There are foods I don't particularly care for.
There are foods I'll eat if they're put in front of me.
There are foods that I understand why other people enjoy, even if they aren't for me.
This blog is not about those foods.
This blog is about foods that I believe have absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Foods that actively make everything they touch worse.
Foods that I would remove from existence without a second thought.
And yes, I'm fully aware that some of you are about to be personally offended.
Good.
Let's begin.
Pickles are not food.
Pickles are vandalism.
You can hand me a perfectly good burger, a perfectly good sandwich, or a perfectly good chicken sandwich, and somehow a pickle finds a way to sneak in and ruin the entire experience.
And don't hit me with the "you just haven't had the right kind" argument.
I've heard it all.
Dill.
Sweet.
Bread and butter.
Half sour.
Full sour.
Those are just different names for the same mistake.
Pickles are what happens when a cucumber makes a series of poor life choices.
They are absolute hot garbage and they don't deserve to exist.
I never thought my mortal enemy would end up being a rotten cucumber, but here we are.
Olives somehow manage to dominate every dish they enter.
You don't eat pizza with olives.
You eat olives with pizza underneath them.
That's how powerful they are.
One olive can completely hijack an entire meal.
It's the culinary equivalent of somebody bringing an acoustic guitar to a party and refusing to stop playing.
Blue cheese feels like somebody looked at regular cheese and asked themselves how they could make it worse.
And then they succeeded.
Every fan of blue cheese spends ten minutes explaining why it's good.
That should tell you everything you need to know.
Especially when ranch is right there, yet you still chose to make the wrong decision.
Nobody has ever had to give a TED Talk about mozzarella.
Buffalo sauce has somehow convinced people that pain and flavor are the same thing.
They aren't.
Every buffalo sauce enthusiast eventually says something like:
"You get used to it."
That's not a recommendation.
That's a warning.
You know what else you can get used to?
Traffic.
That doesn't make traffic enjoyable.
Avocados are the emperor with no clothes.
Every time somebody explains why they're good, they talk about texture.
Or health benefits.
Or versatility.
Nobody talks about the flavor.
Because deep down, they know.
If you picked up any other vegetable with that same texture, your brain would say "Nope. Rotten".
Yet somehow avocados get a pass.
"But what about guacamole?!"
The correct answer is salsa.
Cilantro doesn't taste like soap to me.
I'm getting the actual flavor.
That's the problem.
Cilantro has absolutely no understanding of its role in a recipe.
It's supposed to be a garnish.
Instead, it shows up and immediately tries to become the main character.
Every recipe treats cilantro like a supporting actor.
Cilantro treats cilantro like it's the star of the movie.
Somewhere along the line, somebody told cilantro it was much more important than it actually is.
Everybody else enabled that behavior.
That ends today.
Shrimp are basically sea bugs that somehow won a public relations campaign.
People wrap them in bacon.
Dip them in cocktail sauce.
Cover them in seasoning.
And then tell me how amazing the shrimp is.
No.
Shrimp have a brown line right down the middle.
Any guess what that might be?
I'll keep it civil.
Waste.
It's a line of waste.
And by "waste", I mean poop.
Oops.
What you're "describing" is how amazing everything surrounding the shrimp is.
Lobster suffers from the same problem.
If your entire sales pitch revolves around how much butter I need to dump on top of something, maybe the thing underneath isn't as impressive as you've been led to believe.
Lobster is proof that good marketing can accomplish almost anything.
It used to be the peasant food.
Now you need to refinance your mortgage just to get a spoonful on a stale hot dog roll.
Oysters are one of the few foods where people openly admit that swallowing them whole is the preferred method.
That's not helping your case.
Imagine trying to sell any other food that way.
"Don't worry, you barely have to taste it."
Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
Let's stop pretending fancy names can save bad ideas.
Especially when we're talking about swallowing sea snots from sea shells and calling it "fancy".
Calamari is squid.
You're eating squid.
More specifically, you're eating tentacles and suction cups.
Who looked at a squid and thought:
"You know what? Let's bread that."
Who hurt these people?
At some point we collectively decided that if you fry something long enough, nobody asks questions anymore.
I refuse to be distracted by the breading.
I know what's underneath.
Scallops are one of the greatest scams ever perpetrated at weddings and corporate functions.
The best scallop I've ever had was wrapped in bacon.
You know what the best part was?
The bacon.
In fact, the ideal bacon-wrapped scallop experience is unwrapping the bacon, eating the bacon, and quietly placing the scallop back on the serving tray.
Then watching the next person discover it.
At that point it's not even about the taste anymore.
It's about sending a message.
Sauerkraut tastes like somebody accidentally left cabbage in a science experiment and then decided to serve it.
I don't care how traditional it is.
Being old doesn't automatically make something good.
It's "fermented", also known as rotten. I thought we threw spoiled things away.
They have expiration dates on foods for a reason.
Sauerkraut folks didn't get that memo.
Kale is always introduced with the exact same opening line:
"It's really healthy."
Interesting.
Notice how nobody starts with:
"It's delicious."
That doesn't seem accidental.
It tastes chlorinated construction paper.
If Popeye ate kale instead of spinach, he would have died in the first episode.
Coleslaw somehow manages to ruin both cabbage and mayonnaise at the same time.
That's actually impressive.
Every cookout has a giant bowl of coleslaw sitting there.
Nobody wants to be the first person to take some.
Nobody wants to be the second person either.
Tofu looks like plaque.
Actual plaque.
Not the award kind.
The dental kind.
Every tofu enthusiast eventually falls back on the same defense:
"It takes on the flavor of whatever you cook it with."
That is not the defense you think it is.
Imagine introducing a friend that way.
"He has absolutely no personality whatsoever, but he absorbs the personality of everyone around him."
That's not a compliment.
That's tofu.
Then there's beets.
As a kid, we'd occasionally have beets with beef stroganoff.
The beef stroganoff was fantastic.
The beets were not.
The texture was wrong.
The flavor was wrong.
The color looked like evidence from a crime scene.
Everything about them felt suspicious.
To this day, I have never encountered a beet that made me reconsider my position.
My mother was convinced that they were a good staple to have.
I never shared that sentiment.
For all intents and purposes, she forced them onto those childhood plates.
I'll never touch another beet as long as I live.
Corned beef is salty.
Stringy.
Chewy.
And somehow flavorless at the same time.
I genuinely don't understand how that's possible.
It's like somebody challenged themselves to create the most confusing food imaginable.
Corned Beef Hash?
Corned Beef TRASH.
Much better.
Black licorice is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in human history.
There had to be multiple opportunities for society to stop this.
And yet here we are.
Good & Plenty is still going strong, which means we have heathens out there keeping these alive.
Peeps survive entirely on nostalgia.
Nobody wakes up in the middle of July craving Peeps.
Nobody.
Peeps appear once a year, everybody pretends they're good, and then they disappear before anyone can ask difficult questions.
They also double as insulation.
The asbestos kind.
Cantaloupe is the participation trophy of fruit.
Nobody gets excited about cantaloupe.
Cantaloupe exists because fruit salad needed filler.
It's the cardboard packing peanuts of the produce department.
Honeydew somehow looked at cantaloupe and said:
"I can be less exciting."
Honeydew tastes like somebody described fruit to a vegetable.
I've never once heard anyone say:
"You know what I'm really craving right now? Honeydew."
Not once.
Horseradish is proof that somebody confused a dare with a recipe.
Every horseradish fan eventually says the same thing:
"It really clears your sinuses."
That's not a food review.
That's a side effect.
Nobody ever talks about how good horseradish tastes.
They talk about the physical symptoms that occur after eating it.
If the primary selling point of your food is that it briefly turns your head into a pressure washer, we may have lost sight of the objective.
Besides, that's what ginger is for, and ginger is amazing.
Vinegar deserves its own section because it's the criminal mastermind behind half the foods on this list.
Pickles?
Vinegar.
Salt and vinegar chips?
Vinegar.
Malt vinegar on French fries?
Vinegar.
Buffalo Sauce?
Vinegar.
Every time I discover a food I dislike, vinegar somehow appears in the background like the final boss of the entire operation.
The first time I saw malt vinegar being offered for French fries, I questioned the judgment of everyone involved.
French fries are one of humanity's greatest achievements.
Why are we pouring sadness on them?
And don't even get me started on salt and vinegar chips.
Potatoes deserve better.
The smell of feta cheese alone should tell you something is wrong.
Most foods attempt to attract people.
Feta takes the opposite approach.
It walks into the room and immediately issues a challenge.
And somehow there are people who willingly pursue it.
The same way there are people who sleep in tents hanging off the side of cliffs.
I understand that these people exist.
I understand that they enjoy what they're doing.
I simply cannot relate to the decision-making process that led them there.
Mustard might be the most aggressively defended condiment in existence.
Every mustard fan immediately points out that it has almost no calories.
That's wonderful.
It also has almost no flavor worth having.
And eventually someone always says:
"It's an acquired taste."
Or:
"It grows on you."
You know what else grows on you?
Warts.
And nobody wants those either.
Not everything that becomes more tolerable over time is automatically good.
At this point, some of you are probably reading this while actively eating one or more of the foods on this list.
That's your right.
I support your freedom to make questionable decisions.
But understand something.
These foods aren't being removed because I dislike them.
They're being removed as a warning to all other ingredients that may one day decide to overestimate their own importance.
Let this serve as a message.
Don't.
Until next week folks!
