You can define “picky eater” any way you want to, but do give your definition.
Did your mom/parent/whoever make you clean your plate? How did the fact that s/he did or didn’t affect your eating habits today?
My mother did not make me clean my plate. We didn’t have any food battles. For this I say: GOD BLESS YOU, MAMA! She didn’t make a wide variety of things and there were some things I liked and some things I didn’t, but I never had to sit there and eat something or even “just try one bite.” When I was a kid, I was afraid to try new things, but she never made me try something if I didn’t want to. It just wasn’t an issue. She didn’t seem to see my unwillingness to eat something as any reflection on her or something she had to correct.
As a result (I believe it is a direct result), today I will try anything and enjoy all kinds of cuisines and foods. When I got out on my own, I wanted to try different food and started exploring different tastes and especially different vegetables. I love to cook and probably own 200 cookbooks. I like to read them like novels.
I was visiting a girlfriend one time and at the dinner table watched her reduce her ~5-year old son to tears because he didn’t want to eat a few carrots on his plate. It was heartbreaking. I could see it was a pure control issue. (BTW, that son, now 30 is totally screwed up, but neither of them can cut the apron strings.)
My parents made us finish everything on our plates, but I wasn’t terribly picky. I am not a picky eater now (but I had to break the “clean plate club” habit).
I’m not sure if I would have been described as ‘picky’ or not, but I was definitely ‘selective’. Things I didn’t eat when I was a kid, which I love now:
cheese (outside of a grilled cheese sandwich)
mustard
anything on a hamburger other than ketchup
any vegetable other than peas, green beans, and corn (though it turns out this was mostly due to my mother’s preferred cooking method, which involved mass quantities of both boiling water and time)
pie of any sort
whipped cream
macaroni and potato salad
I was a picky eater then, and I’m almost as much a picky eater now. And by “picky eater” I mean someone who’d prefer to go hungry over eating food they don’t like. I recall when I was a kid we had “sixth grade camp”, where all the kids in sixth grade had to go off to camp for a week. I ate very little while I was there (I mostly survived on lots of water and orange juice), except the one time they served fried chicken. I was sick the whole next day because I didn’t know at the time that you shouldn’t gorge after a fast.
It made me determined to choose what I eat, and convinced me never to try again the foods I was coerced into eating. It also made extra mess for her since I kept trying to smuggle food out in my pockets so I could flush it down the toilet.
My Mum did insist I eat everything she laid out or go without. I chose to go without.
After some concern and visits to specialists, they came to the conclusion that if it wasn’t harming me, then don’t worry about it. And so to this day I eat very little variety of arguably unhealthy foods, and from what I can tell I am perfectly fine.
I don’t eat vegetables, or fruit, or most grains, or most meats. My diet is only made up of about five things, sometimes permutated into different forms but more often is not.
Yes, I was picky. I was picky and mocked by my asshole mother endlessly. Why? Because I had the gall to like good food. I liked seafood, I liked shrimp and lobster, clams, oysters. I liked roast beef, not fucking hamburg and cube steak. I liked mangoes and fresh pineapple instead a bruised sack o’ bananas/apples/oranges. I liked Italian pastries instead of sack o’ ding dongs/ho-hos/or whatever crap cakemix cake was in the house. I didn’t like fruit punch, soda, or cheese doodles. I didn’t like the cheapass ghetto crap shovelled in by all the other kids. Yeah, I was picky. (No, I never got obese or even fat, except a little now, with age.)
Do you mind sharing what those five things are? I’m quite interested. I know we don’t absolutely need all the variety that is available to us. People have survived and thrived for millennia on very limited diets.
I was a picky eater then, and an unadventurous one now although I eat lots of things I wouldn’t eat as a child. Hamburgers and hot dogs are still eaten plain, but I’ll eat onions in casseroles, garlic in food, and lots of different vegetables and meats. I remember many nights crying at the table because I couldn’t get up until I tried everything - just one bite. It didn’t hurt me in the long run at all.
No, I wasn’t a picky eater at all, am not now, though like anyone there are things I like and things I don’t. And my mother, being a child of the Depression, was big on two things…clean plate club, and the No-Thank-You helping (which I think came from Girl Scouts) where you had to at least try one forkful of an unfamiliar food before rejecting it. Now Mom wasn’t an adventurous cook, but we had lots of casseroles. If I had been one of those “foods can’t touch each other” people I would have starved. I’m not an adventurous eater now…you won’t catch me wandering into foreign restaurants and ordering just anything without examining the list of ingredients, but I am by no means picky. And I love potlucks, when everything is all helter-skelter on your plate and sometimes things combine in weird ways!
Yes, I was a picky eater, especially about vegetables. I liked broccoli, green beans, corn, spinach, and raw carrots. I hated cauliflower, squash (which to us was the mushy orange frozen stuff), peas, cooked carrots, lima beans, and brussels sprouts. I wouldn’t touch the cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving. I used to leave the crusts when I ate sandwiches or toast. Now I like all kinds of vegetables (except that mushy orange squash), and I always eat my crusts, but it’s meat I won’t eat.
Very picky as a kid, picky as an adult. No clean plate club thankfully. I ate a lot of horribly overcooked American food in the 1970s. I’m happy being in the Southwest now where I can always find some sort of Mexican/Southwestern type food.
New research (that I can’t find a cite for right now) shows that picky eatingness is actually genetic, and that certain foods taste very bitter to picky eaters. That’s not something you can outgrow, so I’m going to venture that a true picky eater stays that way forever.
I was a very picky kid. It’s taken me 40-odd years to become somewhat less picky. It’s only in the past few years that I’ve begun to like vegetables at all (and I still don’t have raw veggies very often, save for baby spinach, which I’ve discovered that I like). For me, a lot of my pickiness comes down to texture. And, honestly, I hate the fact that I’m a picky eater.
I wasn’t really picky but there were a few things that I would NOT touch, like beets. Nothing Mum tried would make me eat them, and I still won’t touch them to this day.
