That’s probably the part a foodie can’t understand. Painting? It’s just some colors on a piece of fabric. Sex? It’s just moving back and forth, sweating a lot and then you get a baby.
We only have one Indian restraunt (and passable but overpriced new Sri Lankan place) but I can rank all 45 taquerias. And I used to walk two miles across town every Wednesday for samosas at the farmer’s market. I consider one of the advantages of living in such a small town the fact that I can try each new restaurant when it opens.
I’m a picky eater. I also have a lot of sensitivities to foods - before one of the assholes jumps in and says “Oooh, what’s a sensitivity now? I can’t eat that, I’m too sensitive”, I mean that I am not allergic (I don’t get hives or swell up and die) but I get very bad stomach upsets that can last for days or weeks from eating things like tomatoes, chilli, citrus fruits. Note that I actually love tomatoes and lemons and struggle to give them up, this isn’t about foods I don’t like. So, keeping that in mind, here is an actual conversation with my mother in law over dinner one night. Subject: Baked beans (falls into both catagories - I don’t like baked beans, but the fact that they are in tomato sauce puts them into the list of foods that I must avoid to stay healthy)
MIL: Mmmm! These baked beans are so good. Carol, you don’t have any. I’ll get you some.
Me (politely): No thank you.
MIL: Oh, you’ve got to try them! They’re so nice!
Me (politely): No thank you.
MIL: Here, just have a taste (holds spoonful out)
Me (anxiously): No thank you
MIL: Go on! Taste them!
Me (starting to get destressed): Really, no thank you.
MIL: Just have a taste!
FIL: She can’t. She’s can’t eat tomatoes, remember?
MIL: Oh. Right.
But according to half the people here, this makes me the jerk, right?
I find both my pickiness and my sensitivities embarassing and I try very hard to avoid situations where it will be a problem. I feel like I try hard not to ruin everyone else’s meal but it’s so hard for me to manage to find things to eat. I do eat a lot of things I don’t like. MIL loved having SIL’s birthday parties at Pizza Hut and I’d eat pasta, the Carbonara, even though I don’t particularly care for it rather than complain. For a long time, I’d eat Chinese food with everyone else even though I always felt really unwell afterwards but one day I had a major reaction to it… my face was so itchy that I wanted to scratch the skin off, I was gulping water by the bucketload because my mouth was so dry, my tongue and gums were numb, I had a raging headache. It took more than 24 hours to pass and I had to go home early from work because I couldn’t concentrate. Ever since, I’ve had an aversion to Chinese food. I can’t even think about eating it again, I can’t face the thought of it. Now my husband complains about that and says he wishes I’d give it another go. Well, I wish he could experience the reaction I had! Then perhaps he’d understand why I cannot even stand the smell of it even though I used to love it. He puts me on the spot sometimes when we’re hanging out with people. He’ll say “Hey, why don’t we go grab a bite to eat? You know what I’m in the mood for? Chinese!” and everyone usually says “Yeah! That’s a great idea” and then he turns to look at me and I have to say “You guys get Chinese, I’ll grab something else” and I HATE THAT SO MUCH. I hate being the odd one out, the one who has to shoot down everyone’s plans, the one who is so hard to please and I hate that people treat my food problems as though it’s something I’ve chosen and carry on about it. I hate that people can’t be content to grab their Chinese takeout while I duck into the fish and chip shop next door and get my dinner, they have to comment on it and make a fuss about it.
Yeah, I’m picky too and some of the things I won’t eat are because I just hate them and not because I get sick from them, but people can’t even respect that I have an illness and need to avoid things because of it, they ridicule me about being picky for not eating pizza when I don’t think it’s picky to want to avoid diarrhea, severe cramping and heartburn. Besides, a lot of the foods I avoid are out of fear of the unknown because I might get sick and I am afraid of that. I hate the way people treat you like dirt because, for reasons of your own, you don’t want to eat certain foods, and the way people act like you’re a prima donna for vetoing a resturant that you know isn’t going to have anything for you, yet they won’t just let you go your own way without comment. Recently we were invited to a bbq with friends. When we got there they told us they had changed their minds and promised their kids that they could have Pizza Hut pizza for dinner. I didn’t have any money on me so I couldn’t afford to buy something else and I had work the next day so I could afford to risk a stomach upset so I said “No. I’m not eating pizza. I’ve got to work tomorrow”. They know about my problems so this wasn’t news to them. Anyway, the husband said “That’s ok, we can grab something else for you on the way to grab the pizza” but the wife said “No. We’re not making two stops. We’ll all have something else. I’ll tell the kids they can’t have pizza after all.” I can’t tell you how bad I was made to feel by their lack of understanding and for being the bad guy to their kids, not to mention how much I resented putting me on the spot where I had to either grin and bear it or speak up and draw attention to myself. I wouldn’t have gone if I’d known ahead of time and I feel bad that I was so blunt about it but, being unwell, tired and stressed out, I hit panic mode when I realised they’d changed dinner plans without mentioning it despite knowing my food history. In a nutshell, I didn’t think they’d do that to me. We ended up rescheduling.
After reading through this thread, I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that the term foodie is, in fact, an exact synonym for complete fucking asshole. I’m look squarely at you, Dio, Shagnasty and others. The level of vitriol being displayed here is, frankly, disgusting. Calling people “pussies”, and worse, just because they don’t want to eat things they don’t like? Holy fuck! Get some perspective, fer Chrissakes.
Wankers.
The same thing happened to me. I liked chinese food, but once I got a slight food poisoning after eating “5 flavours tripes” in a chinese restaurant. For something like two years after that, I refused to go to chinese restaurants. For possibly 5 years, I didn’t eat tripes in any form or shape. And for say, 10 years I couldn’t bear one of the spices (I always forget its name) sometimes used in chinese and indian recipes (one of the “5 flavours”). Though now I can eat it, I still don’t like any dish containing it. I don’t have any more any issue with tripes or chinese food, though.
YES! YES! YES! You described it so well! That’s exactly what gets my goat about PIA picky eaters. It’s a combination of the inconvenience and the snobbery/opinionation of the whole thing. I couldn’t care less what people eat on their own, but when they start acting like that, it bugs me.
And… for what it’s worth, seafood is one of my favorite things, and I’ve had several people act the same way about it that the PIA person in ** FaerieBeth’s ** story did about the nuts in the salad. Irritated me something fierce, and made me a bit touchy about that particular subject, especially when some of them went on to eat shrimp later.
There are people in the world that like a few specific foods, perhaps a dozen dishes, and are not interested in expanding that number of foods. They enjoy, are nourished, and are comforted by those dozen dishes. They do not want new foods. They actively dislike new foods, and the thing they don’t like about those new foods is the fact that they are new.
These people are not dysfunctional in some way. They are not antisocial, immature, cowardly, or self-indulgent. They just like food for different reasons than those who find food to be an adventure in sensual self-gratification. Food is comfort, familiarity, and an expression of homeostasis. No, thank you, they don’t want to try the Pickled Duck Web. No, they haven’t ever had it. They don’t want it precisely because they never had it. And in fifty years, when they die never having tasted it, they won’t feel badly about that.
Now, if that bothers you, it is you who have an emotional problem with food, not them. If you can’t just shut the fuck up, and eat your Pickled Duck Web, then you are a rude asshole. No, thank you means no, thank you. Asking again is pushy. Doing more than asking twice is an expression of your dysfunctional need to be controlling, and has nothing to do with their socialization, or diet.
A diet that comes with an agenda is not a diet. Folks eating vegetables aren’t the reason that vegetarians get grief. It’s folks talking about my hamburger like I was a murderer that get vegetarians a bad rep. And it’s folks who try to sneak meat into the vegetarians’ food that make them feel like they have to defend themselves at the table. Shut up and eat your tofu, and keep your burger on your plate.
When you are planning to spend an entire day cooking exotic dishes from far away lands, perhaps you should spend a few minutes considering your guests individually. Perhaps the “Adventures in Cooking” group might be best served that day, and the boiled potatoes, and plain lettuce salad crowd can come to lunch another day. Being a host is an art, too.
Now, I won’t pretend for a moment that there are not a few people who will try to use their diet preferences to play center of the crowd games at restaurant choosing time. There are some. And you decide for yourself to go along with their limits, or suggest that the crowd go to the popular choice, and let the drama dieter deal with it. Eventually, you invite and accept invitations from folks who share your interests. You can do all of it without being mean, or rude. But you have to accept that what you love makes some folks gag to even think about it.
Me, I don’t eat beets. Yes, I have tasted beets. I happen to be able to cook beets that beet lovers rave about. Folks love to eat my beets, and come back for seconds. Great. I hate the nasty little red bastards. I hated them as an infant, as a child, as an adult, and now I hate them as an old man. I don’t eat beets. I love mushrooms. I like them with almost anything, and all by themselves. But, about ten years ago, I started getting this really annoying reaction to them. I barf about half an hour after eating them. Man, I hate that, 'cause I really love mushrooms. But I hate barfing a lot more. So, now I don’t eat mushrooms, or beets.
If you try to force me to eat mushrooms at your house, watch out. I might just eat them. I do like them, and this time, you’re gonna have to clean up, cause it’s your house. I ain’t gonna eat the beets, though.
Tris
“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.” ~ H. L. Mencken ~
Tris, I non-sexually love you.
My husband is a ‘selective’ eater. Me, I’ll eat dang near anything. Mind you, I have an abominably poor ability to taste - or smell - anything, but I’ll eat it if it’s food. He…won’t. And I don’t understand it. I gave up cooking for him, pretty much, within a year of our marriage. I buy food, he cooks for himself. It works fine. People have asked me how I can stand it. They say “I wouldn’t put up with it for a minute!” My own parents have yelled at me because he wouldn’t eat whatever mom happened to throw together that night for dinner - he didn’t complain, he just politely declined to eat. Dad said it was insufferably rude for him not to eat, and that his mother should’ve forced him to eat things he despised as a kid. Yeah, that’d have really learned him. (Dad used to force us to eat things - liver, brussels sprouts, and for my brother it was cooked carrots. I guarantee you that my brother doesn’t eat them today as an adult, and being forced to gag them down as a child did not teach him to eat them.)
My husband, on the other hand, loves to listen to any sort of music, a lot of which makes me want to run screaming out the front door because it grates on my nerves like fingernails on a blackboard. He learned, early in our marriage, to wear headphones. He doesn’t understand it, but he accepts it. Why does the music bother me? I don’t know, but if I have to leave my own house to escape it, there’s something wrong. Why doesn’t he like food? I don’t know, but if it makes him experience a recoil similar to the one I feel when I must wash dishes by hand, with all those little disgusting bits of things floating around in the water…there’s something wrong if I insist he eats it.
I don’t understand. But I do accept. It makes dinner time awkward sometimes. We’ve learned to work around it. And he tends to eat before visiting my parents, so he can say “No thanks, I already ate.” And my parents have learned to ask “What does he enjoy?” when they invite us over.
It’s called accommodation, folks, and it works both ways.
Just for the record mate, (assuming I am being lumped in as “and others”), I gave the example of a PEANUT BUTTER FUCKING SANDWICH in my first post. Not Sudanese monkey testicles in brine. Hardly “foodie” stuff. I find food snobs and “picky eaters” equally offensive.
I forget who asked me what I thought guacamole was made from. They asked out of “curiosity” and I hate to leave them unsatisfied.
At the age of 14, which was when I first had the stuff, I had no fucking idea what it was made from. Afterward when I was rolling around in pain, I pretty much figured out it was made from avocados. I’m very sensitive to them – if the kitchen puts a slice on a sandwich and I remove it before eating, I will still get the same reaction.
As to why no one warned me, well, it was with friends and I got something from Taco Bell (shudder – talk about Foodie Hell) that had avocado in it and the putrid green color wasn’t noticeable, being in a burrito.
Has anyone in this thread besides the picky eaters given one of these mythical monkey testicles example? No, us grown up diners have all recalled a third wheel balking at mundane fare like fried mushrooms or walnuts on chicken. Stop trying to put words in our mouths, you people.
As I mentioned before, I only have a problem with peanuts. It’s not a taste thing - peanuts irritate the lining of my stomach, so I avoid them.
I have two friends, though, who can’'t eat tomatoes. One because of health reasons, and the other because they are just out-and-out not liked. Me, I love ‘em. Always have, right from a nipper. But I bear in mind my friends’ tastes, because everyone is different, and not everyone goes to great lengths to conform just to fit into society that little bit more.
Food tragedy is my brother. Kid was the pickiest eater on the planet until puberty. Me, I’m a picky eater (still), but I could at least muddle through with the meals my parents had. My brother did his own meals, because he couldn’t even be coerced to eat the food everyone else was having. Anyway, my brother turns into a tremendous foodie after the chrysalis of his hormone haze, loves the stuff, experimental, an excellent cook . . . and is then diagnosed with Celiac’s after losing thirty or so pounds because his digestive tract quit on him at the age of twenty. (He’s got meds now and knows what he can eat safely, and has regained some weight so he no longer looks like an animated skeleton, thank the gods.) Of all the people whose restricted diets are worthy of pity or sympathy, he deserves it a hell of a lot more than I do; he’s got a genuine sad story.
Triskadecamus has a lot of my pickiness down there; I’m a neophobe, and more so when dealing with fundamental stuff, y’know, food, housing, that kind of thing. I work on this, though, because I spend a lot of time in subcultures that value newstuff. And every so often I’ll work my way up to feeling brave and (in the company of a trusted friend familiar with the foodstuffs in question) will go try something new. I tend to refer to this as “being introduced politely”. So my range of the acceptable expands slowly over time, but not when pressured.
The only type of restaurant I can think of that I’ll veto straight out is Thai; this is because I have an honest-to-god you-are-forbidden-to-consume-peanuts-on-pain-of-possible-death allergy rather than because of my pickiness. Most other places there are things I can eat, usually through this process of polite introduction, even if, on the whole, I don’t care for the genre. (But not always; my default restaurant if given a choice on the matter is Chinese, and I both have a wider variety of Chinese dishes that I know I like and am more likely to try a new one than most anywhere else.)
It’s worth noting that a fair number of food aversions are set in childhood; partially this is a limiting of the palate to what is familiar, but that can be overcome with polite introduction. I’ve heard, though, that a case of food poisoning or even a similar illness can permanently (or near-permanently) toggle something from “food” to “not food” by triggering the “this is poison/dangerous to the body” reactions. (This is my best theory about why I stopped eating fish as a small child; I was too young to have any surviving memory of it, though. I’m told I used to love it; these days, ‘smells like fish’ is enough to move something right into the not-food category for me. But I can find things I’ll eat at a sushi bar – now that I’ve been politely introduced.)
Personally, I’m familiar with the issues of food restrictions, both with my own life and among my friends – which include people with religious restrictions and medical restrictions (including some very strange and particular ones, like the nasty enzyme-related reaction to raw fruit or the fellow who’s gluten- and lactose-intolerant and allergic to soy) as well as vegetarians and people with just plain “I don’t like that stuff” issues. If I’m inviting people over to my place and intend to feed them, I consider it my obligation as a host to provide something for everyone coming. I have, at times, solicited recipes to be sure of being able to do this (and my friend who keeps kosher was kind enough to tell me that the food I was providing for the strict vegetarians would be sufficient to his needs). If there isn’t something available for everyone to eat, I failed as a host; I’ve never had a problem with this being deemed insufficiently satisfying, but if I did, I would consider it only reasonable to not inflict my clearly limited cooking capabilities on them again in the future.
I fall into the category of foodie, apparently (this only became evident to me when I found out it isn’t normal to have something like 50% of your christmas presents come from Williams Sonoma. Who knew!?) and I find the attacks on people who are selective eaters to be horrible.
People are not “pussies” just because they are not interested in experiencing a broader range of food, OR because they happen to already have selective likes and dislikes.
And acting like people are making it up when they say the gag or find it physically unpleasant to eat particular foods is pretty lacking in empathy and I wish that everyone who has made nasty comments about it being psychosomatic could sit down and experience the joy of having a taste or texture in their mouth that makes them feel like they are going to hurl at the table. It is NOT pleasant.
I will try most foods, and I have adapted my palate to a much wider range of tastes than I had as a child but there are certainly still tastes and textures I find physically unpleasant to the extent that I will avoid eating them - preferably with minimal fuss possible. I’m not going to sit around going “ew, gross, how can you eat that?” but I reserve the right as an adult member of society wealthy enough to allow me to make food choices, to decide precisely what does and does not go into my mouth.
Are we going to call people with sensitive hearing pussies because they don’t want to sit through an industrial noise music concert? Are people who don’t care to try the biggest rollercoaster at six-flags somehow babies with psychosomatic reasons they don’t want to join in the fun? We are mostly lucky enough to be able to choose what we eat, and belittling people for making different choices from you just is just plain rude. And I’ve been poor enough not to be able to make a choice about what I ate, and have choked down food I found revolting, and I cannot see why on earth I’d want to insist that someone who has a choice in the matter does so.
On the note about foodies getting saddened at people who won’t broaden their horizons - sure, I can see the comparison to literature or film, but then we all have to rub along in this world as best we can, and getting hyperemotional about what someone else chooses to eat or not to eat just seems like a massive waste of energy that could be better used expanding my own food horizons.
To me, they don’t all taste the same, but they all taste fishy. Each type of seafood has its own unique elements of flavor also, but it also has a fishy taste on top of that. “Fishy” is a non-obscure English word that means “tastes or smells like fish,” which implies to me that I’m not crazy for thinking that most animals that live in the water share a certain taste in common.
Depending on the type of seafood, and how it’s prepared, the fishy taste can be more or less prevalent, but it’s usually present to some degree. If you don’t like that taste, you won’t like fish.
I’m not wild about it myself, though I enjoy certain types of seafood because either the fishy taste is more subtle, or because I like the other flavors in the seafood enough to put up with the fishy taste.
Sea foods can taste pretty much the same to me as well. And there was a time when they all tasted – well, tasteless. In a family who loved to get a piece of hoki and chips, I was the odd one out. But I didn’t force myself to learn to like fish. In adulthood, I discovered it had a taste, so now I do like it.
I remember when I rebelled against eating liver. I was a kid, and after enduring the stuff for ages, I asked my grandmother why I had to eat it. And then asked my mum if she liked liver as well (I kind of had in mind that I was so like my Mum, the aversion to liver might be the same). As it was, I was right. Mum had been eating cooked liver all that time, just to conform. She admitted she’d never liked it. We never ate liver in the household again. I don’t think anyone’s served up liver to me since, although I don’t publicise the distaste.
This is the first post in this thread that really made me smile.
I am SO a food slut. Not a foodie, I think, because I’m just as happy with Doritos and sour cream dip as I am with something gourmet…but “food slut” is such a GREAT term. Thank you, **jayjay[/].
Okay. here on the 5th page I’m going to abandon George Carlin and pick up Miss Manners.
Miss Manners doesn’t have anything against picky eaters or foodies, so long as they are polite. She lumps the rude variety of both together under the umbrella of ‘food fussers.’ Food Fussers are rude, whether from the foodie side, or the picky eater side. A Food Fusser is someone who makes the food more important than the occasion. What you eat at home by yourself is nobody’s business, but when eating out with friends, or dining at a friend’s home, the company is supposed to be more important than the menu. And this applies to both the guests and the host.
This means that the host is not supposed to embarrass a guests by even noticing what he eats and what he leaves – and most certainly a good host never presses a guest to ‘try just a bite’ or attempts to manipulate a guest by saying, ‘but I made it just for you’ or ‘I worked on this meal all day.’ Nor should a host ever put some pyscho-babble spin on their guest’s eating habits – IE: “Food is my greatest passion and it breaks my heart to see someone so unwilling to experience it as I do.” You are supposed to be more passionate about your guest’s comfort than their ‘palate’ and this means leaving them to eat what they want unmolested. A particularly loathesome spin a Food Fussing host can put on their guest’s is the but-children-in-Africa-are-starving spin – what a way to make a guest feel valued, by slapping a 3rd-world children guilt trip on them!
The other side of Food Fussing is what I’ve mentioned in my previous thread – the picky eater side. He has veto power over every restaurant; he feels free to carp and moan over food others have prepared to serve him, or over food that others are eating in front of him – 'That’s so NASTY! How can you eat that! – and every restaraunt meal (even when he’s picked the place) becomes his personal performance-art piece featuring his ‘food issues’ – he wants a chicken salad sandwich with no onion, no celery, and no mayonaiise, and it matters not that they make up their chicken salad by the vat earlier in the day. Somebody needs to rinse off a blob of chicken salad and remake it without the icky bits because he wants chicken salad made the way he wants it and it doesn’t matter to him that it slows up the service and pisses off the waitress.
The distinguishing feature of a Food Fusser is that Every Meal Is All About Him. And that’s rude.
Food slut… I like it. I think I’ll steal it.
Yep, I’m a food slut. I love trying new foods.
Funny thing is, I was the pickiest eater as a child. I disliked more or less everything except a few select courses, and there were many things that I simply would not eat, come hell or high water. It was hellish. Eating wasn’t fun for me; it was something I dreaded.
I’m one of the lucky ones, as I grew out of it. On the list of stuff I just couldn’t eat as a child and now love is mustard, horseradish, herring, many kinds of fish, mushrooms (this didn’t have anything to do with the taste though; ask me about this horror story sometime) and onions. I love them all now, especially mustard and mushrooms, but once I couldn’t get them past my lips.
I have a few real hates left, too. There is just no way in heaven or on Earth that I can eat peas, broccoli or olives. I tried an olive at my in-laws’ place a few months ago, just in case I had outgrown hating them. Uh-uh. I tried me darnedest, but I just couldn’t do it. As for broccoli, I can eat it raw, but cooked broccoli makes me gag. I haven’t tried a pea in fifteen years, but the smell of them makes me gag so I’m not too eager to try them.