Just like some things smell bad or taste bad, some things just feel bad in your mouth. Is that really such an out there concept for you?
Imagine having a mouthful of feathers or sand. Something that has a distinct feel and is definitely not food. That would be really unpleasant, right? For a lot of picky eaters, myself included, there are some foods that just feel wrong in your mouth the way feathers or sand would. Even things that I really like sometimes get to me with their texture. Yogurt, pudding, and other things with that smooth texture can be delicious but my brain actively rejects it so often I can only finish half a container of yogurt or a third of a serving of pudding before I know that next bite is going to make me vomit. The moment I bite into a raw vegetable my brain freaks out, screaming “Food shouldn’t feel like this!”
I get that. This may seem like castigation, but it’s not. It’s genuine curiosity: Why is it impossible to rationalize that it is not a booger? Lots of things are like something else. A roller coaster is like falling off a building. Swimming is kind of like drowning.
How many of you have family members who are also picky eaters?
My dad is not an adventurous eater. He’ll eat whatever is put in front of him, because he doesn’t like to make waves, but he wants meat (well-done) and potatoes. My sister is somewhat better - most of her pickiness is due to allergies - but even things she finds out she likes, she won’t eat later (mostly anything beef. She’ll eat ground beef, but according to her anything else is too tough. But she’s eaten tri-tip and other tender cuts and liked it, but then ends up refusing to eat it later.)
Thank you. That was a helpful explanation at least and not snarky.
I can honestly say that texture just isn’t anything that enters into my mind at all when tasting food. I mean, I’d think something was wrong if I bit into, say, a crunchy banana, or if the crackers were chewy, but that’s because the texture would be unexpected. When I eat yoghurt I expect it to be creamy, and I expect carrots to be crunchy.
I really don’t know at all how this plays out in other people’s brains.
You’re asking someone to use rationality to overcome a visceral, irrational reaction to a food. Some people can easily do that. Some can’t.
(BTW, as long as you mentioned them, I hate heights and thrill rides, and I can’t swim, either. So there!! 
)
Interesting that you mention swimming, since I used to teach swim lessons, and rationalization has very little power over a visceral fear. It helped people terrified of the water not at all to simply be told that their fear was irrational. Showing them it was irrational – usually, a teeny-tiny step at a time – eventually got them into the water. But they had to want to do it (i.e., not simply because they were being nagged). And it was exhausting work for them.
IIRC, it was calamari that my Number One Nephew said tasted like boogers. And it kinda does have that mouthfeel. You know, the really wet and slimy long stringy loogie boogers you get with a chest cold. So it’s not like there’s even a rationalization there to argue against his reluctance. And as his safety is not imperiled by not knowing how to eat calamari, he really has no strong incentive to try it. (unlike, learning to swim.)
Number Two Nephew – who usually cannot wait to do exactly what his brother does – ended up liking calamari. And agreed they kinda taste like boogers. (That may’ve been the appeal for him.)
I’m a picky eater because I’m a squeamish person in general. A lot of foods are just gross to me. I don’t eat any meat, I’ve hated all seafood ever since I was a tiny kid (and my mom did try many times to make me eat it, so THERE to all the people in the other thread claiming that picky eaters are raised that way), I can eat some dairy if I don’t think about it, and some textures just don’t appeal to me.
But even though I’m a picky eater, I don’t think I’m a difficult eater. I can eat wherever, and if the entree doesn’t work for me, I’m happy to have sides. I’m happy to eat nothing but a salad or pasta with marinara sauce or whatever. It only gets awkward if the other people make a big deal of it. I have an ex whose mom took it personally every time we went to her house and she couldn’t fix me a plate. She meant well, but it made me feel bad, and it just wasn’t necessary. I appreciated the offer and declined graciously and that should be enough.
I do. My parents both eat a pretty wide variety of stuff but my grandfather had many of the same food texture issues that I do. My brother is significantly worse than I am and I believe he is only still alive because of multivitamins. He will eat meat, white bread, white potatoes, a few condiments, the very occasional slice of pizza, and booze. He only gets fruits in his system in dessert form (pumpkin pie, apple crisp, etc.) The only vegetable he has ever willingly eaten is canned green beans and when he got to about 16 he decided even those weren’t okay and I don’t think he has eaten another vegetable since then. He works out like a fiend though and looks like he belongs in an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog so most women ignore his food issues because he is so built.
When we were kids, my sister was an even pickier eater than I was. However, now that we’re adults, she is far less picky than I am. In recent years, she’s taken some sorts of foods out of her diet due to digestive issues, but I don’t think of that as “pickiness”.
Well, I am not a picky eater per se, I have food allergies one of which causes me to use an epi pen, which is not fun as it is followed by a trip to the ER. The second food allergy causes projectile vomiting, and the third keeps me in the bathroom for anywhere from an hour to 2 days, and the last is similar though it has kept me in the bathroom for almost a week previously. I scrupulously check ingredients. I do have a short list of food dislikes, but I never call those an allergy or sensitivity, I will flat out tell you I do not like <whatever it is> as honesty is best. And yes, I have had someone feed me mushrooms deliberately, which resulted in the use of a fairly expensive epi pen and trip to the ER.
They make soy wrappers for sushi rolls that are wonderful, ask to see if they have them. You can also ask that they leave off the little seaweed twist tie - I do that all the time. And sushi does not have to be raw seafood - a soy wrap california roll is a soy wrap, rice, crab sealeg cucumber and avocado. I have been known to bring my own package of soy wraps, my grocery store carries them =)
Have you tried the roll that is tempura onion, tempura sweet potato fries, rice and toasted sesame seed sprinkles?
Cilantro is one of those things that is a genetic quirk - to some of us it tastes incredibly vile. Also cruciform veggies like cabbage and broccoli are horrible for ‘supertasters’ to deal with.
I love trying new things, but my major turnoff is uber fishy tasting fish, it is like being slapped in the face with a rotting dead mackeral. I like neutral fish like cod and haddock. Sometimes even salmon is too fishy for me. Usually mrAru will order something and I will try it so we don’t waste an entire meal. I will get some meal that I know I like. That is how I determined that tilapia and red snapper have flavor components I find unpleasant. I decided to do it that way when I got an order of catfish that tasted like a mouthful of mud. Doesn’t matter, farmed or wild, catfish tastes like ass to me.
On the other hand, I will eat pretty much anything except insects - game, nontraditional animals [horse, rabbit, dog and monkey, rattlesnake, alligator, frogs legs so far] and organ meats [heart is yummy, not fond of the texture of tongue, don’t like gizzards, most liver, kidneys, lungs and brains. Foie Gras is interesting, depends on how it is prepared.]
It’s a combination of fear, actual dislike, actual preference, and reasons unrelated to taste.
I’ve generally gotten over my fear of strange foods, but it’s going to be a lot easier to convince me to try a small bite of something new than commit to a whole meal of it.
And, generally I know what I like, and what I dislike. Why should I eat something you like if I don’t. Or even, if I don’t mind it but there’s something I desire more?
Also some people eat things for reasons other than taste - vegetarian, or diabetic, or allergy, or dieting.
I’ve found as the years go by I’ve lost my taste for certain things (cow, dairy) and started liking others (onions, sushi).
I’ve never understood food busy bodies though. Why do you care what I eat? A certain person I know spends more time pointing out things on the menu she thinks other people might like and asking what they are going to order than picking out her own food. Drives me crazy.
At one restaurant I used to get the chicken and shrimp dish without the chicken and shrimp, because I liked the sides and toppings it came with.
In my case, it’s a combination of scientific curiosity - I’m interested in how other people think, and the fact that it has personally affected me. A few years ago, my wife and I gave a close friend of mine, someone who was extremely down on his luck, a place to live. We picked up all his expenses as well, since otherwise, he would have been eating out of a dumpster somewhere. During the time he lived with us, we found that he had severe food neuroses. They were totally inconsistent, irrational, and utterly maddening. I’m not saying this about anybody else but him, but his issues appeared to us to be almost childish - like a kid holding his breath out of pure stubbornness to get what he wants.
Example: my friend could tolerate a particular brand and style of a frozen, pre-packaged stir fry. Broccoli, bell peppers, soy sauce…the usual. Nothing exotic. One night, so we could all sit at the table together and have a meal, I made the exact same thing from all fresh ingredients. Exactly. The. Same. Thing. I slavishly imitated his preferred bag-o-whatever.
He wouldn’t touch it. He wouldn’t even try it. It even looked and smelled identical to the frozen stuff. He hovered at my elbow the entire time I was preparing it, expressing his enthusiasm and how happy he was that I was doing it, and then when I put it on the table, he wouldn’t even deign to try it.
It was incredible. I was infuriated. Life and relationships are complex things, and he and I have been through enough together that our friendship will likely never go away altogether, but I have to admit - I was insulted. That damaged our relationship.
I’ll probably never fully understand what was going through his head, but in my mind it was insufferable rudeness and childishness.
Yes a lot of food just tastes horrible. Some of it, such as raw tomatoes and mushrooms, is so bad it activates my gag reflex. And most of it is just mildly unpleasant.
Nothing stops me from trying new things. I’m almost always willing to try something new unless I’ve good reason to think I won’t like it. Such as if it features prominently ingredients I don’t like. There are things I’m somewhat irrationally opposed to trying but that’s true of most people I think. Bugs, for example.
There’s also the matter of degree. Though I don’t like most foods I’ve tried I’ll still eat them if necessary. But I rather enjoy eating and don’t get anywhere near enough exorcise to just eat whatever I want without worry of gaining weight so why would I choke down 500 calories of something that tastes bad or mediocre, let alone terrible, when I can just wait till I get home and cook something I’ll find delicious?
And there’s a handful of foods I’ve found that follow an odd pattern of tasting fantastic on the first mouthful but seem to become more and more disgusting each subsequent bite until I just cant make myself go on. Tapioca and Spaghetti Squash are two such. I have no idea why that happens and it’s quite annoying.
That’s a weird kind of picky eater, Ogre. That does seems immature and strange.
After reading some of these stories, maybe I’m not as picky as I thought. Other than meat (which is the main problem for me, but still just one category), I think I could eat enough of almost any food to not cause a scene. I just usually don’t, because it’s not necessary. For example my mom is constantly offering me normal foods like a banana, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, fudge with nuts in it, grapefruit, squash, food with butter on it, etc., and I decline because I don’t like any of those and it’s no big deal to not eat them. But I could eat any of them if I found myself in a situation where it would be rude not to. I wouldn’t eat a lot, but I’d eat enough to be polite. I just consider myself picky because I’m not an adventurous eater and there’s not a lot of variety in the food I pick for myself.
It just matters a lot for some people. I am not at all a picky eater, I grew up on wild mushrooms and venison because my dad was a hunter (so really I don’t belong in this thread, but just to answer your question). Anyway, there are exactly two foods I cannot stand due to texture. One is squid sushi (the white stuff with like lines on top), because it turns to liquid goo in my mouth. It feels like trying to reingest vomit–thus my gag reflex is triggered. Can’t eat it.
The other is cooked pinto beans, which were the only food I could not eat in childhood. My mom engaged me in multiple battles of wills over this one dish, which was truly absurd because I would eat *anything else *that was ever put in front of me. I used to get gold stars all the time in kindergarten for eating all of my spinach and brussels sprouts (and going back for seconds!). But she made the pinto beans an issue, and I always hated the nasty grainy texture. Even the thought of them makes me a little gaggy (there’s a lot of resentment over that dish). I have never successfully eaten more than 5 pinto beans without barfing. One time I sat at the kitchen table all night because I would not, could not eat them. I’m pretty sure that’s the last time she tried to force them on me (thank god).
Refried pinto beans are cool, though, I love the taste and texture of those. Just not in their plain bean form. gah! eugh!
A couple things happened around the same time when I was a toddler that made me go basically non-dairy. First, I was put in the hospital for malnutrion because all I would take was my bottle. Apparently I lived on milk. In my crib on the children’s ward they tied my knees apart and put an IV into my inner thigh. That was Clockwork Orange enough to turn me off milk forever. Sometime after that, back home, I got a hunk of cheddar out of the refrigerator and took a big bite. I didn’t know it wasn’t supposed to be covered with furry mold. (My mother was a bad housekeeper, cook…:rolleyes:.) After I finally stopped throwing up I guess I decided dairy products weren’t so good. I do like mozerella on pizza tho and can even tolerate mushrooms on it which are another dislike, if I have to, so I use that as an excuse to eat a lot of pizza. 
I also can eat a little butter (1/8 of a pat?) on potatoes now so I’m not totally deprived.
I’ve heard it described by foodies as “mouth feel” - how a certain food feels in your mouth - e.g., creamy, crunchy, dry, slimy, squishy. When I find the texture unpleasant, I’m not going to like the food.
I’ve posted before, I’m a picky eater. I dislike foods for a variety of reasons, smell, texture, and taste.
My mother is actually a great cook (she’s done catering, in fact), my father isn’t a bad one, and when we were little, we were exposed to a wide variety of foods from different cultures - my parents are both adventurous omnivores. My siblings and I weren’t catered to or spoiled as far as what was served or what we were to eat. Neither of them are picky eaters, in fact quite the opposite. I’m the only one who found many foods didn’t taste good and now, I choose not to eat them.
I’ll try anything once and most things more than once. If I’m served something at someone’s home, I’ll take at least partial servings of most things and say things like “it smells/looks so wonderful, unfortunately I had a heavy lunch, but I must have at least a bit of this delicious __________.” I will then get it down, drink a lot of water, and have something else later.
At restaurants, I’ll tend to be unadventurous because I don’t like wasting food and I don’t like wasting money. I know that I’m picky and I know that I can generally find at least one thing to eat at most places, so if someone says “We’re going to __________,” I’ll go. I don’t comment on anyone’s else’s food. I may order the most boring thing on the menu, but that’s because I don’t want to take 3 bites of it and then push the rest around my plate for an hour. That’s a waste of perfectly good food, the chef’s time, and my cash. Since the chances of my not liking something are so high, I’d rather order something that I know I will like or at least not mind.
One thing that no one has mentioned, there are also certain foods that I don’t like in combination. As an analogy, I like Mozart, I like the sound of birds chirping, I like 50s rock, I like pop music, and I love showtunes. However, if you play them all together at the same time, it’s just headache inducing noise. To me, a lot of food combinations taste like that sounds - I assume this isn’t true for other people, because I see them enjoying foods put together in ways that I do not tend to like.
As I said earlier, I really will try almost anything. But I’m not going to keep making and feeding myself something I don’t like in the hopes that it becomes something I do. That seems ridiculous.
Everybody keeps talking about “texture.” What’s the deal with that? I never had any consciousness that texture could make a difference in liking or disliking food, until I started cooking for my GF and she would occasionally reject some things purely on the basis of texture. The whole concept of texture being a deal-breaker was completely strange to me. 
I don’t know if I qualify as being a picky eater or not; probably not. I’m 100% vegetarian, so every sort of meat is out of the question, but within the wide world of vegetarian food, I love it all. It’s very simple.
I was a moderately picky eater as a young kid up into my late teens, and it was primarily a textural thing, which would kick in a gag reflex real quick. It was no fun, and I really, really hated it. Fortunately it wasn’t extreme, and didn’t get me ostracized much.
Eventually, I just ‘got over it’ for lack of a better explanation. It occurred during college, and the only possible (if unlikely) reason I can think of is that having the occasional ‘munchies’ helped me overcome it. My mom nearly fainted when I came home from college one holiday break, sat down at the dinner table, took some salad, and ate it.
Since then I’ve become very adventurous with foods.