Then the second best must be the restaurant attached to Herbert Fisheries in Killarney, also on the shores of Georgian Bay. We always end our visits to the nearby provincial park with a meal there and sometimes see their trawler coming in to dock at the end of the day.
Back to the question of food preferences, I have an aversion to parsnips, and it’s because of the texture more than the taste. To me they have a texture that combines slimy and mealy (crumbly graininess) in an extremely unpalatable way.
I’m pretty solidly convinced that 90% of picky eating is psychological, and 10% is actually physiological.
I mean, some people absolutely do perceive flavors and textures differently than other people do. But the vast majority of people who eat toddler diets or who have weird food issues are dealing with something in their own heads. I know a few adults and a few children who are absurdly picky, and/or have “sensitivities”. It’s all BS, in that they just draw arbitrary lines in the sand that aren’t consistent, aren’t logical, and aren’t coherent.
one “sensitive” person claims that alliums and chiles give her migraines, but will vary back and forth- one time she can eat garlic juice, another time garlic oil is ok, other times she’ll eat stuff with garlic and not realize it and be fine. Another person is weird about the cuts of meat- won’t eat chicken thighs, but will eat boneless, skinless chicken breasts. My own younger son is a cranky tween who is clearly using his “pickiness” to exert control, but we’re a little baffled- we’ve never been overly controlling or “Eat it or starve” types. He’s just picked that weird hill to die on. The funny thing is that Boy Scouts seems to be a sovereign remedy; get that kid out in the woods and hungry, then offer him one type of food, and suddenly that food is delicious and he’s all about eating his fair share. I mostly chuckle and agree with him.
The funny thing is that my autistic son who also has had sensory issues in the past is a total foodie. He’s always up for trying new stuff, loves a wide variety of esoteric foods, and has never been a pain in the butt about food flavors or textures.
Most “picky eating” is psychological, and there is lots of hard science “behind why a specific food tastes great to one individual but bad to another.”
My impression is that most adults who act like toddlers over vegetables, for example, are the result of having been parented in ways that made eating a power event.
AND the individual variations in the actual perceived reality of different flavors (flavors being more than taste alone) are both significant and common, from variants in taste and olfactory receptors, to changes in brain wiring resulting from prenatal through early childhood exposures in critical and sensitive periods, and learning beyond that.
Huh, as a picky eater, i find this a weird statement on several levels.
my toddlers ate everything. They didn’t start getting picky until ~4, and were much less picky again by about age 6.
most of my pickiness is due to strong food aversions that I’m pretty sure are biological. I mean, i don’t care for lavender because my grandmother’s guest bathroom stank, due to the lavender soaps. (But even that is partly biological: until i had covid i had a much better sense of smell than most people, and found many “added scents” to be unpleasantly strong.) But i recently learned that too much cooked bell pepper makes my physically ill, and I’m pretty sure my intense aversion to the flavor is actually due to my nose protecting me from a personal toxin. In general, I’m cautious about new foods because there are a lot of aggressive-to-me flavors that i dislike. (Although I’m willing to try, cautiously, almost any new food that doesn’t contain a known nasty flavor.)
vegetables are often bitter, and don’t give you that reward of calories/fat/sugar/protein that more popular foods boast. I think it’s amazing that people generally like vegetables, not that many people don’t. I really didn’t think you need to blame bad parenting for an aversion to many vegetables.
I don’t know about your percentage estimates, but I think generally you have a good point. Hence my earlier comment relating to sushi – I will happily consume and enjoy a piece of sushi that is beautifully prepared and presented by an expert chef whose main ingredient is something like eel that I would normally find disgusting. Enjoying food is all about presentation, ambience, and personal state of mind.
Ever hear the expression about “food turning to ashes in your mouth”? I’ve literally had that happen when eating a nice meal and suddenly getting bad news. The enjoyment of food is very much related to psychology.
2 is you as a single case, but my strong impression is not the general case.
3 no most vegetables are not so bitter. They are not generally sweet either. For most as a developmental process the aversion to bitter and stronger drive to sweet, and the fear of flavors or textures new and different, improves by 6 or 7.
Barring something that interferes in that developmental progression. Usually well intended parented that has bad results. Often just replicating how they were raised.
It does both directions: either permissively allowing crap as an alternative and/or trying to bribe with sweets or other crap; or, more frequently, power battles doomed to being lost which entrain the child to keeping saying “no!” long after the age they would otherwise have been open to tasting it again.
The more ideal is to be low key - the healthy food selections are there and only they are there (excepting special occasion treats) and no battles. Eat don’t eat. Their choice. They won’t starve. They won’t become malnourished. They will eventually try the foods again.
I understand the comparison of peaty Scotch whisky to a stick out of a campfire; speaking for myself, I like that kind of whisky (e.g. Laphroag, Glenmorangie).
Guinness is not my favorite beer. It’s heavy and a bit too sweet. In general I’m not an ale drinker. I like Czech lager.
While we’re at it, I don’t care for gin too much. To me a Martini tastes like a mixture of shampoo and nail polish remover.
I must concur. I really don’t like eggs but lots of folks do and that’s fine. But does every single breakfast sandwich or breakfast plate have to include eggs? I’d be ok if places would let me make a decent substitution but they never do. and of course they don’t make the price cheaper if they leave off the eggs.
I thought eggs were so expensive. It shouldn’t hurt to give me an extra piece of bacon in place of the eggs.
Saying it’s mostly psychological is an easy way to dismiss other people’s lived experience.
It’s a given that people have psychological issues around food: eating disorders, but I think we’ve also all seen pickiness as a cry for attention or a need to demonstrate that the picky person is special.
On the other hand, as a picky eater, I have genuinely tried to get over it. For some things (most vegetables), it just took a long time of food I didn’t like to move them from “dislike” to “mostly neutral,” so there was a psychological component that was straightforward to deal with: aversion based on habit and lack of familiarity.
But other foods just don’t move. I gave the example of salmon above: I get zero psychological benefit from my dislike of salmon. I have no conceptual aversion to eating fish. I don’t mind the process of working around the little bones. Why would I have a psychological aversion to this food? It’s the taste I don’t like. In social situations where manners require, I will eat it, but I would prefer to go hungry. I have a long list of foods I feel this way about, including some common ingredients (hello, mustard and mayonnaise!).
We should be careful to not conflate the generic standard “picky eater” who often just refuses to try things, from people who have very specific lived aversive reactions to certain foods.
My problem with when picky eaters come up in conversation is how many people seem to make it personal. They get all worked up about finding inconsistencies, or desperate to find a way to change us. I’m sure it comes from a benevolent place, that they think we’re missing out and must have that corrected, so that we are enjoying life’s pleasures at the level they deem appropriate.
But it’s my stomach, not yours. Leave me the hell alone.
It depends on the relationship? For most people it is none of my business. If I am in a group and one person’s dietary preferences are deciding what the group does, that’s another thing. And if my wife had bigger quirks than not liking chicken on the bone it would bother me since I cook for us and being constrained greatly for our meals is my belly too.
If they’re expecting you to accommodate their quirks, I understand the frustration. I never ask anyone to work around me, I know my tastes are unusual, and I won’t ever put the burden of that on others; I’ll look after myself.
I can’t speak for anyone else like me, but make sure that you aren’t making more effort than you need to be, they may be okay with taking care of their own meal separately.
The vegetarians sometimes complicate my choices, because, while there’s plenty of vegetarian food i like, vegetarian dishes are way more likely to include foods i can’t eat, like eggplant and peppers.
When there’s a choice of entrees with descriptions like “beef, chicken, or vegetarian”, i usually pick the chicken. And sometimes i look enviously at the vegetarian meal, and other times i wouldn’t have been able to find more than 200 edible calories in it.
I request “not Thai”. That’s the only ordinary type of restaurant where i often have trouble finding something to eat.
Depends on the level of flexibility they bring to it.
Most restaurants have some choices that work for a vegetarian or for most food allergies or sensitivities (celiac included here). Insisting that the group goes to the one with the choices they like best annoys.
A bad aftertaste is a deciding factor for me.
Onions don’t taste terrible to me. But I keep belching that taste for hours afterwards.
Bell peppers give me very bad heartburn.
Texture and appearance is the next deciding factor. If it doesn’t look appealing then I probably won’t eat it. Brussel Sprouts, yellow squash, and egg plant look gross and I’ve never eaten them.
Butternut Squash is good. A friend baked one and it was like a sweet potato. Butter and cinnamon made it good.
There are foods that I unexpectedly like. I’ve always liked spinach and broccoli. Love butter beans and peas.
I like grocery store ham. I don’t like country ham because it tastes gamey. It would be different if I was raised eating country ham and gotten accustomed to it.
My mom and dad wanted spaghetti with meat sauce at least twice every week. I burned out on the stuff. Even today, 50 years later I’ll eat spaghetti maybe twice a year.
