I’m a picky eater. I won’t eat shellfish, avocado, oysters, eggs or asparagus. I’m sure there are a lot of other foods I don’t eat if I were to dig into the inner recesses of my brain.
As others have said, texture is a big one - oysters just look and feel vile. Ditto asparagus. The smell alone of eggs or tuna (there’s another one) just makes me gag. I wish I did like eggs because they’re quick, easy and nutritious but they just make me heave.
It doesn’t worry me and I won’t force myself to try new things because there are plenty of other foods which I do like. As another poster further up mentioned, I certainly wouldn’t be trying new and unusual foods at a restaurant because I dine out infrequently and want to enjoy the experience and not waste food and money by selecting something I may not like.
It’s like how a movie lover might recommend movies to a friend, or a book lover might point out all books they think you’ll love at the bookstore. It’s a friendly sharing of enthusiasm.
Think of a physical sensation that feels unpleasant: stepping barefoot into a pile of cat barf, sitting on a wet bench and getting soggy butt, grabbing a garden slug while weeding, stuff like that. Having an aversion to a food texture feels like that inside your mouth. Maybe it’s not rational, but to someone who feels it it’s very real and the first instinct is to get it the hell out of your mouth, and trying to choke it down anyway will make you want to yurp.
Its really more like how a movie lover will castigate someone about their crappy, childish taste in movies, if “busybodies” has its usual meaning here.
Texture/mouth feel is primal for me - I am one of those who can’t stand underdone meat and jiggly, undercooked fat is the worst of all. I’ll bite into it and feel it on my tongue and it’s like someone lightly brushing the hairs on my arm the wrong way - it just gives me a instant creepy feeling. I can force it down if I have to, but if I don’t have to, it is coming out. It’s the opposite of the feel of crunch - a good crunch can raise the level of how good food is for me. And I really can’t stand the taste of bitter (even though it’s supposed to be more “sophisticated”) or excessively spicy. All I taste is nasty and the pain. Beer, dry wines (and frankly most alcohol), cabbage, grapefruit (even Ruby Red), most peppers, etc. - again, I can force myself to swallow it but tend to avoid them whenever possible.
I do this too… I also pick visible fat out of ground beef. Just the thought of eating overly fatty meat squicks me out!
I have eaten and enjoyed alligator and sushi, and I can tolerate calamari as long as the pieces are small. But don’t come near me with an onion or mushroom. If either of those are in my food I will find them and pick them out.
I have varied tastes and love trying new things, but for some reason yogurt makes me gag. It’s annoying, as if my body has some faulty security system for detecting and purging rotten dairy. I want to like yogurt. It’s psychological too; I’m fine if I mask it with enough fruit in a smoothie. I sometimes have the same problem with cottage cheese, which is especially weird because I usually like it. One time I took a big mouthful and ended up puking up a small bit of the salad I’d just eaten.
Like the texture of canned asparagus? I don’t even want to describe it because it’ll make me gag. As a kid, my parents used to serve it with dinner and they were not the “just taste a little bit of it” type of folks. They would beat you if you even looked like you were going to gag (once I almost got a whuppin because my father caught me frowning up while chewing on a pork chop. And then he switched gears when he saw blood gushing out of my mouth, a loose tooth dangling by a thread.)
But take that same texture and apply it to something else, like mushrooms or meat? No problem. So for me, it’s a combination of texture and taste.
Picky eaters don’t like to be made to feel bad for having visceral reactions. If something makes you gag, sorry, but no amount of guilt or shame is going to make it go away. And foodies don’t like to hear about someone’s negative preferences all the time. They like to gush about food and use strange words like “mouthfeel” when describing things.
People like me often wish both of them would just shut up. Really, I don’t care to hear what you love or hate in food unless I’m planning a menu just for you and you’re about to die tomorrow and Jesus and Michael Jackson are also coming to dinner. But I blame the no-nonsense parenting I received as a child for my low tolerance in this department. All that anger at the dinner table taught me some things.
None of us are right or wrong. We just are. Can’t we all just…get along? Here, have some chicken nuggets tossed in balsamic vinegrette and cilantro.
Nit-pick (that is to say, a “picky-eater nitpick”, which is even better):
curry is not a spice, it is a mixture of spices, and the recipes vary substantially. Your average grocery store curry powder tastes strongly of turmeric and fenugreek, so maybe it’s one or both of those you don’t like. Depending on the mix, curry powders also contain coriander, cardamom, clove, cinnamon, pepper, cumin, and probably other spices I am forgetting.
I will try things, so maybe I don’t belong here, but I was considered to be picky because there were a lot of common foods that I didn’t like. The main thing that seems to bother some people is that I’m okay with eating the same things over and over again, week after week. I made an effort to stop a couple of times, but keep falling back into old habits. For me it’s just food, and some people take the process of eating and sharing it too far. It makes sense that someone would want to share food with their friends or family, but then it’s not enough that the person politely took a bit, they want you to take more, and they turn it into a big production.
If I had to make myself puke on cue, I could probably do it just by concentrating on corned beef and cabbage.
So yes, as an adult my diet is very limited. It sucks. I’m not trying to offend anyone, but I was a picky eater as a kid and bad parenting gave me non-physical food issues on top of it. And sometimes I try to give myself a break because being very attuned to slight variations in food smell, taste, and texture probably gave an ancestor of mine an advantage over a competitor who ate something that gave him food poisoning and died.
While I am not self-diagnosing myself as a supertaster, I do react more strongly to stimuli than other people. Noises, taste, the feel of certain fabrics on my skin, etc. So if I like to keep the volume on the tv down, stay away from strobe lights, be careful wearing wool, don’t wear turtlenecks, why is it that much stranger to stay away from foods that smell like ass and, as stated before, feel like eating boogers?
I think that is the key part here and it needs to be reposted every time we have one of these threads. I know I’m picky. I won’t go to someone’s house unless I know what they’re serving or a restaurant unless I can peek at the menu first. As long as I can have one tiny thing that I like, I will be super happy with the company. I won’t ask people to accommodate me. I won’t make faces or complain. I’m happy eating crackers and cheese.
I’m a fairly picky eater, though I will try almost anything once and I can force most things down if I don’t get a huge helping and there’s plenty of time to eat it.
Most of it for me is texture. I can’t stand many things that are soggy or mushy. I can manage a few bites and then my brain will suddenly think “OMG this is nasty” and I can feel my gag reflex trying to trigger and my stomach clenching. That’s generally the end of it. Bananas. Oatmeal/porridge/grits/cream of wheat/whatever. Eggs that are anything other than hard-boiled or omelet-ified. Cereal with milk, though I will eat both dry cereal and milk by themselves. Sandwiches where the bread got wet (can’t put tomatoes on, though I like them in isolation). Greasy pizza. Anything with too much tomato sauce. Ricotta cheese. Cooked spinach. Most leftovers and TV dinners don’t heat/reheat well and are by definition soggy, so I never buy frozen entrees and except for a few things that reheat acceptably, once I’ve finished the first round, the leftovers have to go in the trash because I’ll never eat them.
The rest of it is items that just don’t taste good to me. Peanut butter, yogurt, green peas, guacamole, fruit punch, bacon, ground beef. I love Coke but aside from that I don’t have much of a sweet tooth and think a lot of things are just too sweet and make my stomach feel like I ate a brick, which eliminates most cookies, pies, a lot of candy, and those nasty snack cakes.
Onions and garlic are body reactions: I get headaches and nausea even from small amounts and have to avoid them. For some reason, Snyder’s Honey Mustard & Onion pretzels make me throw up every single time I have more than 4 of them. Which is too bad, because I love them.
It’s not always consistent and sometimes I’ll be willing to eat something and other times know that I just can’t/don’t want to. I have never gone to a restaurant where I couldn’t find at least two entrees on the menu that sounded appealing (except Applebee’s), so it’s not socially crippling. I can be polite. It generally manifests more in the privacy of my own home where I basically eat the same foods over and over again.
I consider myself to be very lucky to be able to eat what I want now. When I was homeless, I’d eat anything that didn’t smell spoiled. Wait, that’s not true. I remember crying because my milk was spoiled and I was so hungry and it was all I had. I shared it with my cat, but he wouldn’t drink it, so I drank his as well.
Now that I don’t have to do that, I eat what I want and I don’t eat what I don’t like. I’ll try anything, but if I don’t like it, I won’t try a second time. I don’t have to.
I don’t like beef. Taste and texture. If I’m at a run and the food is hamburgers, I’ll eat the side dishes and give the meat to someone else. I don’t like mushy overcooked veggies, but if I have my choice between them and a hamburger, I’ll eat the veggies.
You see, I don’t consider myself a picky eater, since I almost never encounter food I can’t eat. But I also hate a certain slimy mouthfeel that I’ve found in both sushi and slimy seafood like oysters and mussels, though the latter I can stomach on a limited basis.
Texture is also part of the reason I don’t like lobster, but I like that same texture fine in shrimp, so there must be another factor.
But, like I said, I almost never run into this as a problem, as no one cooks this stuff at home around here, and I have a choice when eating out.
I am a picky eater. The things I don’t like could be due to texture or taste. Sometimes it’s also the smell, which is linked to taste anyway. In college, one of my roommates once heated up something (a Reuben sandwich, I later found out) while I was still asleep. The smell was so bad that it woke me up and made me feel sick to my stomach. If something makes me feel ill just by the smell, why would I want to eat it?
Being a picky eater doesn’t mean you don’t try new things, though. I don’t like seafood, but I’ve gone so far as to try California rolls and eel sushi when out at restaurants when they were offered to me. My husband calls them “adventure noms” when we go grocery shopping. Sometimes we find something I’ll eat again, sometimes we don’t. If we buy too much stuff that I end up not liking, I can get depressed about the money we’re wasting on stuff I won’t finish, and that puts me off of trying new things for a while.
People in this thread and the other one have claimed that you just have to keep trying it to like it, but my mom served sweet and sour Chicken Tonight I don’t know how many times when I was a kid, and I never liked it. It tasted disgusting every single time we had it. My brother still hates ham, and we had that often enough, too. As a teen/adult, I kept trying shrimp any time it was available for a while, thinking I just hadn’t found any that’s prepared a way that I might like, and that still tastes horrible, too. How many times do I have to try something before I’m allowed to say I don’t like it?
For me, the big problem is food allergies. There are common foods that can send me to the hospital almost immediately, possibly even kill me. This can really put a crimp in your diet.
Because I am willing to try things NOT on my forbidden list I"m a very odd cross between an adventurous eater and someone completely paranoid about what’s on the plate.
For me, the most dangerous things wasn’t flying airplanes, it’s eating in restaurants or anywhere I"m not in complete control of the food.
Or, better stated: I eat and enjoy more things than some people do, evidently.
“Picky” is a stupid descriptor for something which is involuntary. The word usually describes someone who has strong tastes or preferences in a particular area, like someone who is really careful about their knives always being kept sharp, or hates hearing the word “utilize.” Picky might describe food snobs who won’t eat fast food because it is all processed & greasy etc. Or vegans who won’t eat food cooked in a pan that once cooked meat.
People who have a limited food palette are the opposite of picky. They can’t pick, because it isn’t choice-driven, okay?
People who can’t understand why what tastes great to them might be like eating a glob of cow snot to some other person appear to me to suffer from a lack of empathy, compassion and tolerance. Greater failings than not being able to enjoy the taste of cilantro, in my opinion.
While I entirely agree with you, in my experience, those whose diets are limited due to medical reasons are, in fact, frequently accused of being “picky”.
OK. I remembered an example I can relate to. When I was in Malaysia I went to dinner with a bunch of friends at a friend’s place and they ordered out a bunch of meat pies called murtabak. They turned out to be nothing but thick greasy slabs filled with gristle. It was the nastiest, most inedible damn thing I ever tried to choke down. I couldn’t do it. There was nothing else to eat except a salad made of raw onions with a dash of beets. I had to fill up on that. Maybe my most unhappy meal ever. Gristle, eeewww yuck! Coincidentally, or perhaps not coincidentally, I went back to being vegetarian not long after that.
Can’t we all just…get along? Here, have some chicken nuggets tossed in balsamic vinegrette and cilantro.