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Okra. Can't stand it. Grated mountain yam, you know the Japanese grated mountain yam? For the same reason. That slime, I just can't. Fiddlehead ferns, I'm not a fan of. I let my cooks use fiddleheads because they like them so much, but I look at them and go, "Aah, I don't really like them."

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Yeah, badly prepared anything, anything without thought behind it. There are specific ingredients I'm not crazy about. It's probably because I wasn't ready for it. Something that I just don't get -- and I will eat just about anything -- but there are such things I just don't understand: the fermented soybeans, the natto, I don't get it. As open as I can be, I don't understand how that could be even palatable, much less a delicacy, but then again, I've eaten duck tongues and people roll -- "What are you crazy?"

Well, they're actually pretty good. They're crispy and gelatinous and they taste like duck skin. They're good. So it's all relative. But no, just really poorly prepared, gloppy food, especially when you're expecting something really nice and it's, "Oh, my goodness, what happened there?"

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There's only one thing that I could never possibly eat, and that would be cottage cheese. It seems to me it's got to be one of the most repulsive substances in the history of the world. And I couldn't possibly eat it.

There's an interesting book that came out by a UC Berkeley sociologist a long time ago, back in the -- it was either the late 70s or early 80s -- and the name of the book is Unmentionable Cuisine. And he basically went around the world, and it wasn't a chef-focused book or a recipe-focused book, even though there are a number of recipes in the book, but he wanted to study cultures and look at why some people will eat this in one culture, but it's anathema in another culture.

I mean there are certain things if I went somewhere and I suppose if they were eating it, I might. I haven't quite gone as far as Anthony Bourdain to some of the exotic locales eating beating rattlesnake hearts. And I don't know that I would go that far, but I'm open-minded enough to. My wife and I have taken a couple of around-the-world trips where we have only eaten street food, and some of the things we were eating, we really don't even know what's in there.