I think you’ve got this the wrong way around. When people only have access to a fairly narrow range of foods and aren’t exposed to much in the way of unfamiliar ingredients or dishes past childhood, there’s not much to be picky about. Everyone is already eating like a picky eater, sticking to diet based on a few staple food items prepared more or less the way mother used to make.
I suspect that being annoyed with picky eaters is actually a very recent phenomenon, limited to settings where an abundant quantity and variety of food is readily available. It’s only when eating a lot of different types of food is considered normal that it becomes noticeable that some people don’t like to do this.
Are you set up to serve the food as they ask? Frankly, unless you’ve got the pasta and the sauce and the cheese and the veg and the second veg and the soup all mixed together in one big pot that you simply scoop out a glop onto a plate, I don’t think that’s unreasonable at all.
People do have preferences, and I really don’t think that saying, “No, thank you” to beets on the side, or your special recipe for eggplant and chickpea soup should disappoint you. It leaves more for the people who do like it, and it doesn’t go to waste.
Ref the clip above I think it’s sorta funny that somebody named inedible knapsack claims to have an adventurous palate. With an adventurous enough palate, nothing’s inedible. Not even an old knapsack. Naming yourself to call attention to things you won’t eat seems kinda … backwards or something??
I have thought about it this way, too. Several years ago there were a lot of books about how French children are raised to eat everything. One of those books made the mistake of admitting that French cooking uses only about six different flavor boosters, though. It probably *is *easy to get children to eat a variety of vegetables, once you’ve convinced them to like vinaigrette. Let’s try sriracha, oyster sauce, or mole on that food though, and see how they react.
Well, I know my little attitude I’ve been slowly growing like a seething stalactite is definitely wrong, and not very big of me, and etc. etc., but I canNOT resist commenting here because it happened again just tonight.
I simply can’t bring myself to understand or sympathize with people to whom you serve salsa that you have gone out of your way to tone way, waaaaay down from your usual style. A salsa over which you have wistfully, and with devastating restraint, merely WAVED a jalapeno. No throwing it into the blender whole (let alone adding a second one); no cutting it open, seeding it, and then tossing it in — no, you have wistfully and with remarkable restraint stood ten feet from the blender and whispered “serrano.”
And these people you serve it to on a taco with molé chicken and Peruvian beans and Mexican sour cream – these people go RUNNING from the room, screaming for water, and tell you their mouth is on fire, it’s burning up. Dear god help me, you have irrevocably seared my flesh.
Because, on some level, it’s not about what a person puts in their mouth. If you don’t like carrots, then don’t eat carrots. I’m not going to hold your mouth open and shove carrots down your throat.
However, picky eaters often use this to exercise control and dominance over a group where such behaviors are otherwise unacceptable. It’s passive aggression at its best, and people who pull that shit with me don’t get invited out again.
I’m the Stainless Steel Rat, and I am a picky eater.
As in, I don’t eat Pizza, Chinese, most things with tomato sauce (although I love whole tomatoes) or fish except in extremis. Oh, and Mexican is right out.
Which makes me a whole lot of fun at parties.
What I have learned to do is adapt, and do my level best not to spoil others’ dining pleasures. If the group wants to eat Mexican, we’ll go there, I’ll find a salad or something on the menu I can eat, and I always take responsibility for my actions, in effect “hey, it’s me, I’m not stopping you guys from enjoying your favorite foods. It’s on me.”
And so far it seems to have worked OK, and I’ve even learned to eat a few new dishes in the last few years (I fear my planned vacation to China in 2017 may prove to be testing, however).
But always, it is on me to be polite and do my best NOT to dictate to others. And I think I have done that pretty well.
I am a fairly strong supertaster and I get crap from time to time about what I like or not.
It’s not picky eating. If it tastes really bad, I don’t want any. And if it’s something that needs to be prepared “just right” or eaten right from the oven or something, no. It’s still bad.
Note that I said “tastes really bad”. I eat a lot of stuff that’s “meh” to “I don’t think it’s going to kill me, I hope.” For example, our tap water. I’m so used to tap water being bad tasting that I don’t use the water filter thing the others in my family use. It takes too long to fill something. I can tell the difference, but it’s just another ugh thing in my book.
OTOH, you have no idea how wonderful chocolate really tastes.
Dear Other People:
It is not your job to give people crap about their taste preferences.
Whoops, Nava, you are absolutely right. I was hecka bent because nowhere in my character map could I find a font to give me a tilde “n” for spelling jalapeno. *Aha! * I thought… at least I know I can get an accented “e!”
Ah, a common gripe. Yup, that one tends to be a pain to type. The fonts common in corporate environments usually have it, as does this one, and you can type it by holding Alt while typing 164 in your numpad (alt+165 for the cap). The letter appears once you let go of Alt.
For extra fun, áíóú are 160 to 163, but I don’t know where is é hiding… (ETA: 0233 Someone couldn’t count!)
People doing it right.
The individual pickiness isn’t (or shouldn’t be) the issue. It’s using pickiness as an excuse for jerk social behavior which is, and should be, a real issue.
In a society where so much socializing revolves around food, choosing to (or needing to) take extreme dietary positions is going to have extreme consequences unless the extremist takes active measures to blunt his/her social impact on others.
Note also that this thread started out by linking to some videos by a picky eater putting his pickiness on display. “Doing it wrong” includes talking, often or at length, about how gross certain foods look or how nasty they taste, to people who don’t share your opinion and haven’t asked for it. In that case the “high level of irritation with picky eaters” is irritation with critical, negative people, particularly people who are critical and negative about something you yourself like.
But also note that, if you click on a link that says, “Watch this guy eat a banana for the first time,” his opinion on bananas cannot accurately be called unsolicited.
Sodium is not the danger it’s cracked up to be. For most adults, there’s no real danger.
This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.
Not to mention Kraft Mac &Che has only 1/4 your daily supply of sodium.
Yeah, it used to be that for a game, we’d order pizza, and yes, one might be plain cheese, another veggie (and several with meat). But now somebody thinks they are gluten intolerant (unlikely), another cant eat cheese, another tomato sauce, and so forth.
Someone couldn’t count!)