Apparently I was extremely picky as an infant - that is, I demanded everything be mushed smooth and couldn’t abide lumps.
My mum was quite convinced this was her fault for pureeing my food for too long and letting me get used to it. But I discovered later in life that I have a tongue tie. I can’t reach a large proportion of the roof of my mouth with my tongue (apparently this is unusual?) and things get stuck easily.
I got over these issues by the time I was a teenager, and am now completely normal. Well, in that regard anyway.
Turns out that my mother was (and is) a bad cook. She seems to hate foods that have taste and texture. Her favourite flavour is cardboard.
Anyway, I was over 20 by the time I discovered that food could be a pleasure. And I have become a good cook myself. But as a kid I basically survived on potatoes, since they’re pretty hard to mess up. Potatoes are still the only vegetable my eldest brother (now 55 and a grandfather) will eat.
But me, yes. I will try almost anything, and I have learned to love many things that would have freaked me out as a kid. Including Brussels Sprouts: you folks have probably never had them prepared properly. My Brussels Sprouts are delicious. But Brussels Sprouts must never be boiled, and I suspect that boiling them is the reason so many people profess hatred of them.
I wasn’t a super picky eater but there were a number of things I wouldn’t touch. My mother thought everyone should at least try something before deciding they didn’t like it and what she cooked was all there was, eat it or wait until tomorrow. With six kids she couldn’t really afford to cater to our whims. There was at least one occasion when one of my brothers wasn’t allowed to leave the table until he ate his dinner. He sat there until bedtime. Mom didn’t try that one again. Another time I hid some food I didn’t like under the seat of the bench I was sitting on. It was discovered somewhat later, very smelly. I also recall that one time at my Grandmother’s house I noisily refused to try spinach. After a short visit to the back room whereupon Mom’s hand visited my backside, I ate the spinach. And decided that I liked spinach. I voluntarily ate it after that.
As an adult there is very little that I won’t eat. I love trying new cuisines and exploring different flavors. My brother that sat at the table all evening now will eat stuff that scares even me. Another brother is an excellent sous chef. Only my sister is still limited in what she likes to eat. My six year old nephew (my sister’s son) thinks the only edible food is chicken nuggets and french fries. To her credit, my sister tries to introduce him to a wide variety of foods even if she herself doesn’t like it.
I was the least picky kid in the world. We were fed all kinds of food, and expected to eat it and like it. As an adult, there are very few foods I don’t like (e.g. haggis, limburger cheese, kidneys and turnips).
I was a very picky eater as a kid, and still am to a degree, but I am trying to change that. I outgrew it a bit into my twenties, but dated a woman who was INSANELY picky, which actually made me seem adventureous by comparison.
When my fiancee and I started getting close, there was a strong incentive to be less picky- in her family’s household, picky eaters dont exist, because gagging on food/picking stuff out of it is seen as very offensive. Her and her family grew up very poor, and simply ‘not liking’ something wasn’t exactly a luxury they could afford to cater to.
I appreciate her for helping me own up to my own pickyness, which I would shield myself through excuses- for a long time I would tell someone I was ‘allergic’, figuring that it would be rude of them to challenge my ‘condition’. But my fiancee pointed out in her family, that wouldn’t work- they wouldn’t hesitate to call you out on it because they could see through the lie.
Fortunately for me, much of what her family cooks (traditional Mexican food) is quite good, and even the stuff I don’t care for the taste of isn’t ever revolting. I’ve taken the habit of always trying a bite of something I either A. Never had before or B. Never had in a few years.
I was a very picky eater as a child, and was allowed to be, as my father is a picky eater so wouldn’t make us eat anything we didn’t fancy. I actually think it made me rather spoilt. Vegetables were a major stumbling block.
And then, at 19, I went out with an older man, who mixed with a lot of vegetarians. Suddenly I was faced with my very idea of hell, but didn’t want to be the spoilt picky child surrounded by these sophisticated older people.
So I sucked it up and learnt to eat vegetables. And then anything else.
I now eat anything. And find picky eaters annoying. I’m afraid I have a ‘grow up!’ reaction to adult fussy eaters, and could never date one.
I am allergic to mushrooms, bivalves and palm products. I am mildly lactose intolerant, and too much fat makes me queasy and always has. I di have a number of foods I am not fond of, and some I dislike outright but that comes from 40+ years of trying foods.
My mom had a rule that you had to try anything once. We also didn’t get handed a filled plate, food was served to us in serving dishes, and we served ourselves. The rule was that once it hit the plate you ate it. Even while very young my brother and I liked a great range of vegetables, spinach, brussels sprouts, lima beans, that kids traditionally don’t like. I think it is because my mom preferred fresh or frozen veggies instead of canned so we never got the whole cooked to mush veggies. We also got exposed to strange ones like artichokes and salsify.
There was a 6 month period when we had my grandmother living with us and we were given already plated meals and expected to clean our plates which lead to the ONLY food argument I ever had growing up. This horrid horrid meal based around a ham loaf. You take picnic ham and grind it up, and make a meatloaf out of it - you know, bread crumbs, egg to bind and it was hawaiian/polynesian with the pineapple ring and whatever on top. Absolutely nasty to a young kid. Sort of like making spam at home instead of schlorping it out of the can and cooking it. This was the only time I had issues, because I tasted it, as per the original rules, but my grandmother insisted I eat the whole damned slice and I refused. I thought it was terribly unfair to have the rules changed on me like that. I was 4 years old … kids that age need stability - you do not just change rules without lots of discussion and making it clear that the rules are going to be changed.
I think that getting kids to eat does involve making rules and sticking to them firmly.
I think they need to have their own little semblance of control. Even if it is just in the option of not eating something after trying a single bite, or in ability to decide that they want a meal of nothing but mashed potatoes if that is all they want of the foods offered. I like serving dishes and choosing my portions and what I want to eat. For kids it works. Just like the advice to get kids involved in making dinner to interest them in eating something new or different - if they can interact with food other than by shoveling it into their mouth it seems to make the food interesting to them.
Yes, I was very picky. Some basic foods that I couldn’t eat as a child are:
almost any vegetable, except for peas and kale
onions
mushrooms
any kind of cheese
It didn’t help that my mother (who otherwise was/is a good cook) used to cook any kind of vegetable to a slimy mush (it was still the preferred style in the seventies).
Ironically, as today I’ve been a (ovo-lacto-) vegetarian for many years, I had few problems with meat then. If I had kept my childhood food aversions, I would have starved to death a long time ago. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not a picky eater nowadays at all, just not as uber-picky as in my childhood.
No, or at least I wasn’t allowed to be. My parents made me eat everything, otherwise I’d sit there all night until I had. I eat everything now, including things like blue cheese which I hated as a child.
I wasn’t particularly picky as a child, although there were a few things I didn’t like (seafood, beets and spinach come to mind). My parents never forced anything on me.
Now I’m less picky, but I still don’t care for fish or cooked spinach, for instance. I’d eat some to be polite, though.
I don’t remember being picky, ther were certain foods I didn’t like - parsnips, mushrooms, cream, but apparently I was a right pain at restaurants because I’d never want to eat what I’d ordered!
My dad was a meat and potatoes guy and my mom was never the most talented cook. Dinners were almost always a meat, a starch, canned vegetables, and something like cottage cheese, iceberg lettuce salad or a canned fruit. Or, she would make a hot dish, again served with a canned vegetable and another side. We never had seafood of any sort. Black pepper was spice. Spaghetti came boxed by Chef Boy-ar-Dee. More than once I was I left at the table, alone, pondering the poor children in some sub-Saharan country who would love whatever I was refusing to eat. That ended when I suggested Mom use my allowance to ship my plate to said sub-Saharan country.
I am no where as picky as I used to be. I still have texture issues with things like mushrooms and olives. Still do not like seafood of any sort. I love fresh vegetables, many fresh fruits, and will at least try new things.
Oddly, I do find that when I do make ‘real’ meals now, they always include a side of something like cottage cheese or a salad (iceberg lettuce optional).
According to my mother, yes: my mother is an idiot. When I was 10 the doctor told her to stop trying to force down my throat foodstuffs which made me puke and which weren’t particularly easy to digest (liver, kidney, brain, cauliflower, artichoke) - he’s one of my heroes to this day.
There are things I like and others I’m happy to avoid (most pastries, overboiled veggies, potatoes), but with a few exceptions (fried liver, “guts”, cauliflower) I’ll hold my nose mentally and eat about anything if social circumstances demand.
Mom made us clean our plates. Portions were generally reasonable when I was a child/teen; as a teen, it was usually me serving and I always made the person being served tell me how much - once you’d asked for something, you were supposed to eat it, though. Whenever I thought my brothers were suffering from “his eye is bigger than his stomach”, I would stop serving and remind them they could ask for seconds. This is how Dad did it, and how his mother did it, I learned it from them. The biggest problem in this respect took place between me leaving for college and the nephew being born: Mom recovered the serving spoon, but she insisted in serving us the portions we could and would eat at 15. We were having “portion size” struggles in our 20s and 30s :rolleyes: At one point she was insisting that I have another piece of chicken and I said “Mom, if you call me ‘fatty’ just one more time I’m going to make you eat the bathroom scales… yet you keep trying to feed me more. I don’t expect logic from you but Jesus Christ, can you use it just once?” That finally made her stop trying to feed me more than I ask for, with the added bonus of not being called “fatty” again.
At one point I had to poke my brother about not serving adult-sized portions to a 3yo and expecting him to finish them. No matter how small you cut it, a half-pounder steak is way too much for someone that size, specially after pasta in tomato sauce (adult portion) and salad and before a piece of fruit… The portions became more reasonable, but they still make him clean the plate.
This is exactly the food groups my niece will eat. I call it the beige food group, no bright colors, no green in particular, and similar textures.
My kids (most kids I think) would have eaten only from the beige group if allowed. Over time I convinced them that it was OK to try new things. I wouldn’t force them to eat any more than they wanted, just a taste and then I would never bug them again. Like shy fawns I lured them out of of the beige group so that these days they are fairly open to giving foods a second chance. My 29 year old surprised me over the holidays by eating some mushrooms. Yes, they are beige too but the texture is what they didn’t like.
I was labeled a picky eater by my parents as a kid. The truth was that I just didn’t like the food they liked. These days I will eat almost anything edible.
In some ways very picky: I remember my mother, in exasperation, sitting down with me to make a list of five ingredients that I wouldn’t eat, with the understanding that she could cook with any other ingredients and I’d eat it. I was maybe six at the time, and I burst into tears, horrified at what unexpected monstrosities she could foist on me if I complied. I never did agree to make the list. (She was a great cook, so the fault was mine.)
But if a food had the name of a foreign country or nationality in it, I was all about it: I didn’t get to travel to other countries, but I was happy to be an adventurous eater by trying, say, Swiss Orange Chip ice cream.
Yep. If something looked yucky, I didn’t want to eat it. My parents were of two different minds about this. My mom would let me not eat something if I tried a couple of bites and didn’t like it. My dad yelled at me if I didn’t eat everything, or if I made faces while I ate it.
Net result: Mom introduced me to alfredo sauce, which I now like, and scalloped potatoes, which I think are gross. My dad tried to force me to eat Taco Bell-style Mexican food and orange juice; I still hate both of those things.
I was a terribly picky child. I attribute this to growing up in India with my aunts for the first four years of my life and having their cooking, consisting of deliciously spicy yummy foods, and then coming to the States and having to eat my mother’s horribly bland foods or American foods. I was skinny as a rail and refused to eat anything. I remember Mom and Dad both chasing me, begging me to eat something, anything. I clearly remember having Cheetos and candy packed in my lunchbox in the desperate hope that I would eat something at lunch and not just ignore my lunchbox like I always did.
I also wet the bed until very late. This sounds unrelated, but on later observation I think it is - it’s all part of the ‘trauma’ of being uprooted so severely. The doctors never found a cause for my bedwetting, and it didn’t stop until ELEVEN. Funny enough, in hindsight, I realized I started eating regularly around 11, too. Perhaps I finally started feeling like I fit in.
Now? I am not a picky eater at all. I am particular and won’t just eat anything, but I’ll try most things once and have a wide and varied diet.
I wasn’t terribly picky as a child, but the one time my mother made me clean my plate has put me off 3 bean salad for 50 years. as I has gotten older, my tastes have broadened greatly. This has really been evident in the last 5 years or so Now I’ll eat just about anything that doesn’t eat me first.
I am not a picky eater and I have never been one. I’m on top of the food chain and I celebrate that by being willing to try just about anything placed in front of me.