I’m watching this 27 year old Gawker journalisteat a bunch of common foods for the first time and give pronouncements. I watch these little snippets and find I can generate no sympathy for his attitude, and in fact his dismissive judgments of a lot of good foods as “gross” etc. is … quite irritating. I’m thinking “What kind of a fucking man child are you not to have tried these foods?” with each of these little precious judgments.
I know this is wrong. People have every right to their own taste opinions, but there is just something viscerally rankling about his attitude. Picky eaters on the dope have explained logically and politely how their sensory impressions of foods are not the same as most peoples and that’s perfectly fair.
But still… my brow furrows with each video. I can’t help myself.
Different people have different tastes at different points in their lives. That said, I’ve yet to see a poor person who’s a picky eater. Picky eaters should be grateful both that they can afford to be picky and that they live somewhere where there is the variety of food available. And I’m including those - like me - who are or were picky for medical reasons.
I watched a couple of those videos, and they went like this:
I’ve never had X, but just from looking at it I assume it’s really gross. So I tasted it, and yeah, it was really gross. Now let me think of things to say about it to justify my pre-formed opinion.
He seems to be doing a fine job of gathering page views. Which is all that matters. To him.
Picky eating is not a topic I’m willing to take any stand on around here. I’ve seen the hate-filled train wrecks this topic engenders. Color me invisible in that food fight. Invisible and not present.
I used to feel irritated with parents who would kowtow to picky eaters. Until my puppy got bad diarrhea for the first time, and I had water, chicken broth, beef broth and yogurt all lined up on the floor and was practically in tears when she wouldn’t touch any of it. I had to climb down from my high horse that day.
I don’t think it’s wrong to feel irritated, but I think in most cases it would be an unwise waste of energy to try to reason with a picky person. Too many reasons why they could be that way (some of which would not be irritating, if we knew what they were).
How about the reverse? I just got castigated in another thread for eating dumpster food, which was used as a premise for ridiculing my views on a totally unrelated subject…
I’ve got a sister who has always been a picky eater. People have gone to great trouble for 50 years making sure that meals include something that meets her standards, for example, peeling potatoes just for her, while the rest of us like mashed potato with the skin.
Yet while she is helping herself with great abandon to the foods that the cook has made especially for her, she just can’t help criticizing the rest of us for eating the foods we like. “Ew, peels, how can you eat that, that’s horrible!”
No, my irritation is neither ethically nor morally wrong.
You could try not watching the videos. This isn’t someone you know in real life who won’t shut up about his food preferences, you’re going out of your way to listen to a total stranger talk about this.
That’s not always true. I volunteer every week in a food bank and some of our “customers” are extremely fussy. I can’t understand it. It’s often on the tip of my tongue to say, if you are so hungry you will come to a food bank for a free handout, can’t you just eat what you are given?
You must know, then, that much of the food distributed by a food bank is horribly processed food, with very high salt content among other things. Your clients concerned about their own health and nutrition have a right to be picky. They might be better off going hungry, than eating a box of generic mac and cheese-like substance. Or a tin of beans containing more than the RDA of sodium in a single can.
It’s probably morally wrong to be irritated by picky eaters who inconvenience nobody but themselves. Its sort of justifiable to be annoyed when the behaviour interferes with the choices of a larger group (i.e. insisting that the group can’t go to certain places), but honestly, I’ve seldom if ever encountered that first hand.
I’m not talking about the food parcels we hand out, but the free hot meal, prepared from scratch with fresh ingredients, that we also serve for those who want. They are still picky, asking for pasta with/without sauce, with/without cheese on top, no veg, this veg or that veg, refusing down the soup because it has a particular vegetable in it … it’s very disappointing when we take a lot of trouble to produce something that is both nutritious and attractive.
I don’t know how a feeling can be morally or ethically wrong. A lot of “innocent” people get on my nerves. As long as I treat them decently and don’t promote hatred for them, I should be entitled to feel however I want about them.
I think there are some picky people who are that way due to combination of an anxious personality style and lack of exposure to different tastes and textures during one’s informative years. If you are never compelled to eat outside of your comfort zone as a kid, then you’re likely not going to do so as an adult. But I believe there are other picky people who simply have an ultra-sensitive sensorium. These folks are more sympathetic (to me) than the former, but I don’t know how I’d possibly tell the two apart without knowing how they were raised.
I mean, I’ve never experienced the hunger of homelessness or abject poverty. But I know how it feels to skip a couple of meals and be so hungry that I swear I could eat a horse.
But if someone offered me a horse burger while I was in that state of mind, but I knew they also had chicken or beef patties, I’d probably ask if I could for one of those instead. Maybe if there was no choice available, I’d eat the horse. But if I see the nice people behind the table accommodating other people’s wishes, well, why not ask?
