What is your least favorite food? Maybe the smell makes you gag or the texture is too much. Perhaps the flavor is unpleasant--or maybe you can’t stand the sensation that shoots through your teeth when you take a bite. But what is at the root of your reaction? “Unappetizing: The truth behind the foods we hate” is a series of personal essays that explores what is at the core of the foods that make our stomachs turn. Maybe they’re tied to a memory or a circumstance. Maybe they’ve overstayed their welcome. Or maybe, it’s the food that doesn’t like us. From heart breaking to hilarious, “Unappetizing: The truths behind the foods we hate” covers the full spectrum of why we steer away from the dishes we detest.
When I was 4 years old, my mother made Toad in the Holes (essentially toast with a hole made in the center to fry an egg into). She made these knowing that my father had a very poor experience with runny eggs as a child, so my mother was complaining about how overcooked his eggs were going to be.
She put the plate down in front of my father, and I asked if I could have one too. My mother, already in tune with my propensity to be picky, asked me if I was sure I would like it. I said obviously I would, and I wanted it with a nice runny yolk; since that sounded better. She rather reluctantly went back and cut out a second toad in the hole for me.
As I hesitantly bit into the soupy yolk and rubbery white, I realized what my mother had already kinda guessed.
I didn’t like eggs.
Now, disliking eggs is not really a luxury I can afford as an adult. Eggs are cheap, they are flexible, and they are a source of reliable healthy protein. When my paycheck only allows for $15-$30 a week on food, I do not have a lot of choice in what I can make myself and I am sure it seems stupid to limit my choices even more. I cannot help it. I wish I liked eggs, but no amount of willpower has made that wish come true.
Heck, it’s not like my mother didn’t try to make me like them. She made them for me in various forms throughout my life — frittatas, scrambles, bread puddings and the like — but it didn’t matter the form. If the dish tastes extremely eggy, younger me would know, and younger me would not be eating it.
As a kid, I could tell that this distaste for the ubiquitous egg was causing my mom problems when it came to feeding me. I can’t blame her. There were always 7-12 mouths to feed inside our household on a given evening, and money was tight. My father’s job as a pastor was never lucrative, and his paycheck often went to others if they needed it more than us.
Dinner was often an improv game for our family as she stretched, reforged, and dressed-up the minimal resources she had in between paychecks for groceries. Eggs could often have been a saving grace on a night when the cupboards were bare, but my mother knew that was a hoop I would not jump through
I knew this bothered her although she never would say so explicitly. She would make dinner for the family. She’d call the household for dinner, put the plates on the table, and then turn to me in a huff and say, “if you don’t like it, get a spoonful of peanut butter.” Many a night I would do that, and many a night I’d see a tinge of frustration flow from her scrunched eyebrows as I licked my meal substitute.
When I got old enough to begin cooking for myself, I started to feel the same frustrations as my mother for my dislike of eggs. As her kids began to age, my mother’s time and temperament to cook for the varying tastes of the many people in our household diminished.
It quickly fell on me to play the improv game of cooking for myself, and what I quickly learned was versatility was king. Why spend $10 on premade salads for one dish when I could spend $5 on frozen corn which can be a side and ingredient for any number of meals?
The day I started doing the math of how many meals per dollar each option came out to, was the day I felt like a true adult. When I saw that a package of lunchmeat was $5.50 and a carton of eggs was $1.80, I started to think that eggs looked more and more like a vital asset I was leaving to rot.
In this way, eggs became more and more of a necessary evil for me. I had to come up with creative ways to hide them in meals. I discovered hard-boiled eggs were more flavor less than revolting, so it was very easy to grate a couple of those into a salad or a burrito and barely notice their congealed texture. Fried rice was a favorite of mine. I always had a bag of rice on hand, and eggs do very little damage to a well seasoned dish. Occasionally, when I wanted to treat myself, I would hide a scrambled egg in good quality brussel sprouts, potatoes and sausage. It was a compromise I made to stretch the food I liked out for longer periods.
This is why, despite my disdain, eggs have remained a consistent part of my fridge; because they are easy. When I didn’t have the time or mental ability to cook, my carton of eggs would stare at me from my top shelf and taunt me. “Oh how quickly I could get to bed,” I’d muse, “if I just scrambled up a couple of these, and shoved them down my throat covered in ketchup to blur the taste.”
The first couple months of being in LA, I never took this bargain. But one night, with my funds severely low and my energy even lower, I did finally break and scramble a couple onto a piece of toast. I couldn’t stomach more than half of it. I felt like my mom must have felt all the way back when she made that first toad in the hole, “why did you waste food you never intended to eat?”
There are probably foods that I have more visceral disgust for than eggs, but I will always say eggs are my least favorite food because they represent my frustration with food. Cooking is often a chore. Planning, shopping, chopping, prepping, cooking, serving, cleaning and eventually eating food is a process; often an arduous one. Some days I wish I never had to eat another thing ever again, but my biological clock clicks ever forward, and part of growing up is managing that process.
Sometimes I just have to eat the damn eggs.