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“Don’t Hate It Until You Try It”: 40 People Are Sharing Their Unpopular Takes On Food
Pickles wrapped in cheese, popcorn with beans and ice cream on meatloaf are just a few of the surprising food combinations Americans said they love, according to this survey. It’s not to say these pairings are must-try, but they definitely show just how unique our taste buds can be.
So when Twitter user Michael Realman called for “canceling each other over food takes today,” it hit a soft spot for many. Immediately, people started sharing their own “cancelable” food combos that hit all too close to home, or rather the kitchen, for the rest.
From ketchup on waffles to Nutella pasta, some of the pairings will definitely raise our brows but hey, who am I to judge when I put salt and pepper on my porridge! And if you too are no stranger to some quirky food combo, be sure to share it in our comment section!
Image credits: trichesfaucons
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Most of us have at least one eating habit, if not more, that chances are we developed way back in our childhood. The first year of life is a period of rapid physical, social and emotional growth, during which eating patterns also develop. During this first year, infants transition from consuming a single food (i.e., breast milk or formula) to consuming a variety of foods more characteristic of an adult diet.
Moreover, parents influence children's eating behavior in many ways. First off, adults actively make food choices for the whole family, serving as models for dietary choices and patterns. Children also learn about food by observing the eating behaviors modeled by others. For example, research reveals that children's intake of fruits, vegetables, and milk increased after observing adults consuming the foods.
Our food preferences, whether common or unusual, are also part of our eating habits that formed early in life. They often include unique food combinations, too. The registered nutritionist Charlotte-Stirling Reed, who’s the author of “The Baby & Child Nutritionist,” told Bored Panda that when it comes to weird food pairings, parents often have a preconceived idea of what “flavors” go together. “They find it unimaginable that their young children eat certain pairings. But little ones, especially during weaning, don’t have the idea that breakfast HAS to be sweet, for example, until we introduce that idea,” she said and added that “They might not see the problem of having a courgette porridge in the morning or avocado ice cream!”
This is a pretty common dish (specifically in the UK), so I don't see this one being cancelled.
I'm from Germany but I tried this during a vacation in UK and loved it. Have it regularly now, it's even better with some scrambled eggs though. And a really good hangover cure;)
Grill either 2 Cumberland or Lincolnshire sausage and slice into thin disks and mix them in. So awesome!
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A parfait spoon is the ideal implement for eating baked beans straight from the can.
Not a fan of baked beans myself, but I am married to an Englishman who thinks beans on toast is a little bit of heaven right here on Earth, so make it for him whenever he craves it (I’m American, btw).
Ok, now let me get cancelled with canned spaghetti on toast (any Aussies to back me up?)
I see your spaghetti on toast, and I raise you a cold baked beans sandwich, lots of butter to stop the bread going soggy, white bread of course. Let the cancelling begin!
Load More Replies... My friend from hull says that their baked beans are tomato based not bbq based so a bit different
Nah. You're not canceled. This is also a great sober up food!! Side note, dip your french fries in your baked beans! So yum!
add sausage, tomato and eggs and you have the standard English breakfast.
Baked beans are a staple side dish at a hog roast. If you have never shoved beans in your mouth with bread, you have been missing out!
In the UK. Though, after hearing one of my TikTok content creators, I'm willing to give it a go here in the US. Although, with our bread being so sweet, it might not taste the same.
They look more like pork and beans. Either way I don’t get it but I’ve never tried it.
I love beans and toast. My wifi is named "beans and toast." Heinz beans are the best.
Yes !!!!!! Yummy ! it’s not common here in the US but I can eat this anytime of day.
i mean i don't really like beans so i can't really cancel nor dislike it or just agree with it because iv'e never tried them
Every so often I get a hankering for baked beans, but every single brand or flavour I try is always way too sweet and I always end up unable to finish it.
I wanna try them.... Do they have to be baked or Pork & Beans (US canned offering) appropriate?
I had this for dinner last night, with grated cheese on the beans. Amazing, cheap, and full of fibre and protein.
I love it. Especially if you jazz up those beans a little bit with some dark brown sugar, a bbq sauce, and make sure that toast is very crunchy to begin with. Great breakfast, or lunch, OR dinner, imo!
This is common as hell in the UK, I don't like baked beans at all though, but many people eat this as a cheap meal.
This was a very popular snack for common laborers in Rome as I was growing up. The bread was rustic bread and the pork and beans was made with a slightly different cut of pork, but the idea is the same (Fagioli co' le cotiche")
I love baked beans ... and putting them on toast is an intriguing idea!
I love baked beans, but I never had them on toast. In Brazil we have baked beans with rice, it's like our everyday basic dish.
Nope. It was dried beef in a cream sauce on toast that was SonS.
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Heinz Beans on toast with freshly grated caramelised onion cheddar from the farmer’s market was my all time comfort food during Uni. Beans on toast is widely popular in the UK and Australia.
Canned beans on toast seems like a choice made when someone was hungry, went to their kitchen, and all they could find was canned beans and toast.
Hot baked beans, crunchy toast. Cold butter. Doesn’t get better than that.
My mother loved baked bean sandwiches, although she felt ketchup was essential.
Both of those ingredients bring my daughters IBS up big time!! Goes from a flat stomach to looking five months pregnant! Hard to cook without them but possible!!
“In fact, my children recently chomped through some fruit sorbet with a stick of cauliflower on the side (their request). Sometimes children just follow their own innate intuition of what foods and flavors they want at that moment,” Reed told us. She said that parents should be happy to see that and “let them go for it!” Moreover, the child nutritionist added that she has carrot, beetroot and courgette porridge options as regular breakfasts for her kids, “and to them that’s quite normal!” If you and your little one feel adventurous enough to try some of the Reed’s unique porridge recipes, check them out right here.
I don't see anything unusual? Not my favorite, but if there was a cookie shortage, I'd at least consider them.
Sensory scientists and flavor experts have been studying just what foods and flavors pair well with others, pleasantly surprising our taste buds. One such pretty widespread combo is pineapple and ham (but beware to never order this kind of pizza anywhere in Italy!), which seem to work perfectly together.
Paul Breslin, a sensory scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center and a professor of nutrition at Rutgers University, explained this combo: “Really fatty foods, like ham and other meats, tend to leave your mouth feeling fatty, which is an undesirable state. Enter the pineapple. The fruit, which is naturally acidic, cuts through that greasy mouthfeel, creating a balanced (and tasty) result,” he said.
Pears and blue cheese have a similar effect. Breslin says that dressings typically contain three components: fat, salt, and acid. In the case of this classic pairing, the blue cheese provides the fat and salt, and the pear does its part with the acid.
Meanwhile, Niki Segnit, UK-based author of The Flavour Thesaurus, argues that “there are many wonderful matches to be discovered, and you don't need a PhD in molecular gastronomy to start experimenting.” She told the press that “interesting and unusual flavor matches can be made with common store-cupboard ingredients, like cheese and marmalade, or chocolate and aubergine.”
This 2020 survey commissioned by SPAM found that 41 percent of American respondents were most likely to have discovered their favorite food combinations from family or friends. The most popular food combo Americans love is the dipping of French fries in their chocolate milkshake. Other top combinations were chocolate and popcorn or sour cream and onion chips with chocolate. Interestingly, over half said they’ll have a “freak out” if their different foods touch each other while on their plate, the same survey found.
Hear me out. Vanilla Greek yogurt, a spoonful of fig preserves, a good sprinkle of chopped toasted walnuts.
People put stuff in Starbucks coffee because Starbucks coffee is terrible.
You forgot the fact that they sit on the bottom of the ocean and eat all the fish poop that drifts down, and they are full of poop when people eat them.
OMG! Finally another human being that shared my aversion to Ranch! It's totally gross! My favorite food is bacon cheese fries. I ALWAYS get it without ranch, because ranch is just gross. I usually always get it WITH ranch because some brain surgeon in the kitchen thinks that EVERYBODY likes ranch. 😝
"There are 3 stages in life - I hate olives; I don't despise olives and OMG OLIVES"
this might kill you but, i sometimes eat raw onions as a snack when i’m done grilling burgers, like chips. *powers up defibrillator *
I can't stand BBQ pizza, and also don't much like chicken on pizza, so totally disagree.
I've tried hot sauce on vanilla ice cream. It's an odd combo, but I've done it more than once.
If taste of flavourless grass is someone's thing...not judging but actually judging.
As long as it's medium rare, then I don't care if it looks like it was hit by a 4x4 and the grill left an imprint
Note: this post originally had 117 images. It’s been shortened to the top 40 images based on user votes.
let me just say, after looking at some of these, i refused to look at the rest of them, and just came here to say that
What is the purpose of this post? Just don't eat it and stop judging what others do
"Hunger is the best sauce" ---- a proverb for a reason. When you're hungry, you'll eat anything. Been there, tried that.
There are a lot of these where i really wonder if they've ever had a good example of the thing they hate. Like nowadays, especially in Canada and the US, i can easily imagine someone who has never had good bread or a good tomato. It's sad. otoh, if they have and they just don't like them, fair enough
We have amazing breads and tomatoes in the US, lol! I grow heirloom tomatoes every summer and bake breads all throughout the year. Darn, now I'm hungry for warm, fresh bread.
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I like Hershey's chocolate and Goldfish Crackers. Probably the sweet and salty combo.
I thought I was the only one. It's one of the many weird food habits I've passed to my daughter. One of the others is pepperoni, jalapenos, onions, and pineapple on pizza.
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Skin on fries are not fancy. You're just too lazy to peel the f****n spuds!
that sounds like the best way to have rice pudding when you have no rice pudding I have ever heard
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Add another one. I've never even bought it. I tasted it once at my sister's house and thought I was going to die from a sugar overload. I don't understand the appeal.
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I suggest we cancel the cancellers. Why should anyone care what other people like or don't like to eat?
If we cancel the cancellers then aren't we cancellers and should be cancelled?
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With some of these horrible posts.. Do you upvote them (after all, this is a list of food combinations that should be cancelled) or do you downvote them, because they are just terrible?
I think we're upvoting the ones we don't want to cancel
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Cheez-its and black licorice are a snack sensation you gotta try at least once. Tastes like gourmet sausage
I don't get the love for those sickeningly sweet brown sugar and molasses concoctions some people think are BBQ sauce either, but a nice tangy or spicy sauce can compliment just about any meat.
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These folks are amateurs :) When I was 5 or early 6yo and alone at home while my parents were working and sister in school (my parents were quite trusting or that was a different time, I guess), I got hungry and started looking for something to eat. I ended up mixing bread crumbs with some sort of powder for instant vitamin drink and ate it dry. I liked it. Made it again quite a few times, especially while still a kid.
This list made me sad- half the food was things I can no longer eat, the other half food I have never heard of/tried :(
If you're referring to the peanut butter spread they try to pass off as peanut butter then you're right. It might as well be classified as icing. It's like saying miracle whip is the same as mayonnaise. I prefer natural peanut butter like Adam's. It actually tastes like peanuts. If you don't like peanuts then it really doesn't matter which one you try.
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Coffee creamer, straight outta the container. Pure chemicals, almost styrofoam, sure, nummy, yes!
Rice with anything is a crime against humanity. Absolutely revolting stuff.
For the most part, rice is just a filler carb. But, sushi wouldn't really be the same without it.
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let me just say, after looking at some of these, i refused to look at the rest of them, and just came here to say that
What is the purpose of this post? Just don't eat it and stop judging what others do
"Hunger is the best sauce" ---- a proverb for a reason. When you're hungry, you'll eat anything. Been there, tried that.
There are a lot of these where i really wonder if they've ever had a good example of the thing they hate. Like nowadays, especially in Canada and the US, i can easily imagine someone who has never had good bread or a good tomato. It's sad. otoh, if they have and they just don't like them, fair enough
We have amazing breads and tomatoes in the US, lol! I grow heirloom tomatoes every summer and bake breads all throughout the year. Darn, now I'm hungry for warm, fresh bread.
Load More Replies... I like Hershey's chocolate and Goldfish Crackers. Probably the sweet and salty combo.
I thought I was the only one. It's one of the many weird food habits I've passed to my daughter. One of the others is pepperoni, jalapenos, onions, and pineapple on pizza.
Load More Replies... Skin on fries are not fancy. You're just too lazy to peel the f****n spuds!
that sounds like the best way to have rice pudding when you have no rice pudding I have ever heard
Load More Replies... Add another one. I've never even bought it. I tasted it once at my sister's house and thought I was going to die from a sugar overload. I don't understand the appeal.
Load More Replies... I suggest we cancel the cancellers. Why should anyone care what other people like or don't like to eat?
If we cancel the cancellers then aren't we cancellers and should be cancelled?
Load More Replies... With some of these horrible posts.. Do you upvote them (after all, this is a list of food combinations that should be cancelled) or do you downvote them, because they are just terrible?
I think we're upvoting the ones we don't want to cancel
Load More Replies... Cheez-its and black licorice are a snack sensation you gotta try at least once. Tastes like gourmet sausage
I don't get the love for those sickeningly sweet brown sugar and molasses concoctions some people think are BBQ sauce either, but a nice tangy or spicy sauce can compliment just about any meat.
Load More Replies... These folks are amateurs :) When I was 5 or early 6yo and alone at home while my parents were working and sister in school (my parents were quite trusting or that was a different time, I guess), I got hungry and started looking for something to eat. I ended up mixing bread crumbs with some sort of powder for instant vitamin drink and ate it dry. I liked it. Made it again quite a few times, especially while still a kid.
This list made me sad- half the food was things I can no longer eat, the other half food I have never heard of/tried :(
If you're referring to the peanut butter spread they try to pass off as peanut butter then you're right. It might as well be classified as icing. It's like saying miracle whip is the same as mayonnaise. I prefer natural peanut butter like Adam's. It actually tastes like peanuts. If you don't like peanuts then it really doesn't matter which one you try.
Load More Replies... Coffee creamer, straight outta the container. Pure chemicals, almost styrofoam, sure, nummy, yes!
Rice with anything is a crime against humanity. Absolutely revolting stuff.
For the most part, rice is just a filler carb. But, sushi wouldn't really be the same without it.
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