:o I didn't know that was possible! :P
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I'm eating a taco salad right now. :ready-to-eat:
Yes, believe it or not, one will find older folks in the northeastern US, mainly, who don't like or ever eat Mexican food. My parents don't eat it. We never ate it growing up. In fact, it wasn't on the culinary radar until maybe the mid to late 1970s when the first Taco Bell arrived. There were no Hispanics in my area until the 1980s, by which time I was grown and gone.
So what DID/DO we eat? I grew up on things like meatloaf, baked chicken, spaghetti and meatballs, codfish cakes, stringbeans, carrots, peas, corn, toss salad, summer and winter squash in season, apples, oranges, bananas, plums, pears. For dessert or snack we had cookies, pound cake, pudding, jello, crackers, potato chips, ice-cream for a rare treat. If not eating the classic 1950s American fare, we sometimes ate foods cooked by or according to our grandmas' recipes, kielbasa, perogies, stuffed peppers, stuffed cabbage, bobka, corned beef, boiled cabbage, potatoes, beef stroganoff, herring, borscht, mushrooms with lima beans, bread pudding, Irish soda bread...Eastern European and a little Irish-American cuisine.
I first tried real Mexican food in the early 1990s when I was in my early 30s. For me, it's an acquired taste, same as I've come to like certain Asian foods since moving to a predominantly Korean and Chinese area when I was in my 40s. I've been able to adapt to foods very different from what I ate during my growing up years, probably because I got adventurous while still young and have never stopped. My parents, however, have eaten the same way their entire lives, and were already too old to adjust by the time all sorts of foods became available to them. They are elderly now, still have fairly good appetites, but only for the foods they've always eaten.
I enjoy a much greater variety of foods, as do my siblings, still, there are some "foreign" foods I simply cannot eat. I not only dislike them, but several are guaranteed to be rejected by my body if I force them down. These include anything with jalapeño, red chilli, Wasabi, raw eel, raw salmon.
So, how was the Mexican meal?