[QUOTE=Kairos]
So, what would you like picky people like your brother-in-law and me to do? Choke down food we hate? Risk throwing up on the table because we’re forcing ourselves to eat food we don’t like? How can we make the situation better?
I don’t want to sound snarky, but seriously…what would you have us do? I’m not speaking for anyone else, but personally, I’m not a picky eater because I like to be a pain in the ass. I’m a picky eater because the taste and texture of a lot of foods makes me feel physically ill
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The more I think about it, the more I think there are two distinct types of picky eaters:
Type I: Have an aversion to some specific ingredient in foods (may be because of taste or texture), but are willing to try unfamiliar cuisines, as long as they don’t contain the particular ingredient they don’t like.
Type II: Unwilling to try unfamiliar cuisines, even if they like all the individual ingredients that go into a dish.
I’m a type I picky eater- there are a number of ingredients I don’t like (and some I won’t eat because they’re not kosher). I love how restaurants list pretty much everything that goes into a dish, because then I can see if it is likely to have something I don’t like. I may ask, “Does this have chicken stock?” at a restaurant, and eat it only if the answer is “no” (“I don’t know” isn’t good enough).
My parents are type IIs. We had the hardest time finding a place to eat with them when they came out for a visit last year. They only like standard American food and Italian-American food- no Thai, no Greek, definitely no sushi (you’ll get trichinosis from raw fish and also from eating unbaked cookie dough, according to my mother- yeah, whatever, Mom). They prefer chain restaurants to unknown local places, in general. Mom also claims that most Chinese restaurants have a particular smell that she finds objectionable. Mr. Neville and I very rarely go out for standard American food- for one thing, it’s a cuisine that is very likely to contain non-kosher ingredients, and also there are so many good ethnic restaurants around us. We try to accommodate them, because we do love them, but we can’t stand more than about two weeks of it (and we’re likely to send them out on their own at least one night of that, so we can get some more interesting food). The night after they left, we went out for sushi.
I don’t think they’re type I picky- they don’t seem to object to any particular ingredients. Their food pickiness seems to me to be fundamentally different from mine. I’m quite willing (and generally eager) to try an unfamiliar cuisine, as long as I can determine that a dish doesn’t have anything I don’t like in it.
I suppose a type I picky eater could dislike a particular cuisine if they disliked some characteristic spices that go into it, or something like that. But I think someone who says they “don’t like Indian food” is more likely to be a different kind of picky eater.
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