I stopped eating cheese at around 4 or 5 years of age. I just stopped liking it one day and started hating it instead. When I turned 25 I began eating pizza as an experiment, and had no problems with it, but still many years later I do avoid cheese and other dairy products in most situations. I suspect it might have something to do with lactose intolerance, but I have never attempted to verify this.

It seriously bothers me that I can’t bring myself to like cheese, but I literally just can’t — except for a handful of places where it doesn’t bother me.

As an example: At a food science exhibit about the interaction between senses, I tried biting on a cube of fairly mild cheddar while sniffing at a vial of onion aroma. Cheese and onion? No issue! However, literally as soon as I moved the vial away from my nose and I got the leftover cheese flavour alone, I started gagging and retching. As a foodie this bothers me to no end, but I just can’t do it.

My kids eat “cheese” pizza because I said it had no cheese in it.

Sounds like my sister. She never got over it. Still hates cheese. Eats many things with cheese in it, unless the cheese is extremely prominent. She'll eat a pepperoni and cheese pizza, but not a straight up cheese pizza for example.

I'd be tempted to make her sausage pizza every time she came over and just slowly reduce the amount of sausage on it ever time... (or mini-pepperoni - the important thing is that it's small).

There's a lot of different kinds of cheese. Some are garbage, some are the nicest thing in the world. Maybe she just hates one particular cheese and generalized?

Might not even be a cheese, but how it's prepared. I have a strong aversion (often triggering a gag reflex) with gooey/melted cheese, but almost any other consistency is fine.

Pizza, for example, I cook until the cheese is browned and no longer gooey.

It's so much easier to just say I don't like cheese than try to explain this to people. Too many will cook it gooey then tell me "this way it's not burnt"...