Okra Haters: You Need to Get Past the Slime
No matter how adventurous the eater, there is always something he or she just can’t tolerate. While I’m not quite Andrew Zimmern, there are only a couple of things that I don’t ever want to eat and they’re pretty pedestrian: zucchini and chopped liver.
Often enough, I’ve found that culinary opposition is based on a past mistake or on ungrounded suspicion. Many people I’ve met who proclaim that they don’t like sushi usually have never actually tried it.
The good news is that these opinions can sometimes be changed. Over the years, I’ve had a number of people tell me that they don’t like gin. I typically ask if they’d be willing to try a drink. “You don’t have to finish it if you don’t like it, just give it a shot,” I tell them. Then I fix them a cocktail with three-parts gin and one-part Lillet Blanc, a dash of orange bitters, stirred for a full thirty count and whammo, they’re suddenly into gin.