If It Tastes Bad, It Must Be Good for You/Playing With
Basic Trope: Healthy food tastes absolutely terrible.
- Straight: Alice eats a vegetable and nearly retches.
- Exaggerated: Alice smells a whiff of vegetables - cue Vomit Indiscretion Shot.
- Averted: Alice's favourite foods are apples, ice cream, bran flakes, and bacon; her least favourites are broccoli, chocolate, and cheeseburgers.
- Subverted: Alice tastes broccoli - and likes it.
- Alice decides to start eating healthy and eats the mice from the nearby nuclear power plant, Alice understandably gets sick
- Double Subverted: Alice can't handle the aftertaste.
- Justified: The body likes the taste of what it's accustomed to. Alice eats fast food on a daily basis - and health food only at gunpoint.
- Alice's mother used to have two specialities - dry chicken with vegetables boiled grey and bitter, and banoffee pie. Alice learned that healthy stuff tastes awful, and swore off it for life.
- Inverted: Junk food tastes like "cardboard and shame".
- If it tastes good, it's bad for you; the tastiest dish Alice ever had was banana pudding her ex-boyfriend had secretly laced with arsenic.
- Deconstructed: Alice's boyfriend is eternally frustrated at how picky an eater she is, and nags her that she's harming her body. She develops a heart condition from never eating healthy food, and eventually has a minor heart attack.
- Reconstructed: Alice determines to cut down to eating the really unhealthy stuff only in moderation. Her boyfriend takes her on a cordon bleu cookery course, and they learn how to make food that tastes good without being unhealthy. Her favourite dish is still banoffee pie with ice cream.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice has a love-hate relationship with vegetables and tofu.
- Alice can take broccoli. As long as it's smothered in cheese sauce. But she admits she loves other vegetables... not mentioning that she specifically meant potatoes, in Chips and French Fries form.
- It's all in the preparation; Alice will hate vegetables that are cooked but will eat them raw for example.
- Alice hates the classic vegetables and some healthy things; but will regularly eat other stuff that is healthy.
- Defied: Alice determines to put her childish pickiness behind her and try to find some healthy stuff she likes.
- Enforced: "Everyone knows health food tastes like crap. Let's make that into a Running Gag."
- Lampshaded: "If it's good for me, why does it taste so unspeakably vile?"
- Played for Laughs: Alice goes into Waterfall Pukes when she tastes healthy food.
- Played for Drama: Alice is perceived as unwise and unhealthy due to her poor diet and is treated as such. She may even flat out refuse to eat it and be anorexic.
Back to If It Tastes Bad, It Must Be Good for You. And despite the taste it won't kill ya to eat a salad once in a while.