Taste Aversion and Fireball

 I feel like everyone has that one liquor that they avoid like the plague because of one really bad night. You know that one night where you took one to several shots too many. You wake up the next day to immediately pray to Jesus through the big porcelain telephone that you’ll never drink again only to double back like a week to a month later. That’s fireball for me. To this day, I cannot take a whiff of the cinnamon whiskey without being whisked away to the backseat of my dad’s jeep swearing I had a “stomach bug” as I intermittently shared last night’s dinner with a paper bag that was keeping it together just as well as I was (poorly). What I just colorfully described is an example of taste aversion, the dislike of food due to the association with nausea. Now this association extends beyond getting off your trolley. You may have gotten food poisoning from some bad shrimp, and now you swear off the delicious sea insects solely on the one bad experience. Maybe you caught a whiff of durian, a fruit I’ve never eaten and never will because it smells like a well-used jockstrap. Regardless, all these feelings can be described under the blanket term of taste aversion.