Which food, when you eat it, instantly transports you to childhood?
For most folks, a bite of food can send them rocketing back to simpler days—warm cookies from grandma’s kitchen, buttery popcorn at the movies, or that neon orange mac and cheese that somehow glowed brighter than the sun. For me? Childhood tastes like betrayal… and lima beans! 🤢
That’s right, lima beans!
While other kids were building tree forts or riding their bikes, I was knee-deep in lima bean purgatory. Why? Because my dad LOVED them. Not just the casual “I’ll have a spoonful with dinner” kind of love. No, this was deep, obsessive, unconditional lima love. The kind of love that turns a backyard into a forced agricultural operation run by underage labor.
At one point, we had lima beans growing in such bulk that I’m convinced we briefly qualified as a low-budget bean-themed amusement park. The only ride? Me, doing laps with a five-gallon bucket and a bad attitude.
So, picture it… me, small and grumbling, hauling five-gallon buckets of the devil’s legume across a sun-scorched yard while dad watched proudly, like he was raising the next great bean baron of the Midwest. All that was missing was a Soviet anthem playing in the background and a union rep to file a complaint.
I asked once, “Dad, why lima beans?”
He looked at me, dead serious, and said, “Because they’re good for you and they build character.” Newsflash: they built resentment, not character.
And don’t even think about skipping out on dinner. “You’ll sit there until those lima beans are gone,” he’d declare. And I would. I’d sit there long enough to see entire civilizations rise and fall outside the window.
To this day, I can’t so much as smell a lima bean without flashbacks to the bucket brigade. It’s like culinary PTSD. I’ll be at a buffet and, BAM! There they are, smiling up at me like little green smug tokens of my childhood servitude.
So yes, some people get transported back to warm fuzzies and nostalgia with food.
Me?
One bite of a lima bean, and I’m 10 years old again, hauling buckets like a prisoner of war while my dad waves from the porch like a plantation owner proud of his crop yield. 😜
Crock’s Thoughts 