Bro that was me my whole life. Never understood kids not eating brocolli and peas cuz i always loved em ha
Brussels sprouts, too.
That’s also because the Brussels sprouts older generations grew up on and the ones they sell now are not the same thing. They are significantly less bitter than a few decades ago due to selective breeding.
The other big difference is that people actually know how to cook these days.
The brussel sprouts I got force-fed every Christmas as a child were boiled, slimy, plain and gross.
The Brussels I cook these days are cut in half, then tossed in olive oil with salt and black pepper, and oven baked to caramelise the insides and char the leaves a little for that yummy browning. Delicious!
It’s no wonder people hate something when they never tried the good version of it.
How far back does that go? I can remember liking them as far back as the early 80s.
They started changing about 30 tears ago. https://www.iowafarmbureau.com/Article/Its-not-your-imagination-brussels-sprouts-do-taste-better-How-gene-editing-is-changing-how-we-grow-and-eat-food
I still liked them when they were more bitter, then!
I never had them back when I was a kid because my mother hated them so she never made them. The first time I had one was in my 20’s.
I love brussel sprouts, but they give me the weirdest sinus headache/nausea, so I can’t eat them (much)
Heavily depends on how well it is prepared, as brocolli reacts not in a good way to a suboptimal cooking process.
Vegetables provided by child catering services tend to be overcooked, because of keeping them warm.
While that is fine for e.g. carrots, it converts brocolli into a textureless pulpy or even slightly watery-slimy stuff.Was a kid, can confirm.
Ok, now I get what the fuss is about. Half my life I have been wandering why people didn’t like broccoli or where that running gag came from. It probably is my favourite vegetable but I never enjoyed food from child catering services or similar places.
Fwiw it’s not just child catering. The trend for the parents of baby boomers was very often to just boil the shit out of vegetables, even at home. And many of those boomers would in turn keep doing that as they had kids of their own.
Roasting vegetables only became a (semi) widespread thing in the '90s. It sounds stupid but before the '80s the idea of chucking broccoli in a stove pan or oven just wasn’t part of the Western home cooking canon - that was reserved for meat.
I definitely remember that was still the norm for my GenX parents in the 2000s and they only started properly roasting vegetables on occasion in the 2010s. Though at least they’d use generous amounts of sauce so we always enjoyed our vegetables.
Not just keep them warm! Children are considered like, part of the group that food must be cooked to higher temperatures to keep them safe, like the elderly and the immune compromised. So some foods suck ass when cooked like that! Or so my food manager safety quiz told me. Well it told me about the higher temps. It also told me about turtles carry salmonella and a lot about typhoid mary.
That really just means they can’t have raw/undercooked meat, the temp to which veggies are cooked and held is unaffected by the age of their intended consumer. Edible raw veggies are more nutritional than cooked for all ages. No one in the food service industry cooks things to different temps based on age, that would make cooking at a restaurant sooooo much more confusing.
My suspicion is that a lot of young (American) people have only ever had canned, or horrifically overcooked veggies and conclude on that basis that veggies suck. My SO thought she didn’t like green beans until she was 19 and had the ones my dad made and was like “Wait… Why aren’t these mushy?”.
Everything changed when I had to start cooking for myself.
Turns out, my parents didn’t know how to cook broccoli. Or… Most vegetables really. Real steak’n’taters folks.
Everything changed when the broccoli nation attacked
Yes and no. Broccoli, like a lot of other veg, contains bitter flavors that kids can still taste, but adults can’t. So, for them it may actually taste horrible, even if it is delicious for you.
Broccoli is one of the less bitter vegetables. Kids tend to like it. I think kids don’t like overcooked tasteless broccoli.
And they grew the bitterness down over the years, too.
I hated raw broccoli as a kid, didn’t “like” it until I had fully-cooked, soft broccoli, so I’d say your hypothesis is flawed.
Huh. I wonder why humans would just happen to be born with the propensity to hate something good for them only to lose that propensity later in life. Like, would there be some evolutionary advantage? Maybe there are toxic plants that contain those bitter compounds and children who don’t eat them survive to pass on their genes but adults who have lived and learned what not to eat don’t need the same bitterness feedback, so humans evolved to lose it later? Or maybe I’m making stuff up and it’s just one of god’s practical jokes on humans like when we bite our tongue while chewing.
I don’t know where I heard or read it, so take my explanation with a grain of salt. Most poisons taste bitter, so avoiding bitter tasting things means avoiding poisonous things. Since children have a smaller body weight, the lethal dose is smaller for them. As go grow older, your body mass increases and so does your tolerance to poisons. But I am not sure why we would not want to avoid poisons in general even if they were not lethal any more.
Because some plants use small amounts of those poisons to avoid being eaten. So losing some of the aversion to the taste gives you a wider variety of food sources once you can tolerate the poison enough.
The idea is that some kinds of food are hard to digest or otherwise problematic for kids, while adults can eat and digest a broader diet.
fake: ive always enjoyed brocoli
Maybe you never had those receptor cells. We are talking about 15000 different bitter receptors in kids vs. 5000 in an adult. If you were lacking one in 15k it’s not much of a miss.
Kids have double the taste buds, they taste everything more. #TheMoreYouKnow
I find broccoli discorse fascinating, because it seems like there’s a lot of people who feel the need to shower it in praise because it’s the default “eww vegies suck” vegetable.
IMO broccoli is ok. it’s like median tastiness veg. Makes some dishes good, makes others suck.
But if you look at the dishes where broccoli is good, it’s always something along the lines of “we lathered this in cheese” or “dunked in salty oil and roasted”. It’s good and the broccoli definetely makes it better, but I also question if you just like cheese and oil.
dunked in salty oil and roasted
You’re describing the most basic of seasoning and cooking. That’s a weird position to take, that you don’t really like a food unless you eat it raw and unseasoned.
Right? I roast mine in the oven, so I must just like heat.
Median? Ok I want a list of a few above the median.
dunked in salty oil and roasted
Most people prefer their food cooked and seasoned, yes (if you call salt seasoning). That said, you can eat it raw if you so prefer.
I honestly think the stem is the best part. I love gai lan for that reason.
Of course salt is seasoning, what a ludicrous equivocation.
That’s a pretty safe bet, given that oil is a great flavour conductor helping flavour remain on the tongue longer, and cheese being a cultured product brings a lot of complex umami flavours to the table.
Yeah, raw broccoli still sucks ass if it’s not slathered in dip/dressing, and unfortunately cooking vegetables destroys most of the nutritional benefits. Cooked broccoli is delicious, but it’s essentially just excess carbs at that point.
I always assumed it was because the writers didn’t know how to cook and had only ever eaten over boiled broccoli that has no flavour left, instead of garlic and chili roasted broccoli.
I recently forgot my broccoli on the stove and finally understood why there are people who don’t like it.
You were steaming it, that’s why there are people who don’t like it
Blanch those fuckers and then paint em up with olive oil and salt and oven roast them. Works awesome for kale too
No, I didn’t like it because I FORGOT it and it turned to mush
Think it comes down to how it’s prepared, I love me some raw broccoli with some vegi dip, or roasted with some light oil and s/p. When I grew up I only had it offered steamed or boiled and it was awful.
Our parents didn’t have the internet, there were barely any cooking shows and cookbooks, while plentiful, didn’t lend themselves well to the daily grind that was increasingly taking up their time.
We got professional chefs on YT showing how to make “Michelin Star broccoli” in 30-second shorts and grocery stores that offer all the stuff we might need.
In other words, our parents were in the dark about cooking, relative to us.
cooked broccoli tastes like the farts they make.
steamed broccoli is lovely with some lemon pepper.
fresh broccoli is great with some ranch or sourcream dip.
Steamed broccoli is cooked broccoli.
there’s steamed and then there’s cooked.
cooked being soft mushy and slimey.
That’s not what cooked means
oh…chat, am I cooked?
Depends, have you been baked, boiled, broiled, poached, roasted, or broasted? Have you been steamed, sauteed, flambeed, simmered, stewed, or fried? Have you been blanched, grilled, braised, smoked, tempered, or acid-cured?
It all comes down to two things. The first is timing, because broccoli is best when blanched and not fully cooked, with an appropriate amount of salt and (optionally) nutmeg. The second is deception, because even the pickiest child will eat broccoli when it’s covered with some buttery sauce, like butter and breadcrumbs heated in a pan.
Broccoli and cauliflower are the only foods I detest. I hate their taste. I hate how they feel in my mouth. And I hate their smell.
Eating raw cauliflower is my top hated textural experience on Earth. So far.
I don’t like broccoli… I’ve tried it in several ways, it’s not to my taste
it just doesn’t taste like much
crunchy is nice, but it makes a mess
steamed is great texture, but little flavour without adding to it
it’s not like carrots that are delicious both ways without adding anything
Some people are more sensitive to bitter than others. Especially so for children. It’s where the kids not liking vegetables meme comes from.
I’m in my 40s, and Brocolli (and all other cruciferous brassica) still smells and tastes like farts to me. It smells/tastes less like farts than it used to, but the overall flavour is still farts. My partner doesn’t smell/taste it the same as I do, so we eat it quite often.
As an adult, I just accept that “sometimes, part of my dinner will taste of farts” and move on with life.
As someone else mentioned, many people taste all the foulness and bitterness in these things when they’re younger, but as their taste buds age/deteriorate/mature, the foul/bitter flavour can’t be detected any more. In other people, they could never taste it, and in others they will always taste it.
In my case, I look at how much I enjoy the taste of blue cheese or beer, compared to how “yucky” they were when trying them as a child.
