I’m usually pedantic, but the point is, “pickiness” is pretty darned relative. You’re picky if you’re picky about stuff your crowd isn’t picky about. Which is hardly an absolute measure. If everyone you know doesn’t eat Thai, then that’s not being picky, until somebody rolls in who does want to try it, and then suddenly everyone else becomes picky.
On the one hand you could have an objective standard for pickiness - Not Liking Chicken Gizzards wouldn’t count. Unless you’re with the OP in China and they’re serving chicken gizzard souffle, I guess. On the other hand if pickiness is completely subjective, which I’m certain it is, then it’s suddenly a lot harder for me to care about pickiness in and of itself. Pickiness doesn’t cause problems. People cause the problems, by demanding that others behave in ways they don’t want to. And either the picky person or the wants-diversity person can do that equally well.
No. In fact, it can be advantageous; a picky eater is less likely to be poisoned or sickened by eating something dangerous, I expect. That was probably an advantage in historical situations where finding food wasn’t as a easy as it is now; the guy who ate that funny looking mushroom died, the picky guy was hungry but lived. That by itself is enough to move being a picky eater off the “inherently bad” list.
I doubt it will make much difference. I’m moderately picky, and my mother fed all of us the same meal. It didn’t make me less picky, it just made me do things like try to smuggle food away from the table in my pockets to be dumped later. * And when away at “Sixth Grade Camp” for a week, I simply didn’t eat more than a few bites except for one day they served something I liked. I just drank lots of orange juice and water. The experience didn’t make me less picky, it just made me dislike having other people determine my menu.
Of course, my mother still did all my laundry back then; a budding criminal genius I was not.
There’s being a picky eater, and there’s being a picky eater and an asshole about it. Only one of those groups deserves criticism.
I avoid certain foods and routinely order the same meals at restaurants. The reasons are twofold: one, some foods make me physically sick (spicy, dairy, shellfish) or strongly trigger my gag reflex, and two, I like to enjoy my meals, and usually this means re-ordering meals I enjoyed before. I’ve also recently overhauled my eating habits, and limit my intake of fried food, ground meats, and other things.
Unless you watched what I ordered, you would never know I was picky, and I make sure it stays that way. I don’t deserve to be called an asshole for keeping my comfort and health in mind.
I think there’s a lot of room between “picky” and “adventurous”. A lot of people enjoy food and eat a reasonably balanced diet but don’t get much pleasure from seeking out new and unfamiliar foods. I can certainly understand that–we’re all that way about something.
But I’m surprised at how many adults I know who eat like they’re ordering from a children’s menu. One of my colleagues, a 33-year-old physician with a two-year-old daughter, told me the other day that he simply hates vegetables and won’t eat them. Period. A 26-year-old mother in our office told me she can’t eat meat with bones in it. It’s one thing to not seek transcendence with every meal; it’s another to let childhood food preferences define your diet as an adult.
(Not that we should encourage such pickiness among kids, either. Nothing makes me madder than going to our local Chinese restaurant and seeing parents who have brought in Happy Meals for their kids to eat. That’s just rude.)
The only picky eaters who really bother me are the ones who simply won’t shut up about it. I know a few who like to get graphic about how sick it makes them to even think about eating whatever relatively innocuous food we’re discussing–or, worse yet, eating. It’s the culinary equivalent of threadshitting.
I think most people in this thread are making distinctions between a very narrow band of food preferences (e.g., I don’t like tomato slices on my sandwiches, that guy reacts to spicy food), labeling it pickiness, and then talking about how that pickiness is nobody’s business but their own.
However, when we think about picky eaters, I think most people would agree that a picky eater is someone who would simply refuse to eat a commonplace meal because it isn’t exactly what they eat every day. DoctorJ gave some good examples.
Another example: the person who will eat American steak, meatballs, or hamburger; but your garden variety Lebanese kufta (not spicy, just a Middle Eastern meatball) is strange and yucky and won’t be touched. There’s no other way to put it: that’s a picky eater who is a pain in the ass.
Where I think the OP is probably right, but her view doesn’t necessarily translate into our everyday Western experience, is the well-founded scorn of someone who goes to live in another country and is actually scared of foreign foods. That is being a huge headache to literally everyone around them. Going to China and not being willing to eat Chinese food is a much different situation than someone living in the US and who doesn’t like to eat adventurously.
A kufta is commonplace? That example doesn’t sound like they’re being picky because they don’t like the food, but rather that they’re being picky because they don’t know what it is and are suspicious that you’re trying to foist nastiness off on them. I would not call that pickiness. I’d call that you being bad at explaining foods, coupled perhaps with having a habit of telling people stuff’s good that they end up trying based on your misleading descriptions and disliking.
And, why are they a pain in the ass, again? Just because they don’t like kuftas? I don’t see it. Just as I don’t see restricting yourself to familiar places to be a problem - it’s your choice, innit? Even if you’re in a foreign country.
My cousin’s son is in his early 20s, and has only eaten three foods for basically his entire life. One is peanut butter, the other is plain dry Cheerios. I don’t remember what the third is. But he is totally healthy, extremely athletic and never get sick.
I, on the other hand, can think of just a few foods I don’t like. But even when I was younger I was never as healthy as my cousin’s son.
But is forcing kids to eat something they don’t like any more polite? I doubt it was the idea of the kids to go to a Chinese restaurant in the first place. Yes, fine, sometimes you need to override what kids want or they’ll ignore schoolwork in order to play videogames all day; but it’s just as reasonable for a kid to have culinary preferences as an adult. That seems to me an example of parents compromising between indulging themselves with something they like, while minimizing the impact on their children.
Ingredients isn’t the whole thing. I don’t really like tastes mixing. The best example is probably that once in my East Asian Studies course last summer we had a tea ceremony. There were three types of tea: an oolong, a “lower grade” weak green tea, and a very strong bitter green tea. Most people find the first two palatable, and the third atrocious and overly-bitter. I hated the first two, not because of the flavor per se, the flavor was there, but because I could taste the bitterness as well as an uncanny boiled water taste. The third one overpowered that boiled water taste to the point that I couldn’t notice it and I was the only person in the (small) class who actually liked the tea because it had a single coherent taste.
That’s not to say I won’t eat anything with toppings, pasta without some sort of sauce is just weird, and some sauces just naturally have a couple things in them, but in general I’d say that just because the ingredients are all agreeable doesn’t mean you’ll like it. It’s sort of like that whole “you may like pickles, and you may like milk, but pickle juice + milk isn’t a pretty picture” thing.
That’s disingenuous - you know you know somebody who only eats chicken tenders and fries, and they won’t go to a restaurant that doesn’t serve them. And they won’t eat YOUR chicken even though you made it specially for them, thinking they’d like it, because there’s no ranch dressing on it. And they make you go to Applebee’s every single time. If you want to enjoy their company, you’re doing it at Applebee’s.
“You don’t explain food well”? Completely off the subject.
I’m in Sichuan, land of extremely yummy spicy food that is certainly not blander than American Chinese food. Food varies a lot around the country, so the dishes I am familiar with might not be available…but hopefully he does get to at least one good Sichuan restaurant, because the food is sublime.
The classic foreigner-friendly dishes around here are gan bian tou dou si (fried shredded potatoes- much like hash browns with a little bit of spice on them), tang-cu li qi (pronounced "tong su li chi…sweet and sour pork), gong bao ji ding (kung pao chicken), ganbian sijidou (dry fried string beans) and yu xiang qiezi (yu xiang chi-eza…sweet and sour eggplant.) My pinyin on these might be wrong, and don’t even ask me for the characters.
Chances are your friend will be wined and dined and won’t have to worry too much about ordering food. At a banquet, the trick is just to keep those chopsticks in motion so that nobody puts the “choice” bits of chicken head or whatever in your bowl. Banquets have good food and insane variety, so he’ll be fine. Tell him to make sure he doesn’t get into any drinking contests!
In my particular case, I am pretty grumpy because I just got a new batch of foreigners in town. I took them to my favorite restaurant and ordered to the best of my ability- I got all the classic “foreigners like this” dishes. There were a few mystery dishes. Sometimes my Chinese just isn’t there and I have to pick a chicken or beef dish at random. There was a wide variety, and there was nothing “strange”, just different incarnations of veggies and meat. Anyway, I did my best.
Every single one one of the new people complained the whole time. One has suddenly decided the only meat she’ll eat is chicken, a massive problem in a place where pork is considered a seasoning. Three don’t eat spicy food, a massive problem that they are just going to have to learn to deal with, since all the food here is spicy. One has a huge list of foods he doesn’t eat- greens, mushrooms, etc. They even rejected the delicious fried green beans because it had dried red peppers sprinkled on top (it’s not spicy) and disparaged half the dishes as “looking like vomit.” Apparently, they plan to eat nothing but fried potato and sweet-and-sour pork for the next six months.
It’s going to be tough, because China has a huge dining culture, and frankly if you want to go out socially there really isn’t much else to do. It’s not like we can go to the bowling alley. We don’t have any real western food in this town, and what little there is is prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, I know they’ve already alienated their host several times- I was a banquet yesterday and Miss. I-only-eat-chicken sat there pointedly eating a bowl of plain rice and pouting. This is really offensive in a culture where friendships are cemented over meals.
Anyway, if they had learned to push themselves a bit more in their lives, their current inability to adapt to change would not be holding them back like it is going to here. Hopefully a lot of this is just culture shock and they get at least a little more adventurous soon.
Don’t you see how this is a completely bizarre way of looking at things? Anything vaguely foreign in probably nasty? That the world menus are just big suspicious things of foisting off nastiness? Don’t picky eaters ever walk down the street, see all those restaurants, and wish they could enter this world of sensory enjoyment that everyone else seems to get?
What does the word “mean” in your sentence refer to? I’m not sure what your word “mean” means, because in the next sentence you seem to understand what “commonplace meal” means…
Refusing to eat a rather plain meatball simply because it has a foreign name is pickiness. Ground beef mashed into balls and grilled is extremely common food. Do you get “suspicious” of a chocolate chip cookie if it comes from Mrs. Fields’ as opposed to Chips Ahoy? Or “suspicious” of a french fry that comes from England as opposed to America?
Unfortunately, I don’t possess the astounding power to poorly explain foods to fictional people in hypothetical situations. I hear that’s quite the superpower to have. I can only wonder if this comment says more about your friends, than it does about me.
Those of you who identified yourselves as picky eaters: how about things like movies other than blockbusters, traveling abroad and staying someplace other than resorts, going to museums, and trying to learn and speak a foreign language?
I am not a picky eater, and there is nothing more fun to me than going to a new country, trying out some new food, and trying to learn the language enough to at least say hello, good bye, and thank you. Does that sound like something you’d enjoy or avoid?
I think it’s simple. Is it easier to describe them as saying they eat anything but X, Y, and Z, or that they only eat A, B, and C? The latter is a picky eater.
I love going to new places to see the sights, but I don’t care about food. Meals are a chore to get through so I can enjoy the rest of the day.
As a result, when I’m in a foreign country, I pick the easiest place to get a meal I can recognize. More quickly I can get over it, the more quickly I get to the (for me) fun part of travelling.
On the other hand (me being kind of picky) I think it’s bleeping rude from someone to pressure someone else to eat something they don’t want to eat for whatever reason.
As for ruining social occasions, in my case if there’s nothing in the menu (a rare thing in any case) that I don’t like I just have a drink and eat nothing. I do agree that if any picky eater makes a fuss over it it’s being an arse though.
As for this:
Yep, me picky. Me also packed up one day and moved to another diametrically opposite hemisphere and culture. I’d suggest a finer brush.
Really, mange touts of the world, give us a rest. No I don’t want to even try duck’s feet, I’ll pass on the gelatinous thing that needs a DNA test to discern it’s origin and thanks but no thanks, curry makes my GF knock on the bathroom door asking what am I doing in there.
I call myself a picky eater, even though as I said I am currently rethinking that. Let’s see…yes I watch movies other than blockbusters (what does that have to do with food preferences?) I have lived in 4 different countries and traveled to many more, I have stayed in tents, hovels, homes, 5 star hotels and everything in between, I go to museums and all kinds of cultural activities, I speak a foreign language and I try to learn as much as possible about anything that interests me.
I have traveled to countries specifically for their food…being picky does not mean never trying or never liking anything, it means having specific preference. I have found meals in almost all cuisines that I adore but still dislike or refuse to try things that I find distasteful or disgusting.
But really I think the definition of “picky” is being played with a lot in this thread and really don’t understand what it has to do with intellectual or cultural pursuits and interests or what it has to do with “being a good person” (or “better person”) as the OP suggests. But most of all I don;t understand how it matters to anyone other than the picky person- with the exception of rude behavior using “picky” as an excuse, but rude behavior is rude no matter what food you like to eat.
I have certain genres of movies I prefer, though I’ve never heard of anyone who doesn’t. Same with books and music and any entertainment media. For travel, I would definitely do those things. I have a short list of countries I’d really like to visit and explore, such as Japan and France. I have no plans to go to either place, but I took French in college and spent a few months last October trying to teach myself Japanese.
If you think it balances me out as a person, I wear a variety of styles and colors of clothing.
At the risk of setting off another parent vs. childfree firestorm…it’s insanely rude to bring food from one restaurant into another restaurant. If you want to take the kids out to dinner, it needs to be one where they can get something to eat.
The sad thing is that it might not have even been the kids’ preferences. A lot of people around here seem to think that “kids don’t eat stuff like that”, so they wouldn’t even offer any sort of ethnic food to a child.