Oh, please. Are you a cannibal? If not, it’s probably for moral reasons.
Vegetarians and vegans just have a different moral system influencing their diets.
Daniel
The FDA doesn’t consider white chocolate to actually be chocolate - from this site:
Is that food snobby enough for ya? 
Heathen! EVERYBODY knows you eat blackened hot dogs with yellow mustard, preferrably the store brand. 
I like sushi just fine but I don’t quite understand the “my steak is rarer than your steak therefore you suck” mentality. I like a medium rare steak, meaning warm all the way through with a medium to dark pink center, not cold, not dark red, not dripping blood. Rare may be the most tender but if I can’t eat it that way then it really doesn’t matter.
Make that medium to medium rare.
Hot dogs are angel poop.
And, it’s one of two applications where the “yellow paint” is superior to fancy mustard. The other is a baloney sandwich with white bread.
A point my ex-girlfriend made numerous times. She delighted in pointing out that what I was eating was somehow counterfeit delicious. That it was somehow “illegal” to enjoy it.
Please.
I’d have sex with a diseased yak if there were white chocolate involved.
Hell, yes I’m a food and drink snob, and a pretty vocal one at that. Although it does make me have to hide my corn-dog habit…
All part of the full-service abuse I offer to regular customers.
In all fairness, featherlou, not all vegetarians feel the need to lecture carnivores on the evils of their diets. Takes Left Hand of Dorkness, for instance. I have never seen the man so much as breathe an intimation that other people might be wrong for eating meat. Overall, I’d say veggies pontificate on the eating habits of others in the roughly the same proportion as low-carbers, low-fat dieters, beer snobs, spice snobs, etc.
I pretty much ignore the lot of them. I kind of have to, since quite a lot of my food preferences fall into the category that would simply appal food snobs. I’ve tried most of the things people get whipped up about, but in a lot of case I think the cheap crap tastes better. Yes, I’ve cooked with real butter. I’m not real wild about the flavor, thank you. Yes, I’ve had 100% real maple syrup. I just think Aunt Jemima tastes better. Yes, I’ve made my own fresh whipped cream. Frankly, it’s not any better than CoolWhip, so the trouble and expense are just wasted. Yes, I’ve had straight bourbon with a splash of water. I’d rather mix it with something strongly flavored to cover up the vile, overpowering alcohol taste, so that I can actually taste the stuff that makes bourbon good. With tea, I want sugar in it to cover up the bitter flavor from the tannins, so I can enjoy the flavors of the tea. Yes, I can taste the tea over the sugar. If you cannot, I’d suggest brewing your tea a bit stronger.
I don’t mind people poking fun at me about these preferences. Provided that’s all it is. If it’s wink wink, nudge nudge type stuff it’s no biggie. But real horrified protestations at the things I eat, or real pontificating on how incredibly superior your preferences are…that’s going to get you slapped shitless.
I do like better beers, though, and I don’t think refusing to “swill a brewski” out of the communal pitcher of Bud makes me a snob. I think the flavor is just vile, and I’m not going to waste my time, money, or calorie intake eating/drinking stuff I think is vile. That’s just insane.
I’ll have to agree with this basically. But…
I’m sorry, this is, well, stupid. I mean, if you like eating hot stuff, fine. And I’ve tried hot stuff, because I pretty much try anything once. But to have tried it and not liked it, that has nothing to do with not being adventurous, or being a “mamma’s boy.” I mean, banging my head repeatedly against the wall will give me an endorphin rush. Does that mean that I’m a wuss and unadventurous because I won’t injure myself for the natural high? If you find banging your head against the wall is worth the pain for you, by all means continue. But if I’ve banged my head against the wall and found the high didn’t balance out the pain for me and I don’t want to try it again, that doesn’t make me unadventurous. It makes me rational.
Really, I agree with your basic point. I usually find that people who will never try anything unusual or outside their comfort zone aren’t going to be people I click with. But like I said, if someone’s tried it and found they don’t like it I consider them reasonable for not wasting their time subjecting themselves to something they don’t like, not unadventurous or timid. After all, life’s too short to continue forcing myself to eat wings that I know will make my tongue blister when I could be trying something else I might like better.
I’ll admit it, I’m a food snob. But I would never say anything bad about what someone else is eating. That’s just not right.
I do have a sense of unease about the Tastebud Zombies, however. That’s those people out there who just seem to be absolutely clueless about food. All I can figure is that they can’t really taste it, so it doesn’t matter to them - thus the term Tastebud Zombies. Their tastebuds must just not work they way mine do.
Examples:
My ex-in-laws, who would insist we come for Thanksgiving or Christmas most years. One Thanksgiving ex father-in-law made it a point to brag about how inexpensive the turkey was - six or eight cents a pound if I remember correctly. He kept saying “It sure doesn’t taste like it cost six cents a pound!” and I kept thinking “Yup, you’re right. It tastes like someone ought to have paid you to haul this damn thing away.” It was dry and tasteless. A turkey TV dinner tastes better.
Even on the years where they paid a normal amount of money for the turkey, it was inevitably served with canned sweet potatoes with different colored mini marshmallows on top. the cheapest store-bought pumpkin pie they could find, and (if we were lucky) wine from a jug that was stored in their basement for who-knows-how-long. They didn’t drink much, but kept this jug around for when drinkers came by. It was a screw top, and they’d just screw the top back on and stow it behind the overflow in the basement fridge.
Does it make me snob to think this way? Probably. But I never was anything but polite to their faces. I just can’t imagine, when you’re going through all the work of making a holiday dinner, why you wouldn’t take an extra 20 or 30 minutes and spend the time to find out how to make things actually taste good.
Tastebud Zombies, I tell ya.
My bad - I should have said “the vocal, in-your-face vegetarians/vegans”. I don’t care what other people eat or don’t eat, and I expect the same courtesy in return.
I don’t think Trunk was expressing his own machismo with that statement, I think he was simply expressing why some people are hot snobs. And I think it’s a valid observation. Yes, macho hot snobbery is stupid, but widespread and oh-so-easy to fall into. Just a few years ago I picked up the gauntlet that a friend threw down in a Mexican restaurant. I could out-hot him, I claimed. Minutes later I was spitting out the blacked dust of what used to be my tongue. A shame, really, because the very expensive shrimp that I never ate looked delicious.
I have high blood pressure, and dark chocolate has zero sodium (unlike milk), so that’ll often be a reason for the preference.
Trust me, even if it looks like white chocolate, it probably isn’t.
ITA. When I worked in a coffee shop, there was a woman who would get a mocha (with all the chocolate) and insist on a full shot of toffee and another full shot of caramel be stirred into it. And then she put whipped cream on it. She insisted that she loved coffee (and couldn’t understand why her diets never worked).
I read (in Mean Genes) that there is a correlation between a love of spicy foods and a risk-taking personality. However, there is also a lot of evidence that these people aren’t really enduring more pain, as they have less-sensitive taste buds and fewer epinephrine (I think) receptors in their brains.
So people like me, who don’t 't believe that eating should involve pain and are blessed with overdeveloped taste buds, have to put up with you numb-mouths judging us by our food choices. So yes, I will point my finger and yell “food snob!” in your general direction. And note that you are missing out on some seriously cool people.
Tastebud Zombies. Good term.
My girlfriend calls it the food equivelent of being tone deaf. It descibes her step-daughters to a tee. They don’t bother to apply fancy-schmancy gourmet additives to their food. You know, things like salt.
I’m a food snob, but this does not mean I only like snobby food, nor am I picky. I will eat absolutely anything put in front of me. I have never turned down a free meal.
I’m equally at home with bacon, lard, and onions as I am with goose liver, truffles, and caviar. I can’t afford to eat the latter most of the time (except goose liver. In Hungary it was absurdly cheap and yummy) but I really do love it.
However, I’ve always harbored this theory that people in America have forgotten what food is supposed to taste like. There’s so much mediocre and overpriced crap on the market. I mean, look at the shit bread most of us eat. The margarine spreads we use. The processed bologna meat. Sure, once in a while it’s nice comfort food. But it simply amazed me the first time I was abroad by myself and actually enjoyed a baguette and butter. It was literally an epiphany to me: I remember it to this very day. I was in a cheap hotel in Paris waking up to a continental breakfast. Everybody knows continental breakfasts. They suck. Stale cereal, burnt toast, old cold cuts. With absolutely no anticipation, I buttered my warm baguette and stuffed it in my mouth. I saw God. I could not believe how freaking awesome buttered bread could be.
I mean, it saddens me. Most people don’t seem to know what bread and butter really should taste like, and I’d like to spread my love for those simple ingredients. Because with the right care, they’re heavenly. And the produce in supermarkets here…argh. I can’t believe people eat those flavorless, pale greenhouse tomatoes. Drives me nuts to think some people might actually think tomatoes are supposed to taste like that. And then they don’t understand why their homemade tomato sauce tastes like pink water and they resort to that awful (IMHO) Ragu. I’ll eat it occassionally when I’m lazy, but Ragu, Prego, and its ilk taste nothing like what tomatoe sauce should taste like. Namely, fresh tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, maybe basil.
I suppose it depends on what your relationship with food is. For me, it’s to be savored. It’s utility and necessity are secondary to me. I’d rather pay more and eat less of something whose quality is superior than the other way around. And, frankly, since I love cooking and tend an extensive herb garden, I could usually eat better and pay less. I can’t bring myself to buy a TV dinner, because they’re so freaking expensive. I could make twice the amount at infinite quality if I cook it myself.
Are you happy that Jeffrey Dahmer was thrown in prison? If so, you do care about what other people eat–you just base your cares on a different morality.
Daniel
How 'bout this: I am both a food snob and a timid, picky eater. My mother was a very bold cook and I ate more weird things as a child than most kids ever encounter - very few of which I liked, many of which I got to see again thanks to the wonders of reverse peristalsis. It made me downright suspicious of food. Now that I’m all grown up, I like having my preferences set in stone, and I don’t understand people who will put just anything into their mouths. Also, since I AM so picky, if I like something, it must be good the way I like it, right? Thus automatically rendering all things made differently “bad”.
All that said, my diet has become increasingly boring over the years, so I’m starting to venture into new food options.
<Pitr> Da, Sushi, she is food of gods </Pitr>
thanks for making me hungry for sushi now, UrbanChic… :rolleyes: 
Oh, God, stop that.
Mr. e. would rather have the fake crap than real, honest-to-goodness-dark grade maple syrup. I’m hoping that when the kids come along, they inherit my preference for the good stuff and we’ll outnumber him when it’s grocery-shopping time!
Right now, we just alternate. We’ve been on the same bottle of Log Cabin for two months.
E.