If you’re not going to eat those potatoes, can I have them?
Nice generalizing there, sven. ENFP here, and I don’t chomp down on pig snout soup or Nepalese ferret turds.
I’m probably not a picky eater per se, but more of a timid eater. My experience mirrors that of Scarlett67. The diet of my parents preferred diet was 1940s/1950s-style food, with an abundance of slimy textures that triggered my gag reflex. At family gatherings, the food remains “Lutheran”, bland, and unappealing to me; it’s like the saturated photos of 1950s cookbooks have come to life. However, I’m far more adventurous when it comes to contemporary and ethnic cuisine. I won’t dig into everything on a menu, but at most restaurants I’ll find many selections that I’ll enjoy. I’ve never been a “wet blanket” to my friends when it comes to food.
DanBlather: the food snobs are far, far worse. If it’s not esoteric, organic, free-range and trendy, it’s often something they’ll turn up their noses at. Wet blanket? The hardcore foodies are far more high-maintenance than the picky eaters, IMHO, because they’ll reject anything that seems in the least bit “pedestrian”. Why is it a sin to be a picky or timid eater, but share your stories about projectile vomiting from the sight of an Applebee’s and it’s okay for everybody to hop on the bandwagon about eeeeevil chains?
The hive mind here can be so screwed up …
I disagree with everything above. Sometimes, the rudeness of inflicting your own preferences on everyone (disrupting social situations due to one’s pickiness) might be a control issue, but being picky is not always a “statement”. I consider myself a picky eater but no one that I socialize with would even guess that, because I have manners and was taught proper etiquette and social graces.
Anyone who is using food to demonstrate control in a social situation is a boor, plain and simple. It is quite possible to dine with picky eaters, and accommodation beyond the basic courtesy level is not required of those dining with the picky eater. The people who are complaining about their dining partners’ pickiness are really complaining about the rudeness. And those who would try to dictate others’ eating habits (whether trying to broaden someone’s culinary horizons or keep the adventurous eaters’ from indulging) are far worse than someone who simply chooses not to eat certain offerings.
There is a serious problem here with confirmation bias, though. I am a moderately picky eater, but I don’t make a big deal about it. I’ve never turned down the idea of an entire cuisine or place to eat because there wasn’t anything there I could have, and if I’ve been at a party or something and there were things I didn’t want to eat, I never mentioned it, I just didn’t eat them. In a situation where it would have been rude to completely abstain, I’ve eaten things I wouldn’t normally and never said a word beyond “this is delicious”. But given a chance, I tend to be pretty monotonous in my diet and am not what anyone would call daring.
People with poor social skills tend to be pains in the ass regarding anything that matters to them. That doesn’t mean all picky eaters have poor social skills.
Picky eater speaking.
I didn’t really want to eat with you anyway.
I go to a restaurant. I order something I know I like. You might argue I could try something I haven’t tried before, but the risk / reward ratio is low. If I don’t like it, I’ve wasted money and need to order something else. If I do like it - so what? There’s no real substantive gain there.
Further, I don’t actually have to taste something to get an idea of how I might enjoy it. You can tell a lot about taste by smell and you can tell a lot about texture by sight.
New and Change and Different are not inherently good. Old and Same are not inherently bad. You eat what you want, I’ll eat what I want.
I’ll try something new very rarely, and that works out pretty well for me. The rest of the time, I’ll just have a steak, or pasta, or chicken and really enjoy my meal.
Exactly. There is a lot of poor logic in this thread.
The picky eaters that have social skills deal with situations gracefully and you don’t even realize they are picky. These are the people that have found something they like at each type of ethnic restaurant. They, like the rest of the polite world know when it is really important to eat what is on their plate and to smile while doing it.
People without social skills cause all kinds of awkwardness. The sub-set of those that are picky eaters cause awkwardness about going out to eat, thus you notice them. But the issue is their lake of social skills.
We all have a lot more interests to pursue than we have time. More crap to deal with than we have energy. If someone can’t find the time and energy to transform themselves from being a picky eater to an adventurous one, who am I to judge? It is a choice that doesn’t hurt anyone else, thus it is none of my business.
Even Sven,
As a favor to my upstairs neighbor could you please list a few meals that an American could eat and possibly find tasty in China? He is going over for two weeks for his MBA. It would be nice to give him some tips on food before he leaves. Thanks!
Picky eaters are a pain, especially to their parents. In your case with duck throats and other odd foods I would be a bit queasy myself. I am adventurous but monkey brains and birds eyes etc, I have to draw the line. I heard that Chinese food is much blander in China then in the States?
To be fair, most of the really picky eaters I know are somewhat odd. I met one guy who didn’t eat anything but hamburgers, toast, and a few other foods. He was friends with my roommates who invited him and his wife over to our place for dinner one day. I drove him to McDonald’s so he could get something for dinner. On the way there he talked about how the moon landings were faked. I realize my anecdote is just that, an anecdote. I do consider vegans to be really picky eaters and most of the ones I’ve met have been fairly odd. Of course I have to recognize that odd is relative.
Odesio
You have got to be kidding me.
For myself, I can’t tolerate seafood. None of it. I’ll cook it for my wife if I can do it out on the grill, and I will try it once in a while. I have most certainly tried it more than 7 times, so I also go against this common wisdom (that I have never heard of before). I would like to enjoy it. I don’t. In any case, I’ve never been to a seafood restaurant where I could not find something I enjoy. They always will offer a steak.
From what I’ve seen of people raising children now, picky eating is just accepted as a matter of course. Moms think nothing of making three meals every day for supper - one for the adults, and one each for the kids. I’ll be interested to see where on the pickiness scale these super-fussy children end up as adults.
I will tell him something not to eat. Don’t eat any dishes with raw vegetables in them. I did, and got traveler’s diarrhea. That meant I couldn’t do the sightseeing and shopping I had wanted to in Shanghai, because the sights were too far from a bathroom. Raw vegetables aren’t safe there because the tap water isn’t safe for tourists to drink.
The irony here is that I’m a picky eater, and most raw vegetables are something I usually avoid.
I’d like to debunk the idea that someone is a picky eater just because they don’t want to try foreign food. Sure, it would be nice if we could all try every kind of food on earth to decide what we like best but that just isn’t practical. My mom grew up on a farm and will eat stuff that would put off most of the population of China - brains and eggs, hog face, pigs feet, squirrel brains out of the skull(!), opossum, and that’s just some of the meats. That’s all tasty southern cooking. Put a dash of hot sauce on any of that and it becomes inedible to her.
Kind of a pain sometimes finding a style of food she is wants to eat but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter to anyone but her as long as her restrictions don’t affect others.
You are so right! At least that has been my experience. With my own children I simply fed them whatever we were eating (and even though I think I am picky, it is nothing compared to what I have read here, so maybe I am not. We have always eaten a wide variety of foods and a wide variety or preparations.) and my children basically eat what is served. I am willing to cater to tastes to a certain extent and won’t force meatloaf on the child who despises it for example, but at the same time I was never one of those “different meals for each child” mothers either.
But dealing with my children’s friends is a whole different ball game. It seems that all of them re-define picky and expect that to dictate what I serve them when they are at my house for meals. (I relish serving these children bison, alligator and other such “exotic” foods, but that is a different topic.) and one girl who instantly springs to mind is my daughter’s best friend. I have given up trying to feed that child and when she is over at meal time I just don’t set a plate for her any more because she likes nothing, and I mean nothing other than spaghetti with canned tomato sauce (she doesn’t like my spaghetti only whatever kind she eats at home) and taking her out to a restaurant is a nightmare. When I asked what her parents fed her she told me that she eats only spaghetti (with whatever canned sauce her dad uses) and her siblings eat only certain foods too so her dad cooks 4 different meals each night for each of them (but it is the same meal for each child each night!) and if they don’t have that available she will eat cookies.
Talking with other parents, this seems to be much more the norm and most of them just laugh at how precious and unique their little non-eaters are. I would go mad.
Oh how I wished my picky eater had not suddelnly reverted to a pouty child when she saw the menu at Bonefish fricking Grill. I was ready to pounce on her, give me a break, look at the sides menu there’s potatoes, steamed veggies rice,and uh hello spinach fettucine, crunchy shrimp? They’ll take all that extra crap off it ifyouwant (SPeaking between clenched teeth)
NOTHING? OK missy, no bread for you! Maybe soon the car! Grrr.
Finally, a sigh and a request for the pasta but with the garlic cream sauce on the side. See? how hard was that?
So who delivers it? The big chef, with a flourish, just to view the picky eater I am sure…:rolleyes:
My stepson is like this. He went on a trip with his dad last year, and they only ate at Subway the whole time because that’s all he wanted to eat. At home, he usually asks what’s for dinner, then says he’s not hungry, or he takes the food and picks it apart to find the acceptable items. I’ve been told (by his dad, my husband) not to use the word “casserole” to describe anything. If we get a pizza for the family, we start by asking the boy which restaurant to order it from, then what kind he wants, then we worry about the rest of us. When the boy doesn’t want to eat what we’re having, his dad offers to cook him another meal. The kid is eighteen fucking years old, and if he were mine, he’d never see nineteen because his ass would starve to death.
Oh my! I read your story picturing a 4-6 year old and wondering if maybe it was just a phase his Dad was catering to, but I guess not.
Of course, getting back on topic, it doesn’t make him a bad person, and doesn’t say anything good or bad about his character, but the household catering to it or his expectation of that might.
It just goes to show what I said before…picky eaters are not inherently bad, but sure can be annoying. 
I’m a picky eater - I am extremely sensitive to spice-as-in-hot. (And yes, I’ve been spiced out more than seven times. :rolleyes:) Does this make me a wet blanket? Well, sort of - there are whole cultures of food that I am very dubious about, because I don’t want to be suffering and streaming tears after five minutes (or five bites). This necessarily limits the set of restraunts I want to go to.
On the other hand, though, my friends are not assholes, and so they don’t have a problem with, when they choose to eat with me, limiting themselves to places that everyone will enjoy. Admittedly, I am not as picky as some people apparently are, but it seems to me that as long as the set of overlapping food interests is not zero (such that you can’t even all find items on any single menu), then everyone can just go to the place that everyone likes and all be happy. Is this restrictive? Sure. But if people want variety they can go on their own time; they don’t have to take me along to all their meals, after all.
I also don’t see the moral superiority in being able to eat and enjoy everything from jalapenos to grease-dripping pizza to soggy refrozen macdonaldsburgers to pig intestines to insects to cardboard to styrofoam to dirt to fecal matter. Sure, if you can eat anything and enjoy it, then you’ll do better if you’re stranded in some foreign country or on a desert island or a third world prison. But I don’t go such places too often and so the problem doesn’t come up much, making the increased flexibility seem to be of little consequence or importance. From where I stand it’s like being really proud of your ability to curl your tongue, and speaking badly of those who don’t train themselves to similar heights. Whoopee.
You want picky? I’ll give you picky. I have a friend who likes TGI Friday’s but not Ruby Tuesdays. Then there was the time she was with a group of people in NYC and made them look for a McDonalds.
Although I started my first post in this thread by saying that I don’t think picky eating is a character flaw, in this particular case I’d be very suspicious if the “I’m 18 and I’m only going to eat at Subway” pickiness is actually one manifestation of a character problem. As in, it sure sounds very passive-aggressive to insist on eating only Subway.
Bah, I know a guy who would boycott specific restraunts because they have crappy food or service or what have you.
Heck, I do that myself. I’m pickier than I thought.