As a further elaboration: growing up, I absolutely hated pasta salad. I could not and would not eat it. But one day, when I was about 22-23, I was working somewhere that includes meals, since shifts were literally all day for a week (save eight hours for sleeping). The cook made a pasta salad that I could only describe as “orgasmic.” I ate that same pasta salad for every meal for the next two days until they finally tossed the leftovers. Ever since then, I have been “converted” to enjoy pasta salad. That one dish completely changed how my body reacts to a food that I already tried several times.
So many times. Hated asparagus until my aunt made it for me at 16/17 years old. Now I can’t get enough.
A Peruvian/Japanese fusion restaurant in DC ended my absolute disdain for mushrooms (specifically shitake) when I was in my mid 30s
I have learned to keep trying things I think I don’t like every few years because you never know what meal will change your palette - and maybe your life
When I was a child, we’d often see people walking at the edge of a farm fence adjacent to a country road near us.
I asked my dad what those people were doing. “They’re looking for asparagus,” he said. Hmph. I knew my dad was just making shit up again, especially with a funny word like asparagus.
Some time later he told me to go up to the fence at the edge of our yard and find some asparagus. Oh, dad, you slay me.
You know what I still see to this day? People walking that same country road, with the same grocery bags. They are foraging for wild asparagus. It’s a real thing.
He should have taken you asparagus foraging to teach you how. It was unreasonable to expect you to know something he didn’t teach you.
My father was many things. A forager was not one.
To be fair, the way asparagus grows looks like a prank. It’s like someone just stuck it in the ground lol