody likes them and they just ruin good food."
  • From Bottom:
    Richie: Will you stop whingeing, Eddie. Nobody likes sprouts.
    Eddie: Well why are we 'aving them then?
    Richie: Because it's Christmas!
  • SCP Foundation: SCP-261 is an interdimensional vending machine that dispenses all kinds of strange food. One of the vended items is "Mr. Mercer's amazing condiment," a tiny bottle of orange paste that makes anything taste delicious, even brussels sprouts.
  • The chemicals that make Brussels sprouts taste so bitter was only identified and bred out in the mid-nineties. Notice that most cultural references to Brussels sprouts being gross come from before the millennium? There's a reason for that!
  • Codename: Kids Next Door
    • Numbuh Four accidentally ate a brussel sprout once while blinded by boredom, causing the rest of his team to undergo a "Fantastic Voyage" Plot to get it out before it caused a viral infection that would make him an obedient, well-behaved child. Broccoli is also universally disliked; according to Father, the only reason adults make kids eat broccoli is so that they don't have to eat it themselves. When 362 is forced to eat through it to stop an Evil Plan, it sends her into a coma for two weeks. Father has a childhood trauma from when his father used to force-feed him broccoli. The only character who seems to be able to eat the veggie is Numbuh 2.
    • In addition, Sector V had an incident where, upon being stranded in a sea of asparagus and being attacked by a great white one, they were rescued by Stickybeard who claimed "[He'd] be dipped in chocolate before [he'd] let a blasted vegetable do anyone in!"
    • Spinach is another widely disliked food. There is a group of villains named The Spinach Inquisition, which consist in old-timey conquistadors forcing children into eating it via spinach-themed versions of real torture implements (for example, an iron maiden that is full of spinach instead of spikes).
  • Recently, as TV cookery shows and celebrity chefs make an increasing impact, the Brussels sprout has made something of a comeback as people learn to cook them properly - lightly blanched and then tossed with some bits of bacon and onion.
    • Or one could simply sauté Brussels sprouts cut in half in a little rendered bacon fat along with onions and fresh garlic, sprinkle a little salt and pepper, and serve them with crumbles of the reserved crispy bacon on top. Delicious.
  • In the Family Guy episode "I Never Met the Dead Man", Stewie once created a weather-controlling machine so he could wipe out broccoli.
  • While he was president, George H. W. Bush once famously declared that he hated broccoli. Histeria! did a skit based on this that was a Whole-Plot Reference to Green Eggs and Ham, with a twist: George winds up hating the broccoli, which causes the children to thank him for his stance on it, since they agree.
    • Reportedly, American broccoli farmers sent him several tons of broccoli for saying that. He most likely didn't eat it.
    • The West Wing did a riff on this, in which Charlie inadvertently admits to a reporter that President Bartlet doesn't like green beans. Cue an episode of panicking about how said admission will play out in Oregon.
  • One old joke.
    Q: What's the difference between boogers and broccoli?
    A: Kids won't eat broccoli.
  • One thing all those vegetables (except spinach) have in common is their ancestral plant: the wild cabbage. The bitter taste is a family trait for plants in the cabbage family. They also become nasty and sulphurous if overcooked which is somewhat easy to do.
    • Just to be absolutely clear: Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, kale, kohlrabi, and gailan (a vegetable called "Chinese broccoli") are descended from one kind of plant that lived on the cliffs lining the English Channel. They are all one species. There are also a few more varieties, like the "tree cabbage" that grows in somewhat warmer climates, which takes the form of a small tree with a woody trunk and everything; the leaves are eaten like cabbage and the trunks are cut down to be used as walking sticks. Scary, innit? Oh, and turnips, rapini, and both kinds of "Chinese cabbage" (the curly "napa cabbage" and flat bok choy alike), are also one species. The turnip species is so closely related to the Western cabbage species that it can produce a fertile hybrid—which itself is ludicrously versatile, having been bred on one end to emphasize oil production in the seeds (which is how we get canola oil) and at the other extreme to forget oil production but emphasize the size of the taproot (which is rutabaga/swede).
  • In one episode of Rugrats, Angelica sues her parents for trying to make her eat broccoli. (Though the episode turned out to be All Just a Dream.) In another episode where Angelica thinks that no one can see or hear her, she tells her dad that he didn’t lose his office papers. She threw them out the car window on the freeway because he made her eat broccoli.
  • A 2021 Huggies commercial introduced babies to the world, telling them that they'd grow to love it...before showing a crying baby refusing to eat his broccoli, and adding, "Well, most of it, anyway."
  • Played with in Return to Ravenhearst, with a list of rules the tyrannical Charles Dalimar imposed on Rose's young daughters. To showcase just how child-unfriendly their diet was, one of the rules is: "No broccoli until you finish your cauliflower".
  • In the comic strip Ernie/Piranha Club, broccoli is the only thing Sid's pet piranha and live trash can Earl has ever refused to eat.
  • In Ed, Edd n Eddy, Eddy scares and chases Ed with some broccoli. Then Ed attempts to chase Eddy with it. Then at the end of the episode Edd chases the other two away with it.
  • Tiny Toon Adventures: In "Real Kids Don't Eat Broccoli", a parody of Blade Runner had Buster Bunny spot evil robot duplicates on the basis that they like broccoli.
  • In MadBalls: Gross Jokes, the opening claims that the cartoon is "grosser than a mouthful of Brussels sprouts."
  • Some Popeye stories are about the titular character trying to convince someone to eat spinach. In the Popeye and Son cartoon, the son doesn't like spinach but will eat it on occasion since it's as much of a Power-Up Food for him as it is for his father. In the movie, Popeye himself refuses to eat spinach until he discovers its effect.
  • U.S. Acres: A worm tries to eat spinach but doesn't like the flavor. The remaining spinach moans over the fact "Nobody likes spinach".
  • Stunt Dawgs: In "Dream On, Fungus", Fungus is tricked into thinking he and his team are dead. He's shown a scene of the other Scabs being tortured in "Hell". Airball's torture is being force-fed spinach.
  • Riley's distaste for broccoli is a Running Gag throughout Inside Out, from her father's attempts to get her to eat it as a baby to Anger's outraged reaction to broccoli pizza.
    Anger: Congratulations, San Francisco! You've ruined pizza! First the Hawaiians, and now you.
    • Word of God is that Disgust's design - green with a large head and skinny body - is based on broccoli.
    • The Japanese release of the film replaces the broccoli with green peppers.
  • Dinah from Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 2 mentions that devils hate broccoli.
  • In the SuperMarioLogan episode, "Bowser Junior's Broccoli Problem!", Chef Pee Pee tries to get Junior to eat healthier by serving him broccoli with his pizza bagels. Junior is outraged, especially because his friends, Joseph and Cody, get to eat potato chips instead, and disposes of the broccoli by flushing it down the toilet. The broccoli lands in the mouth of a crocodile who lives in the sewers, who infiltrates Junior's house in search of more food.
  • Winston from Feast is a dog who will eat pretty much any human food his owner throws at him. When James' girlfriend tries to get Winston to eat 'healthy' foods like Brussels sprouts, he doesn't take to it. It could be justified as dogs are carnivorous (or omnivores with a strong preference for meat, depending on who you ask, but either way they shouldn't eat too many plants), but it's likely they were going for this trope.
  • Discworld:
    • In Going Postal, Moist von Lipwig worries about having spinach stuck between his teeth, since that's the sort of thing you're supposed to worry about when you're going on a date. When he's asked if he's actually eaten any spinach, he replies "I haven't eaten spinach since I was old enough to spit."
    • The gardening section of the Discworld Almanack says that in early spring, when last autumn's harvest is running low but nothing's sprouting yet, the wise husbandman will be sort-of grateful for "everlasting bloody leeks", which have survived because even the slugs won't touch them.
  • In Skylanders: Trap Team, one of the villains is Broccoli Guy, a dangerous animate flying piece of broccoli. However, when he becomes trapped, he subverts the "yucky broccoli" stereotype by being a healer who summons delicious vegetables to restore your health.
    Broccoli Guy: Hey, at least I'm not cauliflower.
  • In a 1974 Archie at Riverdale High story, Reggie Mantle fancies himself a martial arts expert and walks around town alternating bogus "moves" with pseudo-profound sayings along the lines of "As broccoli on the dinner plate of life, so is the flower of transgression."
  • In the Red Dwarf episode "Quarantine", when Rimmer has the other Dwarfers locked in quarantine and is torturing them with the Exact Words of the Space Corps manual he announces "And, fulfilling all Space Corps dietary requirements, dinner tonight, gentlemen, will consist of sprout soup, followed by sprout salad, and for desert, I think you'll like it, rather unusual - sprout crumble." Lister protests.
    Lister:Rimmer, you know damn well sprouts make me chuck.
    Rimmer: Well, this is awful. I've got you down for sprouts almost every meal. No, I tell a lie. It is every meal.
  • In Through Hell or High Water, Neville refuses to eat a green Bertie Botts bean because it might be asparagus-flavored.
    Neville: They're disgusting! Especially when you cook them, all slimy and gross.
  • In I Wish, I Wish Snape says that Brussels sprouts are the work of the devil.
  • In Puyo Puyo Tetris, Zed's stronger "attacks" consist of him serving platters of vegetables and bowls of vegetable soup to his opponent, which alone is enough for them to reel back in pain. (This also holds true even if the opponent is also using Zed.)
  • Dr. Eggman from Sonic Boom is implied to dislike broccoli, as at the beginning of the episode, "Mombot", he has built an invention that makes broccoli taste like applesauce, and has decided to start eating broccoli for this very reason.
  • In the Gamecube version of Animal Crossing your mom can send you a letter saying that she only is able to grow brussel sprouts. Unfortunately, she hates brussel sprouts. In New Horizons, one of the messages you might get from your mom in your birthday is "You're one year wiser now, so how about giving broccoli another chance?"
  • In the Restaurant: Impossible episode that's a Crossover with Sesame Street, we learn that Elmo's least favorite food is brussel sprouts.
  • Away in a Manger:
    Harry didn't think any kid liked broccoli. That was stuff only grown-ups ate and made their kids eat 'cause it was good for them. Only Harry could never figure out just what was good about the stuff. It tasted nasty. Even smothered in cheddar cheese.
  • At one point in The Petri Dish, Thaddeus creates some sentient vegetables who don't want to be eaten. He tells the broccoli not to worry as everyone hates it.
  • In the xkcd comic "Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect", which discusses how the recent development of a less bitter cultivar of brussel sprouts makes the long-held belief of brussel sprouts' yuckiness seem like False Memories.
  • In the Franny K. Stein book The Fran That Time Forgot it is mentioned that Franny created a breed of cannibalistic broccoli that ate itself so that children didn't have to eat it.
  • In the Total Drama episode "Brunch of Disgustingness," Trent talks in the confessional about how his parents used to hold him down and force-feed him broccoli. "They only did it because broccoli's — hurp — good for you!"
  • Inverted in the Claymation special Follow That Bunny - Danny mentions that his favourite vegetable is brussels sprouts (especially in milkshake form), much to Sebastian's surprise.
  • In one For Better or for Worse Sunday comic strip, Elly cooks Brussels sprouts to go with dinner, but Michael doesn't eat them because he doesn't like Brussels sprouts. When Elly tries to force him to eat them, Michael refuses because he's almost 18 years old and can make his own decisions on what he eats or not. When Elly tries to get John to back her up, John decides to side with Michael instead because he also hates Brussels sprouts.
  • It occasionally comes up in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! that Bob hates asparagus. When attending a school art department party, he's served an hors d'oeuvre that he's told contains carpenter ants and asparagus. He responds that it can't have asparagus, since it's good.
  • In Cookie Clicker, one of the possible headlines that can appear on the news ticker is "Nation cheers as legislators finally outlaw broccoli!"
  • The Fairly Oddparents:
    • In "Ruled Out", Timmy's parents feed him spinach that he expresses visible disgust for when he reluctantly wolfs it down. AJ is more receptive to his own parents making him eat it, however.
    • In Abra-Catastrophe!, Mr. Crocker spies on Timmy while operating out of a van disguised as an ice cream truck. When too many kids come to him, he disguises the van as a spinach truck, which scares off the kids but attracts a crowd of spinach-loving sailors.
    • When Timmy wishes all food on Earth was desserts, the population ended up fat and lethargic, including Timmy's godparents, who were unable to undo the wish. Timmy's solution was to go to the only place where spinach still existed: Mark Chang's spaceship, since in his Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad Yugopotamian biology spinach is considered the best dessert.
  • In CatDog, the eponymous duo joined a traveling freak show and they noticed a fairly normal guy was part of the spectacle. After Cat asked him what was so freaky about him, the man cheerfully admitted to liking Brussels sprouts.
  • In the Recess episode, "Weekend At Muriel's", one of the many un-fun things Spinelli has to go through while being babysat by Miss Finster for the weekend is brussels sprouts, liver, and horse meat for dinner.
  • Friends: In "The One With The Late Thanksgiving", the rest of the gang steal a dish Monica left in Joey's oven to eat, only to recoil in horror when they discover it's full of brussel sprouts.
    Ross: That's worse than no food!
  • In an earlier version of Turning Red, Mei would have tried drinking a vegetarian cocktail her mother made only to spit it out after hearing it contains spinach.
  • In the Arthur episode "D.W. The Picky Eater", D.W. hates spinach to the point that she leads an tantrum by stomping her fist at the table making her salad fly over the waiter causing the latter to abandon his job. His mother Jane grounds her for her bratty behaivour.
    D.W.: This is spinach and I. HATE. SPINACH.
  • In "Tilly Style from Big City Greens, Cricket hates zucchini which he had eat six days straight because Bill planted too much of them and not wasting food. Bill scolds Cricket to not leave the chair until he eats the zucchini. Later Cricket gets on hunger strike and Bill buys hamburguer, french fries and cake all of which are made by zucchini much to Cricket's changrin.
  • In one episode of Jorel's Brother Mrs. Danuza forces Jorel's brother to eat his broccoli. He refuses to do so and Danuza tells her son Go to Your Room! and grounds without playing toys.
  • Franklin has a strong dislike for Brussels sprouts. The early story "Franklin's Blanket" involves him missing his favorite blanket. When found, it's filled with Brussels sprouts - he had used it to hide them to avoid eating them and then forgotten where he had stashed it. In the third season story "Franklin's Fossil," when Franklin tries to put off digging potatoes to get something from Mr. Mole, Mrs. Turtle threatens to cook Brussels sprouts for dinner instead. Franklin then rapidly gets to work digging the potatoes. In the special Back to School with Franklin, Franklin gives his blanket to his little sister Harriet for comfort, feeling he no longer needs it. It is then shown that they have similar taste, as she too tries to hide Brussels sprouts in the blanket.
  • Taka Kamitani from Gakuen Babysitters hates broccoli and often has to be tricked or bribed into eating it, which isn't surprising since he's only a toddler.
• In Japan, carrots are considered a Stock Yuck for picky children. In non-Japanese works, it's not unheard of for carrots to be a Stock Yuck for children, but it's much, much rarer.
  • Usagi Tsukino from Sailor Moon doesn't like carrots; while it's likely meant to show how childish she is, it's also ironic since her name sound exactly like the Japanese word for "rabbit".
  • Ryo Hazuki from Shenmue didn't like them as a child, until his pop schooled him on all the hard work it took to put them on his son's plate.
  • Kou Uraki from Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory is famous for his hatred of carrots.
  • Omochao says something about promising to eat all of his/her carrots in Sonic Adventure 2 (Battle) if held long enough.
  • In the Harvest Moon series, most children (and even a few adults) respond unfavorably to being given carrots.
  • In Tales of Symphonia, carrots are Bratty Half-Pint Genis' least favorite food. The only recipe in the game that requires carrots has the lowest stars possible of Genis' otherwise very high chef skills. Judas also mentions disliking them, as well as peppers (another stock yuck), in Tales of Destiny 2, which by extension means Leon doesn't like them either.
  • Even giant Zentraedi children hate them in Macross Frontier. Although these particular carrots are rainbow-colored and the size of preteens, so whether or not they have a point is up for debate.
  • A little girl in Tampopo has one with a hole in it strung with a piece of a string and a sign that says "Do not feed me sweets". A man getting over a toothache gives her his ice cream.
  • Aguri Madoka and Ai-chan both hated carrots at one point in Doki Doki! PreCure. Love Momozono from Fresh Pretty Cure! also hates carrots.
  • In Pokémon: The Series, both Misty and Bonnie hate carrots.
  • A Western example is Dennis the Menace; he's a child, of course, but he seems to hate carrots more than any other.
  • Another Western carrot-hater is Pippi Longstocking.
  • As revealed in the episode "Be a Vegetable Taster!", Katerina Kittycat from Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood didn't like carrots when she tried them, however, she did like the green bell peppers.
  • Clay from Wings of Fire is a Big Eater who loves to eat. Carrots are an exception. Sunny, however, loves carrots.
  • Kamen Rider Decade: On their first casual meeting, Tsukasa and Yusuke are served a soup with carrots in it, and both rapidly argue while attempting to foist all the carrots off onto the other guy. They're both in their early twenties.
  • Anya from Spy X Family hates carrots.
  • Power from Chainsaw Man, being the Psychopathic Womanchild she is, despises veggies with a passion. One scene in the montage of her being a little terror while living with Aki and Denji has her actually throwing a carrot off her plate like a toddler pitching a tantrum (though with considerably better vocabulary).
  Power: Foul vegetables! Begone!
  • In the episode "Eating Our Vegetables" of Growing Up With Hello Kitty, one of Tracy's least favorite foods is revealed to be carrots.
  • In the Nintendo Switch version of Miitopia, one interaction between a Mii and the horse is to let it pick between an apple and a carrot. If the horse picks the apple, the Mii will eat the carrot, but bemoan it somewhat.
• As well as natto.
  • For Western readers unfamiliar with natto... the blog "Steve, Don't Eat It" featured it once. It's The Dreaded to Western expatriates in Japan. Needless to say, it would probably be a Stock Yuck in any country if it were actually popular anywhere else.
  • Natto's taste is actually pretty mild and inoffensive, resembling a bit nuttier an mushroomy pease porridge. The slimy and snotty texture however, and, in the more traditional varieties, the smell,^note Which is usually likened to the smell of the unwashed socks, worn for a week at least, which is the whole reason for the development of the modern non-smelly version. do tend to be off-putting for many.
  • Natto is really popular only in the Tohoku region, where it originates from, and even there it's something of an acquired taste. Hell, the stuff was born because some soldiers didn't like the idea of throwing away a spoiled horse forage, for God's sake! (Still, on the plus side, it's high in Vitamin K, Vitamin C, iron, and dietary fiber! Or so they say...)
    • In other words, the decision to eat the first batch of natto went:
    Well, the horses won't eat it. So... who's hungry?
  • Basically, natto is a polarizing food that sticks to Japan because of its polarizing nature: traditionalists stand by it, modern types run away from it. It was used twice in Iron Chef specifically with challengers who were sticklers for traditional Japanese cuisine and considered the ingredient to be as Japanese as one can get.^note The Iron Chefs won both times: Michiba the first time, Morimoto the second.
  • When two elves eat natto at the Restaurant to Another World, one of them mentions that none of the other guests ever order it.
• Another Stock Yuck for children in Japan is green bell peppers:
  • In Tales of Symphonia, every character has a least favorite food as part of the cooking mechanic; green bell peppers are Colette's. When she starts eating them without complaint, it's a sign that something is seriously wrong.
  • BlazBlue: Bang Shishigami has just two things in this world that he cannot stand: lies, and evil, and LIES and BELLPEPPEEEERRRSS.
  • Shin has a disgust for green peppers in Crayon Shin-chan.
  • Haikyuu!!: In the OVA "Special Feature! Betting on the Spring High Volleyball", there's a scene where the main character Hinata is asked in English class to read the line "The vegetable that I don't like is _" and fill in the blank with his hate vegetable. He chooses green pepper, but uses the Japanese term for it which makes it sound like "pee man". In the German Dub, he uses "spinach" instead but mispronounces it as "Spanish".
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS: Vivio doesn't like green peppers and initially refuses to eat them.
  • Combining two Stock Yucks on one character, there are three things Misty from Pokémon: The Series hates: carrots (see above), peppers, and bugs. Ash immediately retorts that he likes carrots, peppers, and bugs.
  • In the Garrett, P.I. novels, Garrett regularly criticizes Morley's vegetarian restaurant's fare, particularly the fact it serves green bell peppers. He sometimes points out that they're one of the very few foods even pigs won't eat.
  • As mentioned above, Riley's disdain for broccoli in Inside Out was translated to her disliking green peppers in the Japanese dub.
  • Kokoro, the main protagonist of Himitsu No Cocotama, hates bell peppers.
  • Honoka and Riko from Love Live! both hate bell peppers. In addition, one of the phrases the former character can say on Love Live! School idol festival's menu screen is "Th-This is just between us... but I don't like bell peppers..."
  • Discussed in Sweetness & Lightning, with regards to the abovementioned reason why children dislike certain foods.
  • The second opening theme to Idol Time PriPara has the line "My mom, dad and brother all shoot for the rainbow. They can eat all the green peppers I hate-so nutritious!".
  • In INVADERS of the ROKUJYOUMA!?, Sanae tries to get Kotarou to eat her bell peppers, only for him to grab her and use the spirit link they developed from her time as a ghost to make her taste them. When Yurika tries to slip Kotarou her own peppers, Sanae grabs Yurika and makes her taste it too.
  • The description for Green Pepper in Harvest Moon: Light of Hope is "Some love and some loathe this summer crop".
  • This is mentioned in one of the verses of the full version of the first Yo Kai Watch ending song, "Youkai Taisou Daiichi".
  • In the Growing Up With Hello Kitty episode "Eating Our Vegetables", we learn that Hello Kitty, Mimi and their friends all hate bell peppers. However, after overhearing their parents talking about how they are picky, and with a little encouragement, Hello Kitty and Mimi eat their bell peppers.
• Turnips
  • The Cat Who... Series: Qwill loathes turnips and doesn't hesitate to say so; in book 18 (The Cat Who Said Cheese), he's convinced that 'something underhanded' must be done to make a dish containing turnips palatable. In another case in the same book, he writes in his "Qwill Pen" column about all of the different ways in which turnips are awful and in return (very late in the book) receives a giant turnip grown by one of his readers. First, though, the package has to be inspected by the bomb squad because there has recently been a bombing in the community and the package is considered suspicious.
  • Sophie in the film version of Howl's Moving Castle hates turnips, and remarks on this when meeting the scarecrow Turniphead:
    "It's been nice meeting you! Even if you are my least favorite vegetable!"
  • In Meet Molly, Molly's housekeeper serves her and her siblings mashed turnip. Molly is the only one who refuses to eat it (especially after Ricky describes it as "old, cold, moldy brains"). Thankfully, her mother is able to make it taste better by warming it up and adding sugar, cinnamon and butter.
  • In World of Warcraft, Virmen hate turnips. In one quest, they're using turnips for target practice; in another, you exploit their hatred of turnips by painting them orange to disguise them as carrots.
  • In the Animal Crossing series, turnips are often bought but not to be eaten as they've been unfashionable to eat for more then 30 years. Instead they're bought to "turnip" a profit. The whole thing is called "The Stalk Market". However, you can still eat them with no ill effects, and in New Horizons, doing so might be more efficient than eating fruit if you need to move a lot of trees at once (fruit and turnips work as a Power-Up Food that gives you the strength to move trees), since you can eat 10 turnips at a time but only 1 fruit at a time.
  • Numbuh 5 from Codename: Kids Next Door once said she hated turnips. The episode where she said this had the group having to take out a monstrous one whose roots were invading their treehouse.
  • Vishnal from Rune Factory 4 hates turnips, even though he's tried to like them. In an inversion of the trope, Arthur loves them.
  • Usagi Yojimbo: During the Travels With Jotaro arc, Usagi's son Jotaro really doesnt care for turnips, not helped by the fact that they're used as travel rations and are eaten raw. He's a samurai-in-training so he'll still eat them without too much complaint, but he isnt thrilled about it.
  • The Ghost and Molly McGee: One of the reasons that the town of Brighton is considered a miserable place is that its chief crop is turnips. Scratch once described them as "if earwax was a vegetable".
  • In Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium the titular character greets protagonist Molly Mahoney by saying he made turnip pudding and asking if she'd like some, to which she points out "No one likes turnips".
  • Fire & Blood: When the young King Aegon III Targaryen has to remarry, his Hand of the King, Unwin Peake, advises the boy to marry his daughter, Myrielle. When Aegon asks what will happen if he doesn't like his prospective bride, Unwin says, "Your Grace does not like turnips, but when your cooks serve them, you eat them, do you not?" As a result, Myrielle is given the Embarrassing Nickname "Lady Turnips." The narrator notes that she never became Queen Turnips.
  • The late John Pinette had an entire bit about his hatred for the turnip, in which he also mentions the added bonuses of turnips being both a very gassy vegetable and hard to prepare:
    Pinette: "They're not easy to cook. You can't cut them with any knife in the kitchen; you have to bang them off the concrete for an hour to soften them up, then you have to boil them for 8 hours... If it's that difficult, it doesn't want to be food!"
  • In The Simpsons episode "Lemon of Troy", the kids of Shelbyville all have a glass of turnip juice after being told the story of how Springfield got their lemon tree back. All of them clearly hate the taste.
• Parsnips, being related to carrots, are one of those vegetables no-one can figure out.
  • Ogden Nash even wrote a short verse about them:
    The parsnip, children, I repeat,
    Is simply an anemic beet.
    Some people call the parsnip edible.
    Myself, I find these claims incredible
  • Parsnips have a varied, leaning to positive, liking on Stardew Valley. They're THE starter crop upon arriving at the farm, and is needed for the "Getting Started" achievement, it's part of a bundle at the Community Center, a requested item, and are a liked crop my most townspeople with Pam loving it the most.
• Garlic is a variation; while there's no shortage of folks who love it (mostly in French, Italian, and Greek cooking), nobody likes the halitosis it causes, especially in fiction. Its close relative the onion is also a polarizing veggie, especially as a pizza topping.
  • Raw, whole garlic bulbs are Wario's Trademark Favorite Food as emphasis on his equally "pungent" personality, in the first Wario Land it even serves as his counterpart to Mario's mushrooms in making him Big Wario. In the manual for Wario Land 4 which discusses Wario's biology, he says the reason his teeth are a beautiful pearly white despite living like a slob is because the bad breath from the garlic kills any cavities before they can go to work.
  • The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Vincente of the Dark Brotherhood hates garlic. In this case it's because he has some kind of unbelievably powerful magical allergic reaction to it (this isn't even a case of him being a vampire either, as Elder Scrolls vampires don't have the Achilles' Heel to garlic like most settings). A note you can find has him chewing out another member of the guild for slipping garlic into a stew she made because of this. When you have to kill him, reverse-pickpocketing garlic into his pocket will render him effectively helpless when he's otherwise the toughest fight of the sanctuary members.
• While a lot of folks enjoy cabbage, the very strong smell it causes when cooked turns a lot of people off.
• Alton Brown of Good Eats has a habit of addressing why so many vegetables are Stock Yuck, and seeing if he can't turn them into something edible. The answer is usually that somewhere along the line, some parent who couldn't cook worth monkey feces did their horrendously substandard best, so that's how their kids learned to prepare it, and so on and so forth, until modern kids are subjected to something hellish and only nominally identifiable, prepared so horrendously wrong that all the nutrients have probably been wrung out of it anyway, defeating the purpose and proving that forcing your kids to eat their veggies is just another sign you don't really love them.
  • The other is that many vegetables have bitter background flavors. Adults (generally) find that these flavors add dimension to the flavor of these vegetables. However, children, because they have more taste buds, and their taste buds and brains are wired in a different way than adults, don't like them. (Children are biologically programmed to seek out sweet-tasting things, because sweet = sugar = calories = energy for growth. They also are more inclined to avoid bitter tastes, because many poisons have a bitter taste; this was likely an evolutionary means of keeping safe that remains to this day. So when your kid complains about eating vegetables, they're not trying to be difficult, they're just doing what comes naturally.)
  • Another example using vegetables in general is Preschool Popstars: The song "Wait Until I Cook It" has one girl sing that she could even eat vegetables.
• The canned version of anything here, and everything that isn't. If it's good, they've found a way to ruin it. If it's bad, Eldritch rites have been employed to keep it in stasis, and what they sacrificed was what little the vegetable had that was worth preserving. The issue is that canning usually involves stuffing the veggies into the cans and boiling them in-can which rarely does the flavor and nutrition any favors. Canned spinach is in a class all its own, normally being one of the mildest and least bitter leafy green vegetables when fresh or frozen, but when canned it turns into a disgusting, foul-tasting brown sludge that will ruin any dish into which you add it.
  • One exception to this is Baked Beans (which are considered the stereotypical student food in Britain, being cheap but relatively tasty) because these kinds of beans need to be cooked first.^note These beans are toxic if eaten raw. Notwithstanding the side effects.
  • Other exceptions include corn and beets. While not as good as the fresh variety, most children (and adults) won't mind eating either in their canned form.
  • Canned tomatoes are another exception in that they are generally both more nutritious and tasty when cooked as the cooking process normally concentrates them.
• Tofu, especially in the context of those accustomed to a Western diet forced to eat healthier. However it's the texture of tofu that many people find disagreeable, not the taste: Plain tofu more or less doesn't taste like anything.
  • Beast Boy from Teen Titans (2003) and Teen Titans Go! is vegetarian and is often shown eating blocks of tofu. Despite trying to persuade them to try it, none of the other Titans are interested.
  • Bill from Pokémon: The Original Series was made to dislike tofu in the English dub. This is in contrast to the Japanese version where he seemed excited that Brock could cook several dishes for him, some including tofu.
  • Neve from Ignition Zero hates tofu. Their friend Orson is vegan and loves it. Subverted with Robbie, as he likes it when he tries it.
• Lima beans:
  • On The Simpsons, when Marge is praying while awaiting the impending nuclear meltdown, she promises that if she survives, at the next canned food drive she will give the poor something tastier than old pumpkin and lima bean mix.
  • In a different The Simpsons episode, Bart stacks his plate high with lima beans and then refuses to eat them. He does this to annoy Lisa.
  • In The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, Carl Wheezer hates lima beans so much he has nightmares about a killer one, so he can't sleep.
  • An episode of All in the Family has Gloria hating lima beans from childhood. She has to eat one after losing a bet to Michael wherein he is able to distinguish between Coke, Pepsi, and Royal Cola.
  • In the Spongebob Squarepants episode "Krabby Land", Spongebob subjects himself to various forms of torture to entertain children, up to and including getting run over by a truck, but the one he seems to dread the most? Being force-fed lima beans.
  • In The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Tigger stumbles across a strange dimension that fulfills all his birthday wishes, and goes on a massive wish spree through song, but he keeps accidentally wishing for lima beans because the word rhymes, much to his disgust.
  • In A Bad Case of Stripes, the main character Camilla is insecure about liking lima beans because everyone else hates them.
  • In the Arthur episode "Arthur's Knee", Arthur cuts his knee on a lima bean can, causing DW to remark she knew lima beans are bad.
• Mushrooms. To many people, they look horrible unprepared, and the fact there are poisonous ones in the wild which can kill you is enough to put anybody off. There's also the fact that they start off as mold and are commonly associated with sick or dead plants.^note Some mushrooms are saprotrophs and feed off decaying plant matter, others are parasites and feed off living plant matter. There are also mycorrhiza that buddy up with plants. The common Agaricus bisporus (white button) mushroom is a saprotroph, usually farmed on conditioned beds of mulch.
  • In some Hindu sects mushrooms are considered non-vegetarian due to their nature as decomposers (which means that they believe that eating mushrooms is akin to eating corpses).
• In Noob the resident Manchild once wanted to "kidnap" and "torture" a friend to get him to leave his new girlfriend. After the kinapping part gets botched, it turns out that the torture part was meant to consist of Friendly Tickle Torture and force-feeding vegetables to the "prisoner".
• Vegemite has a fierce reputation for being divisive, which is understandable; the stuff has a taste that is not only salty and acrid, but also extremely strong. However, most Australians love it. All but the most hardcore fans agree that the best way to eat it is using it sparsely, traditionally spreading it thinly on a thickly buttered piece of bread, simply to cut down the intensity. Any time Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern covers Australia, Vegemite has to be brought up due to its infamy and its strong association with the Land Down Under. Most of the people Zimmern asks dislike the stuff too.
  • The Discworld novel The Last Continent, which is set in not-Australia, has Rincewind inventing Vegemite while dead drunk by boiling all his remaining vegetables in a can of beer. He tries it when sober the next morning, and finds that it actually tastes worse than expected.
  • The obscure Vegemite spin-off Promite, a sweeter and milder version of Vegemite, is still a pretty divisive food-stuff, since — whilst not as harsh as Vegemite — the taste can be sometimes best described as "mashed onions mixed with sugar".
  • There's also the UK variant called Marmite. It's broadly the same product, and although it's not quite as strong, it still often elicits the same reaction — its marketing slogan is the starkly honest "Love it or hate it."
  • There is a whole class of products like these: Vegemite, Promite, Marmite (which has two variants, the UK version and the New Zealand version), Cenovis, Vitam-R. The basic gist of these products is their primary ingredient: yeast extract, as in the used-up yeast from brewing beer. That alone can explain its off-putting qualities.
• Marie from Splatoon mentions more than once she dislikes vegetables. In the first Splatoon, she's an older teen with a taste for junk food, especially French fries and anything sweet, and her dialogue in later installments implies that this doesn't change much as she ages up.
• Donut from Lily Love is a woman who has a Sweet Tooth and hates vegetables.
• Peas are also a vegetable many hate:
  • The King of Town from Homestar Runner will eat just about anything (even things that aren't really food), but according to the Strong Bad Email "different town" he hates peas. Which naturally means that if he could make the town different, Strong Bad would have the King of Town buried alive in a crate of peas.
  • Laala, Dorothy, Cosmo, Mikan and Ajimi from PriPara hate peas. One of the lyrics in their song as the unit Cosmic Rice Omelette Da Vinci, "Omuomuraisu!", mentions this.
  • In the Shining Time Station episode, "Double Trouble", after Mr. Conductor tells the kids the story of the Thomas & Friends episode, "The Diseasel", he tells them that he wishes he had a twin like Bill and Ben, so that the twin could eat his peas, since he doesn't like peas.
  • Jeffy from SuperMarioLogan does not like peas, as revealed in the episode, "Jeffy Gets Potty Trained!". In the same episode, he is revealed to have a bratty side, as he claims he wants marshmallows instead of peas.
  • This parody of the children's song "Osakana Tengoku" is about how kids hate peas.
  • At the end of the Teen Titans Go! episode "Hot Salad Water", the Titans compare how horrible tea is to various disgusting foods, and Cyborg chooses to compare tea to mushy peas.
  • A recurring character on All That is Miss Piddlin, a school lunch lady (played by Keenan) who appears to have a psychotic obsession with peas, serving them at every meal, and in large portions, only to become physically violent when someones says they don't like them, which, unfortunately, is almost everyone in her sketches. Although even people who do like peas aren't entirely safe.
  • A For Better or for Worse comic has a young Elizabeth not being allowed to leave the dinner table until she's eaten all of her peas. She tries to dispose of them by putting them under her plate.
• Beets:
  • In Walk the Mirrored Path Sirius loathes beets with a passion. It's stated that he actually prefers rats to "those dirty, stringy, sorry excuses for a root vegetable."
  • In Mork & Mindy, Mork describes being made to eat beets as a situation to say, "Shazbot".
  • A meta-example in the fanfic Purple Haze on the dock of San Giorgio Maggiore; according to the author, Professor Barbabietola is named after the Italian word for "beetroot" because it's a disgusting vegetable to fit his repulsive personality.
• Coriander / Cilantro. People either love it or hate it. There is a genetic basis for this, as the haters have a gene variant that causes their taste perception of the herb to be very soapy, while those who don't have the gene variant, just taste an herb.
  • A running gag in Binging with Babish is Andrew "Babish" Rea expressing his dislike for cilantro, even calling it "the Devil's lettuce" at some points. Whenever he makes a recipe from a fictional work that calls for cilantro, he'll begrudgingly add it in for the sake of accuracy to the source material, while still noting that he hates the stuff.
  • The Oatmeal: In "Believe", the brain is represented by a bunch of walls and planks that make up a house, which have things written on them like "tradition", "upbringing", "life experiences", "religion", "family", and "hatred of cilantro".
• Bittergourd, especially in South Asian countries. The name should tell you why it is disliked.
• Many flowers are edible but they're rarely ever eaten. Flowers are for rabbits and horses to eat, not people. Usually only eccentric characters are depicted eating flowers.
  • One article on the Neopian Times on Neopets has Jhudorah the dark faerie say, "Who wants to eat a flower?!".
  • In Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Fudge eats his mom's flowers while Mr. Yarby is having a business talk with his father. She freaks out and calls the doctor over what he's done. Peter ends up trying one just out of curiosity since Fudge seems to like it, but finds it too disgusting.
• Lettuce is sometimes called boring.
  • Discworld has a guy named Rincewind who wants to be bored, so he likes lettuce because it's boring.
• Kelp (seaweed) and algae also get this, possibly because they come from the ocean and look disgusting. This tends to vary by region, as countries with good supplies may eat them regularly. Japan has numerous edible seaweeds (kombu, wakame and nori for starters) and is known for eating plenty of it. This may also be another reason for disdain for sushi, as many sushi rolls are wrapped in nori, which those unfamiliar or put off by might find akin to eating electrical tape with its chewy, hard-to-tear consistency.
  • In the Teen Titans Go! episode "Fish Water", the other Titans get disgusted when Starfire drinks algae water at the end of the episode.
• The Asian delicacy of red bean paste gets this from younger generations who are more accustomed to modern, Western-inspired sweets and foreigners who think the taste is too mineral-like. To clarify, "red bean" in Asian cuisine refers to mung beans, not red kidneys.
  • In one episode of Love Live!, Honoka tells her friends that she doesn't like red bean paste, which is ironic, since her family runs a Japanese sweets shop.
  • In the children's picture book Yoko, Yoko gets made fun of by her American classmates when she brings a thermos of red bean ice cream for lunch.
• Olives get a bad rap from some people due to their strong flavor, although olive oil is less hated.
  • Total Drama Comeback Series: During an eating challenge, Beth panics when her team has to eat a giant platter of olives.
    Beth: No no no, I can't do thisth...I hate olives with all my heart and sthoul...
  • Junie B. Jones: When Junie B.'s group of friends has to write a poem for a school assignment, Herb suggests writing one about an olive, since their teacher wrote one about a pickle. The others don't like the idea; José says he hates olives, and Lennie says he threw up an olive once.
  • American Girls Collection: Lindsey's brother Ethan picks the olives out of his spaghetti sauce whenever the family has spaghetti night.
• Soybeans:
  • Dr. Hare from Doctor in Love is disgusted by the idea of having to eat soya flour soup.

Sweets

• Even chocolates aren't spared from this trope.
  • Every box will have an undesirable piece, often the one filled with orange creme or coconut (see Fruits for more regarding coconut). Sometimes one character searches futilely for the legend.
  • In The Simpsons, one of Homer's attempts to get Mr. Burns to remember him failed after his face remained covered by a "sour quince log".
  • The Revel adverts play with this trope making it into a Russian Roulette style game. Coffee
    • Coffee has since lost a poll and been removed, while the ones people actually played Russian Roulette with (peanut, highly dangerous to anaphylactics) got taken out because... yeah. (Rumours abound that the games came before the adverts.)
  • Peanuts had a running gag with coconut chocolates, which no one ever wanted. Naturally, the subject of any gag would get nothing but.
  • In an episode of Rugrats, after Angelica saves Chuckie's life, she forces him to become her servant. At one point he has to steal a box of chocolates for her. She proceeds to eat them, until she finds a coconut one, which she spits out and gives it to Chuckie (who has no problem with it).
  • Two examples in Discworld:
    • In Thief of Time, Susan Sto-Helit hates nougat. Guess what the first chocolate she pulls out of the box is.
    • Nanny Ogg's Cookbook quotes Sir Joshua Ramkin as saying "Having anything designed by Bloody Stupid Johnson is like a box of chocolates — you always get the horrible strawberry one that someone has already sucked and put back."
  • The narrator in Jack Ritchie's "For All the Rude People" hates chocolate-covered cherries.
  • Chocolate-covered cherries have grown in popularity as a Stock Yuck as far as adults go. For kids, they are the safest chocolate in an assortment to get, but many adults hate them, finding them cloyingly sweet and disliking the texture of what they refer to as 'cherry snot'.
  • Many cartoons have used the gag where someone has unsuspectingly starting eating chocolate-covered ants (usually by some of the ants escaping and crawling around them ... which, creepily enough, can actually happen!). Then you have a subversion: one The Ant and the Aardvark cartoon where the titular Aardvark (and a rival aardvark) fight over and try to open a can of chocolate-covered ants.
  • On The Joe Schmo Show, the chosen "schmo" Matt Kennedy Gould of the original season had an abiding dislike of chocolate and a massive gag reflex when it came to it. This came up in a game which involved licking chocolate sauce off of models, though apparently the producers didn't know in advance about Matt's dislike of chocolate.
    Matt: I want to, but I can't!
  • "American chocolate tastes like vomit"^note  This is due to the addition of butyric acid, which was used to prevent spoilage in the days before modern refrigeration. It's found in other places like parmesan cheese, but yes, also in vomit. is a fairly common topic of discussion in culinary circles, particularly the Hershey's brand. Few non-Americans are actively obliged to eat American chocolate, so it's not a stock yuck yet, but it does help explain its limited success when exported.
  • Chocolate-covered peppermint candies with a soft center like York Peppermint Patties or Junior Mints are often compared to eating toothpaste.
  • In Homestar Runner Strong Bad has a huge dislike for "fun-sized" chocolate (though because of quantity, not flavor).
    Strong Bad: What's so fun about eating less chocolate? The only fun I will have with this is smearing it on your door before I leave.
• White chocolate (which technically really isn't chocolate as it does not contain cocoa solids) gets a bad rap too, as some consider it too sweet.
  • In Harry Potter continuity, a popular game among Hogwarts students is to release a large box of Chocolate Frogs and try to catch the milk chocolate ones while avoiding the white chocolate ones.
  • According to Undertale fanon, Chara hates white chocolate.
• Black jelly beans.
  • A guess at whose origin was ventured by an entry in this Cracked photoplasty contest.
  • Many of Jelly Belly's beans are like this, due to the fact there are so many and naturally, they have to stretch into unappetizing flavors. This sort of variety is the likely reason they were tapped to make "Bertie Botts' Every Flavor Beans" during the Harry Potter craze (the flavors weren't as weird as in the literature, but they still worked to elicit the dread of just which flavor one might get next). Better yet, the impenetrable glossy coating on Jelly Bellys also means you can't rely on the classic jellybean "sniff test" to weed out the nasty ones.
    • Jelly Belly "buttered popcorn" flavor beans are notorious for invoking this in some people - and for having equally ardent defenders. If buttered popcorn jelly beans are mentioned, expect two characters to get in an argument over whether they're a Stock Yuck or Impossibly Delicious.
    • "Sizzling cinnamon" also has its detractors, mostly because its flavor is so very sharp that it can spoil the taste of the next several beans eaten after it. Like the below-mentioned "cappuccino", its coloration makes it look exactly like several other, much more benign flavors.
    • "Cappuccino" beans can be this for anyone who has never had coffee before and/or dislike bitter tastes (read: kids). It doesn't help that sometimes you can't tell them from "root beer" or "chocolate pudding" until you bite into them and get a nasty surprise.
    • "Pizza" is a flavor that depending individual taste buds can be -incredibly- foul. The recipe for pizza-flavoring in these beans is made with small amounts of lacric acid - the same type of stuff found in human stomach acid after it's mostly broken down a meal, which is why the "bad" outcome of the pizza flavor in "bean roulettes" is vomit - it was their first and failed attempt to make pizza but they kept it around as the penalty bean.
  • Subverted on The Office with Dwight, who cleans out all the black jelly beans on Pam's desk dispenser, looking for more.
  • Also subverted in All-of-a-Kind Family, where the black jelly beans are the favorite of Charlotte and Gertie. The white ones are their least favorites (what flavor it was meant to be is unclear, but nowadays it's usually coconut, which is a Stock "Yuck!" of its own).
  • On Neopets, a food item called Stale Black Jelly Beans is available, with the description "Ick, these are a bit hard." It's classified as a Gross Food; feeding it to your Neopet will get a disgusted reaction and a possible drop in their happiness level. Even the Charcoal Jelly Beans have the description "Uggh, charcoal? Why on earth would they make charcoal?" (although your Neopet will like them better, as they're not considered Gross Food).
  • In the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog episode "Musta Been a Beautiful Baby", a de-aged Dr. Robotnik sets a trap for a de-aged Sonic and Tails, using red jelly beans as bait. Sonic and Tails fall for the trap, but are taken away from it. Robotnik watches from the bushes, but the only jelly beans he has to eat are the black and green ones he doesn't like. He ends up falling for his own trap by eating the red jelly beans just as Sonic sets it off.
  • In the Trolls: The Beat Goes On! episode "Chummy Sparklestone", after Cooper becomes committed to a detective persona, he solves several mysteries around the village and is rewarded with King Peppy's secret recipe upside-down cake. The other trolls are disgusted when he deduces that the cake's secret ingredient is black jelly beans.
• Licorice, especially the aniseed variety.
  • This is rarer in Scandinavian countries, where licorice is quite popular. Especially Iceland. It's also very popular in The Netherlands. Knowing that foreigners generally don't like licorice, a common prank among the Dutch is to trick foreigners into tasting some.
  • Numbuh Five from Codename: Kids Next Door likes black licorice, but candy pirates like Stickybeard are so revolted by it that there's an infamous pirate curse which causes people to become living skeletons made out of black licorice.
  • The salmiak to almost anyone outside the Nordic countries. Then again, when you take a mineral salt and turn it into candy the reaction can't be that unexpected, at least until people get used to the idea of salty, bitter "sweets".
  • A Nickelodeon Clickamajigs game involved you giving caramels to trick-or-treaters and avoiding giving them black licorice. Eventually, when you ran out of caramels, you had to give them a piece of black licorice, which they would tell you they didn't like in a demonic voice.
  • In Undertale, the description of Monster Candy (the very first healing food item you can obtain) advertises its "distinct, non-licorice flavor."
  • In DuckTales (2017), Della is able to survive for 12 years on the moon thanks to Gyro's Oxy-Chew! Now in one flavor: Black Licorice. And it gets more flavorful with every chew!
  • Amphibia: In a dream sequence, Anne finds herself in "Yogurtropolis", a magical land of frozen yogurt, but is horrified when she finds out that the only flavor available is black licorice.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "The Beginning of the End, Part 2", Pinkie Pie is distraught at King Sombra, after taking over Ponyville, forcing the Cakes to make him a black licorice fruitcake. "It's the ugliest cake I've ever seen!"
  • Crabgrass: In this comic, Kevin is grossed out by the idea of Miles eating black licorice. Then subverted when he asks for some of the candy anyway, since sugar is sugar.
  • In this Trader Lydia strip, Lydia is sorting her Halloween candy after having gone trick-or-treating across the world. Next to several candy dispensers is a furnace labeled "black licorice", though another container to the far right has what is presumably red licorice, meaning she only hates the black stuff.
  • The main antagonist of Candy Land is Lord Licorice. He is the only character who impedes the player, and his negative role is likely a nod to how disliked licorice is. Oddly, he is associated with the more popular red licorice instead of the more hated black.
  • Star Trek: Lower Decks: In "Where Pleasant Fountains Lie", Mariner describes black licorice as "the least nutritious food that tastes the most like poison". Unfortunately, because either a crash landing or the Negative Space Wedgie that caused the crash broke the replicator, that's all it's creating, and a local plant grows fruit that tastes exactly like black licorice.
• Candy Hearts. Either due to the sappy love messages, or their chalk-like texture.
  • One Pokémon adoptables website allows its users to collect user-created trinkets, among them a set of three candy hearts, each with the description, "This chalky treat is universally hated for its flavor and loved for the little messages."
  • The Futurama episode "Love and Rocket" had the Planet Express crew delivering barrels of candy hearts to the Omicronians as a Valentine's Day gift/peace offering. The factory showed their ingredients came from dispensers marked "bone meal" and "earwig honey". They only succeeded in making the Omicronians even angrier than they already were.
    Lrrrr: This concept of "wuv" confuses and infuriates us! (Omicronians pull blasters)
  • A variant on the candy heart are Necco wafers, which are basically if someone steamrolled a candy heart. Both of these candies used to be made by the same company in New England, though only the Necco wafers are made there now. They are similarly reviled for their chalky texture and muted flavors, and are routinely on lists of the worst candies to get on Halloween.
• Candy corn, likely due to the waxy taste or texture.
  • A Moose and Zee song was about this.
  • Lewis Black had a bit about this.
    "'Candy corn?' So it's corn that tastes like candy. I can't wait!" *tries some* "Sonofabitch!!"
  • In Animaniacs, Skippy's reaction to getting them from Benny on Halloween is "SPEEEW!!". Slappy doesn't like them much either.
  • In Bad Horse's Bedtime Stories for Impressionable Young Colts and Fillies, when Bad Horse is trying to explain to his young audience how a stallion feels about a mare he is attracted to, he compares it to there not being any candy in the house ("not even one of those lousy waxy candy corns") while knowing there's bags of it stashed in a place they can't reach.
  • In a Jimmy Kimmel Live! skit where Gordon Ramsay listed the top 5 worst Halloween candies, candy corn was #3, accompanied by the comment, "It's not candy, it's not corn, it's earwax formed in the shape of a rotten tooth!"
• The candied cherries and citron commonly found in fruitcakes, hot cross buns, and similar "treats" (fruitcake itself has its own page). Likely due to the fact that they have been coated in large amounts of sugar to the point where they're just cloyingly sweet, and at least in the case of the cherries, dyed either an unnatural shade of red or an unnatural green color. Also likely due to their often chewy texture.
• Candies more often brought by older people, commonly referred to as "old people candy", are this to kids and young adults. They can range from cheap generic-looking candy (such as those sweets in the strawberry wrappers), low-sugar candy, gumdrops, or retro brands like Bit-o-Honey.
  • Six-year-old Reina from Bunny Drop starts whining when Daikichi gives her an "old lady candy" (fruit jelly).
  • Malted Milk Balls (like Whoppers) are often considered to be an "old person candy".
    • This is inverted in Scandinavian countries, especially Iceland. (Where it's popular and easy to make due to the dairy culture)
    • An episode of Rugrats shows Lou picking up a bag of malted milk balls, specifically because he used to eat them when he was young. However, Angelica likes them just as much.
  • Barley Sugar. Was a common candy right up to the 80's, but had a reputation as an "old people's candy" even then.
  • In the comedy video When your LATINA MOM inspects your HALLOWEEN candy, the mother takes all of her daughter's Halloween candy except for the "boring" ones, such as the generic strawberry candy.
  • Two Halloween episodes in Bob's Burgers shows that Bob has awful taste in Halloween candy. One year he purchases a bag of "Dr. Peters' Bitter Drops," which he not-so-helpfully states was a favorite of his grandfather's and that they aren't too sweet. Linda repeatedly apologizes to kids when she gives them out. Then Bob tried to force kids to take hard candy which looked and smelled like cough drops and which supposedly tasted like old leaves (which Bob espouses they were going for because they're "sophisticated").
• Gravity Falls episode "Summerween" heavily features this trope as the Summerween Trickster is the personification of the candy that shows up in every candy bowl that no one likes but is somehow always there, such as salt water taffy, black licorice or cheap, powdery chocolate, dubbed "loser candy" by Mabel.
• Both rice pudding and custard are stereotyped as "gross/boring desserts".
  • Yet another Discworld example: 71-Hour Ahmed of Jingo, a graduate of the Assassins' Guild school, disdainfully mentions the odd-tasting custard they used to get on Mondays.
  • Angela Nicely: In “The Ugly Sisters!”, Angela thinks rice pudding is just as bad as eating mud or bugs.
• While certainly not considered gross, Vanilla ice cream is talked about as being the most boring flavour so often that "vanilla," as with mayo, has become slang for "plain" or "generic".
• Bran muffins are often a Stock Yuck, either for being plain or the idea that they make you poop.
• The Jell-O gelatin dessert gets this through its association with crappy institutional food such as in schools, hospitals and nursing homes. (And likely its association with WASP culture, its popularity in Mormon culture, and the gelatin salads mentioned further above.) Of these, green Jell-O —the package may say "lime" but the flavor says "green"— has the worst reputation of them all.
• Tapioca pudding was described as "Britain's most hated school pudding", likely due to its bland flavor and frog eggs-like appearance. Someone will probably also mention that tapioca's poisonous if not cooked correctly.
  • In the October 27, 1991 strip of Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin imagines himself as Spaceman Spiff being devoured by a hideous alien Blob Monster. In reality, he's disgusted with the cafeteria's tapioca pudding and comments, "*YECHHH* I sure wish I'd brought my lunch today!"
  • Tapioca pudding in Codename: Kids Next Door is disliked by both kids and adults and is only liked by senior citizens. In one episode the Kids Next Door steal a huge tanker truck full of tapioca pudding from some teens (who actually were seniors under the effects of an anti-aging cream) because the kids assumed they were planning to do something evil with it. The kids then can't figure out what to do with all that tapioca pudding and end up just letting the seniors have it back after they find out it was just being delivered to the senior citizen center to be eaten. The elderly villain Grandfather from Operation: Z.E.R.O. also loves the stuff and wants to enslave the world to work in his tapioca pudding factories, which the adult villains think is weird.

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