A friend of mine is a picky eater, and he was just telling me that he was involved in a study with other picky eaters, wherein it was determined that picky eating was a genetic trait. I will have to try to find it online, but there it is there.
Here’s an article- it states that 78% of picky eating is genetic, 22% environmental.
Toilet issues. Inability to use a public bathroom, or urinate if someone else is present, inability to defecate in any but your ‘own’ home bathroom, etc. etc.
It’s a very large issue for many folks. I’ve had patients who didn’t defecate for weeks because they could not overcome their toilet issues.
But…people don’t. Just look at my earlier post in this thread. The fact that a summer program I went to actually had requirements for what we were and were not ‘allowed’ to eat, and the fact that people I know have called me ‘crazy’ and insinuated that it was my problem that I didn’t like a certain food, should both suggest that it’s ingrained in our society that food preferences should be stamped out and/or criticized.
This picky eater crap starts in childhood when a parent is willing to give the child an alternate menu instead of making them eat what was cooked. When kids decide they don’t want to eat something, usually they make the decision without even trying the food in question, I find.
That never would have flown in my mother’s house. Her philosophy was “You’ll eat what was cooked, I’m not running a restaurant here.” Were there things I hated? Sure, I wasn’t a big liver fan, but I ate it anyway, because it was better than going hungry. Over time, I actually learned to tolerate liver, not to mention feel the same way with other things I wasn’t crazy about, i.e., eggplant, turnips, squashes of all types, etc.
The other thing is that you never know what you’re going to get served when you’re invited out someplace, and to refuse to eat something is bad manners, and potentially embarrassing to your parents when you were a kid.
Unfortunately, my (now ex-)wife didn’t feel the same way – she would indulge the kids’ whims about what they didn’t want to eat and cook something alternate for them. Net result was a larger food budget (back when I really couldn’t afford it), lots of wasted food, and today, kids that won’t eat a lot of things.
Did I mention she was my ex-wife? Just one of the reasons she is, BTW.
I wonder at what point in human history it became possible for someone to be a picky eater and not starve to death?
I can’t generate a lot of empathy for picky eaters. After all the work our ancestors did to reach the apex of the food chain, picky eating seems a little – disrespectful.
You’d be surprised - you may indeed respect her wishes to eat what she likes, but I’ve run into people who do not.
I’m not a picky eater at all, but like everyone there are some foods I don’t like. I’ve actually taken to telling strangers I’m allergic to certain foods because I’ve had people argue with me when I tell them I just don’t care for it… as if I don’t know what I do and do not like. I’m not saying your matzoh ball soup sucks, I’m saying I just don’t like matzoh ball soup. At All. Not from your momma, or your Aunt Beatrice, or anyone else.
Some people take it personally, so if I’m in a situation with someone I don’t really know sometimes I opt to say “no, sorry, can’t eat peanut butter” because telling people I don’t like it gets me odd looks.
Well, sometimes you choke it down and still hate it, but it turns out that your mom just sucks at cooking various foods and as an adult you gain a whole new appreciation for those foods when you find there are other ways of cooking them. Someone mentioned this up-thread, and my husband was the same way. He thought he hated asparagus, mushrooms, peas, squashes, and a bunch of other veggies. Nope, she just wasn’t good at cooking vegetables - his dad thought that you had to boil them into bleh, apparently, and that’s what she did.
My mom let us avoid some foods if we wanted - liver and canned spinach are the few that come to mind.
I had a serious onion aversion that I’m still working on, triggered by a childhood vomiting incident. Those are hard to overcome since that’s such a hardwired thing, but at this point as long as the onions aren’t raw or cut very large, I’m good. Most raw ones still trip my “ew, sulfurous!” trigger but I’ve made a ton of progress with major effort at very slowly introducing small amounts of onion, starting with it heavily cooked and pureed.
(Oh yeah, and I’m a vegetarian, but I don’t consider that in the “picky eater” category. I used to eat meat just fine; this is a choice.)
To be fair, your patients are in some pretty extreme toilet situations!
Yeah, that’s another one. I was once going to have a friend over for a weekend, and she promised me she wasn’t going to poop the entire time. I thought it was a little strange, but she seemed sincere.
From the article linked in the OP (and also, see posts # 10 & 13, above):
Oh, for cryin’ out loud. They’re battered-and-fried, high-fat, salty foods. Of course they like 'em. They’re tasty! Show me a “picky eater” who only eats steamed Brussels sprouts and liver, and then you’ll get somewhere with me. :rolleyes:
This, I think, is where the difference is. For a picky eater, it’s better to go hungry.
There are lots of things I dislike the taste of and will avoid eating–most berries, bell peppers, tomatoes. I wouldn’t order anything off the menu if it contained these things, and if you give me a salad with these things in it, I will eat my way around them. I won’t make a big deal about it, and if I have to eat these things to be polite, I can, will, and have.
However, I WON’T eat mushrooms. If they put mushrooms in something, I don’t eat it. I can’t pick them out because I might miss some. Mushrooms are just a total no-go for me, and I have no idea why. It’s very different than my dislike of other types of food.
Yeah. If I was exposed to a prehensile rectum I would problably neither eat nor crap for a good long while myself.
See, Celtling would disagree with you there. she would gladly not be bothered with eating ever again, and seems to very seldom feel hunger. (She’s not terribly picky though, just needs to see a food a few times before she tries it.) One poster above mentioned a younger brother who is medically underweight. The folks we’re talking about would much prefer hunger to the sensation of unusual tastes or textures.
This surprised me more than anything. I always assumed that people who had known true hunger would take food any way it came. I have seen the same thing while working in a soup kitchen. We’d serve scrambled eggs, fresh fruit, and pancakes until they ran out, then a rather pathetic mix of veggies and ramen noodles. There was one lady who’d always wait for the ramen to come out, because she couldn’t stand the powdered scrambled eggs.
I wonder what kind of ‘toilet’ issues people had when they and their tribe were trudging across the open tundra, following the mastodon herds and it came time to take a dump? I wonder how many humans were killed ‘mid dump’ by other predators because they needed a little extra privacy along the way?
It’s kind of hard to describe.
His mother eats a VERY bland diet, will only eat canned vegetables, ceasar salad and steaks without spices. She assumes that everyone else eats the same things. She and I had a discussion where she said that ladies in India don’t eat spicy food while pregnant.
His father bullies people (him, me, his bro, his mom) to eat different foods. If you say you don’t like something he says you’re wrong. They were serving lobster - it’s not my thing, it’s not my husbands thing, FIL didn’t believe us.
They never eat at a normal time - we’ll be invited for dinner, told to be there at 6 and wind up eating at 11.
My FIL will grab food off of serving plates and put it on your plate without asking and expect you to eat it.
It’s really, really bizarre. Honestly, at home we eat normal meals, at a regular time. I cook things that I like and he eats them. If I KNOW that he hates something, I’ll make him an alternative selection.
Honestly, as soon as the bizarre dining conditions are removed, he eats like a normal person. His favorite take out now is Indian food.
We were making a shopping list for a trip we took with his parents (long story) and wanted apple sauce. MIL said “Well, we’ll have to get sweetened because that’s all W will eat!” I said, “Uh no - we don’t eat products with added sugar at home - unsweetened will be fine.” She looked at me like I said we sacrifice kittens to Satin.
Well, not brussels sprouts and liver, but my husband loves turnips, green salads and green beans.
To be fair to my mom I am still fairly picky, just not as picky as I was made out to be by everyone else. I won’t eat seafood and I will always, always think asparagus tastes and smells like pee. I have other food issues too, mostly texture related, but as I get exposed to different ways of preparing food I’m finding that texture can be changed through cooking in different ways and flavors can be dramatically different as things are paired together in the cooking process. I wish I had understood that as a child. My life would have been much easier.
So? He shows remarkable good taste is all. I’d like to see a few follow-up studies on the one cited by Alice The Goon. I would have placed the percentages the other way around. IME picky eaters were catered to too much as kids. Eat it or go hungry worked for me.
Although I should note that my tastes have changed dramatically as I’ve aged. I eat tons of things now that I would have actively avoided 20 years ago.
I think the more important thing about them is that they are pretty bland. Not just fatty and salty, but without a huge amount of flavor otherwise.
Most things that are better for us have stronger flavors than a french fry or a chicken finger.
There are a lot of foods that fall into that “acquired taste” category that picky eaters generally don’t like. A number of foods that are commonly avoided by picky eaters are very strong, distinctively flavored in some way, or bitter. I suspect that most picky eaters have a better sense of taste than I do, and have a more limited sense of what’s an appealing mouth feel (which might make sense. I love textures, not just in food but in fabric or surfaces. I’m feely).
This is me. I don’t like bitter flavors, so I don’t drink coffee or beer, and don’t enjoy a lot of stronger flavored foods. I have forced myself over time to expand the foods that I eat, but some flavors just don’t work for me. And I don’t like the texture of most fruit.
Given the eat or go hungry choice, I always chose go hungry. I don’t consider it rude to not accept food when someone offers it to me, either. If I don’t like what you have on offer, I’ll just decline. If you press me, I’ll tell you it’s because I don’t like what you are having, thanks anyway.
My food selection is wide enough that it doesn’t prevent me from living my life. I was very careful not to let my pickiness to rub off on my kids; they both eat a wide variety of foods.