Some folks would call me a picky eater because I don’t like seafood. Lobster, shrimp, fish, anything from the water. I just don’t like the flavor. I try. I will cook it for my Wife. But just can’t seem to enjoy it. I wish I liked it. There is some flavor there that I just can’t seem to get around. Or maybe it’s a flavor that I don’t really taste that others enjoy.
Mushrooms are on the list too. I will tolerate a few on a pizza, but I just assume not. I would never order them.
I have changed quite a bit from when I was younger though. I love asparagus now. Artichokes and avocadoes are also a recent favorite.
It’s odd. Broccoli used to be a favorite, but now, ehh it’s OK. Don’t really care for it that much anymore. I prefer it raw. That’s good.
My Wife does not particularly like cooked carrots. One of my faves.
So. It comes down to there is no accounting for taste. Both with art and food. And times and tastes change. At least they have for me.
To the OP - amarinth, the foods you like might change. Don’t let anyone force you. And watch out, tastes like our sensibilities can change too. Shag carpeting and bell bottoms are probably just around the corner.
Depends on how prone to nausea you are. If you’re like me, and get motion-sick and can be emotionally upset to the point of nausea, it might be more. I suspect some parents who make a drama at the dinner table with their picky-eating kids might make a kid who is prone to anxiety, like me, into even more of a picky eater.
From what I know of food aversions, no.
You could, however, have something like acid reflux or diarrhea hours later.
Remember, some of us who have physical reactions to certain foods are trying to spare you the gruesome details, if we can…
I understand food aversions, because I have one, based on being sick as a child after eating a particular food. Don’t like to go near it now. But I think you are missing my question. My question is not about physical reactions to foods that have a history of upsetting your stomach or causing other nasty symptoms. I am talking about disliking the taste or texture of a food to the point where, once you have made yourself eat it, there is still a chance that you will throw up later on just from…I’m not sure…remembering the fact that you ate it? I am basing the question on this statement from Neptunian Slug:
Nowhere does it say that food aversions are at work, or that certain particular foods would cause a physical illness. All it refers to are foods that are not LIKED. So, what I don’t understand are the following questions:
Are there some people whose food dislikes are so bad that could throw up hours later based on JUST NOT LIKING the food?
Are people whose digestive tracts are particularly sensitive that they literally find themselves often in a situation where there is NOTHING they can eat that won’t make them sick? (That is, foods that are liked taste-wise, but unfortunately impossible to eat due to the sensitive GI tract.)
Looks like the rodents-du-jour ate my post of this earlier.
I’m at 24.1; Normal.
Mind you, I’m not too fond of BMI’s accuracy of healthiness. But, my weight has gone down as I’ve gotten pickier about what I eat over the years. Where once I’d’ve caved in to peer pressure to eat what was being served, now I’ve learned to enjoy saying “no, thank you”.
I would guess “yes” if… capitalized IF… the psychological revulsion factor was really high. For example, if three hours after a meal that I really didn’t enjoy but managed to choke down through sheer will power, my host revealed: “You ate human meat!”, I would most certainly throw up.
However, the difficulty with that is that we’re dealing with picky eaters who presumably recognize the yucky foods and manage to chew it up and swallow it, then puke much, much later on. That seems more unlikely to me, but not impossible. You might be able to fight off the psychological malaise just long enough for the sake of decorum, knowing it was ultimately a losing battle.
It’s possible if they are in a situation where the choices are extremely limited and have just the right combination of physical intolerances and/or allergies. That would be rare though, IMHO. Example: If you were severely lactose intolerant and couldn’t eat gluten, an Italian restuarant would be a challenge. Helloooooooo salad! (No croutons please! And just oil and vinegar dressing!)
I’ve got two food aversions: mint and honey. Both of them were caused by me getting violently ill after eating them. Mint is the stronger one because I was a kid. (It was the Mint-cident.)
Anyway, I could make myself vomit right now if I think about mint. It’s that strong an aversion. (TMI: I actually did it once when I was sick but not throwing up. I thought it would help if I did throw up, so I thought about mint and it worked. I felt much better, too!)
But that would be me deliberately making myself sick–thinking about it on purpose to drive myself into nausea.
I have one of those! Plain yogurt. I was violently ill with some kind of stomach bug when I was nine years old. After a few days, I was feeling better. I ate some plain yogurt, then… round two! The stomach bug found its second wind and I was back in the bathroom calling Ralph on the big white phone. (Plain yogurt revisited!)
This was not the yogurt’s fault, but I can acutely nauseate myself if I think of the taste of it because that experience is forever etched into my primitive, lizard brain.
Right…it seems unlikely to me, too (OK, barring the human meat factor…that may very well make me puke, as well! )
I agree that going to an Italian restaurant is a mistake if you can’t eat gluten. But, again, some of these situations seem very…situational, and the picky eater types seem to have trouble with this all the time.
I meant just not liking the food, rather than not liking it because you have a food aversion to it, brought on by having been sick from it. As you point out, you only have a genuine “food aversion” (I think that is actually a technical term, if I remember right from my psych classes) to TWO foods. I have an aversion to one food, also from being sick after eating it, and Swallowed my Cellphone has just one as well. That is clearly different from a “picky eater” who can feel nauseated to the point of wanting to throw up from many different kinds of foods.
Help!!! I am still confused by exactly what the nature of the picky eater problem is! Am I just hopelessly dense?
Well, if someone decided that they were going to hyperfocus on the fact that they ate something they didn’t like, they could probably make themselves ill, just as I can. Basically, if you can convince yourself that a food makes you feel nauseated, you can become nauseated thinking about the food–no matter what your real experience was with the food. But I think it would require effort.
I think you’re expecting “picky eater” to be some clearly-defined category. It isn’t. In this thread we’ve seen it applied to (1) people with food allergies/sensitivities, (2) people with religious dietary restrictions, (3) people with moral/ethical dietary restrictions, (4) people who have aversions to certain foods, and (5) people who don’t want to eat what someone else is offering and therefore get labeled “picky”.
It’s like when someone tells you that they are a vegetarian. Are they vegan? Veg-aquarian? Ovo-lacto-vegetarian? Ovo-lacto-meato-porkchopo-vegetarian? As we’ve seen, sometimes even the putative vegetarian has difficulty describing what they’ll eat, so they just go with the catch-all: “vegetarian”.
So with “picky”. I find the texture of mushrooms to be nausea-inducing. I’m allergic to berries and nuts. There are other things that I prefer not to eat, ever (e.g., Imo’s pizza). I am “picky” about what I eat.
The point, though, is that it does not matter why I’m picky about what I eat. If I don’t want to eat something, the polite thing to do is accept that, and move on. The implication here is becoming that being “picky” is socially acceptable only if there is some approved reason for being picky. Which is rude.
It’s probably something that screams at them from their primordial lizard brains and mis-identifies the food as “poison”. It’s probably something very instinctive which yells “This is not edible! No! Do NOT eat!” And it can be really hard to over-ride your instincts.
Texture is a big one for me. I tried a vegetarian bacon (yeah, what the hell was I thinking?!?) and the texture was so artificial my brain was yelling “Do NOT eat!”
I have a similar reaction to bubblegum ice cream, of all things. I don’t dislike the flavor or the texture, really, but my gag reflex flat-out refuses to cooperate. My lizard brain apparently took that “don’t swallow your gum” thing to heart.
(Veggie bacon is better in sandwiches or crumbled in salads than it is “straight” - the texture thing is far less noticeable.)
I agree. I felt nauseous thinking about my grandfather eating breaded beef brains, nearly 20 years after it happened (beef brains have become ickier since then, because of mad cow, though I thought they were icky then). But it would have to be something incredibly icky or morally repellent for that to happen. I’d certainly get sick if I found out I had eaten human meat (I think it would be worse, actually, if I hadn’t “really not enjoyed” it), cat meat, or dog meat.
Further back than that, actually. There are slugs that display signs of learned food aversion. Of course, being able to sense and avoid poisons, like food aversions allow you to do, is a very useful trait in an evolutionary sense. And it’s much worse for an animal to misidentify poison as good to eat than the other way around is, so there are going to be false positives.
In the other thread on picky eaters, I speculated that there are two types of picky eaters.
Type I: Has certain food dislikes, but is generally willing to try unfamiliar dishes and unfamiliar cuisines as long as the dish doesn’t contain any ingredients they don’t like.
Type II: Doesn’t have a dislike of specific ingredients, but is unwilling to try new dishes and new cuisines. An example would be my parents, who never want to go to a restaurant that doesn’t serve standard American food.
Now, there’s where it gets complicated. Whether you have this problem all the time is going to depend largely on your culture and where you live.
My parents and anu-la 1979’s brother are both unwilling to eat Indian food. It comes up as an issue all the time for anu-la 1979’s brother, but almost never for my parents- there are no Indian restaurants around them, their friends don’t eat Indian food, and the only time an Indian restaurant would be a possibility would be if they were visiting their younger relatives (and we know not to suggest it, unless we want to rile them up a little ;))
I find it makes a difference where you live, too. I keep kosher (so I don’t eat meat, poultry, or non-kosher fish, including shellfish, in restaurants) and don’t like most raw fruits or vegetables (don’t like the textures). In the Bay Area, that is not a problem. Restaurants (with the possible exception of really authentic Chinese restaurants) will almost always have some vegetarian option other than a salad, so I can find something I like. I have a much harder time when I go to visit my parents in a small town in western Maryland and go to the restaurants they go to- most don’t have many vegetarian choices, or many fish dishes that don’t contain catfish (not kosher) or shellfish. (I know that there are restaurants in western Maryland that aren’t like this, but my parents generally don’t want to go to them :()
Another example- I guarantee you that my aversion to cat or dog meat is not going to be a problem at any restaurant in the US. But if I went to some areas of China, it might be (I know, not so much any more).
So whether your pickiness is a problem depends on your social circle as well as what you will or won’t eat.
I really think this bears repeating. If I decline something, accept it and move on - I do not owe anyone an explanation about a food choice/preference.
That is definitely true. For the record, I am not thinking of keeping kosher or being a vegetarian in the same category as being a “picky” eater. My questions are more about what makes a person so physically adverse to certain foods, not about choices made for religious or ethical reasons. Most of my kosher & vegetarian friends are far from what I would consider “picky.” Many of them truly miss the kinds of foods they avoid eating.
Also, I am not trying to make a judgement about “picky” eaters, I am just trying to understand the phenomenon.
I absolutely agree with this. I think I mentioned this in the other thread, in regards to the guy whose friends can’t accept someone turning down a beer, and they have to keep inquiring why the person doesn’t want it. If they don’t want it, they don’t want it!!!
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