Oh honey…not to say you’re wrong. Everybody has their own way of doing things. But I pick up my pork chop and tear it into pieces and gnaw the bone first because it’s my favorite part. (Or at least I did before my hand got messed up. Now my husband has to cut my meat up into bites.) I don’t have to worry about what that would look like out in public since we rarely can afford to eat out anymore. About a hundred years ago I read a short story about a girl who, after eating pork chops, would rub the grease onto her face like a lotion, to make it glow. She also didn’t shave her legs. She was my hero for a while.
Can’t eat with a coat on? Check.
Can’t eat with a hat on? Check, with the exception of one particular restaurant that has no place to put a hat.
And I must wash my hands and face directly after eating. Face, because food on the face equals massive acne. Hands, because I’ll want to play my guitar right after eating, and I don’t want to get nasty chicken grease on my beloved axe.
Those reasons were aquired in my teens, and though they no longer apply, the habits remain.
I love, love, love chunky peanut butter.
I don’t like peanuts.
No, I can’t explain it, either. 
S’aight. I loathe cheese of any sort but could eat pizza every day.
My food quirks are too numerous to mention but, I won’t eat sandwiches from a deli because the counter people often don’t wipe off the knife after cutting each sandwich. I realize that worse things go on in restaurant kitchens but it’s easy not to think about it if I can’t see it. I watch someone cut (god forbid) a tuna sub and then think they’re going to slice my sandwich bread and the whole deal is off.
I’ll sometimes order a sandwich with lettuce or pickles, but if I get a PB&J or grilled cheese, and there’s a tiny bit of lettuce or pickle in it, I’m a bit grossed out.
Although I don’t mind leaving food (in fact, I believe it is best to eat only what you want/need rather than pushing everything down you), but I absolutely hate to leave meat. I feel that if the animal died so I could eat it the least I can do is, well, actually eat it.
So meat tends to get forced down, even when I am full.
Ahh, so I do have food quirks after all! I totally save the best for last, and get the worst over with at the start. I will eat the crust part of a slice of pizza before the part with the topping, and I will then save the most topping-rich part of the slice for the last bite. I look down on people who don’t eat the crust…though I will sometimes give my dog a bite of it.
This is part of why I like cinnamon rolls so much. (I mean apart from the cinnamon and butter!) I can eat them exactly like everyone else, and get the dry yucky outside first, slowly spiraling in on the most delicious nubbin in the middle.
That reminds me of eating cake. I have to do it in such a way that preserves the precise cake to frosting ratio in every bite.
Shoot! I forgot the one that I got tricked into as a kid. My dad always said we should save the best part of the meal for last. This was really just a ploy to get us to eat our veggies but I still do it to this day.
Even if I am having a stir fry or the like, I will eat the components in the order of how much I like them saving the best part for last.
I don’t like frosting on cake. If I’m eating cake, I remove all frosting with surgical precision. I’ve gotten very good at it over the years.
I do that too!
And I also hate leftovers - very, very, very rarely eat them.
I’m not crazy about leftovers, but I have to cook in such a way that I create them. Cuts down on kitchen time.
I don’t want to eat food given to me by others. I don’t mean when someone cooks for me, but when someone sends me away with food for later, I really don’t want it. This might be if I’m visiting family, and my mother makes a sandwich for me to eat on the plane on the way home. Or if someone sends me a care package. I know, that’s pretty weird!
My father taught me to do this. Said it was an indication (to others, presumably) that you weren’t so poor as to be starving, since you could throw away food. I still find myself doing it once in a while and it always makes me think of him.
My own food quirk: I have to salt almost everything. The joke in my house is that I salt everything except ice cream . But I do have some justification. I have Addisons Disease and therefore my body can’t regulate the sodium in my blood. I’m always craving salt!
Oh yeah! This! One of the reasons I’ve come to dislike the holidays.
I absolutely love vanilla frosting. I will eat it alone with a spoon. I will eat other people’s leftover vanilla frosting with a spoon.
When I eat cake, I eat the cake part first and save the frosting for last.
Oh, yes! :smack: Toast with butter in the middle and dried edges: wrong, wrong, wrong!!
When I eat a hamburger, I eat it keeping the side with the greater amount of bun on the bottom. So generally that means that I start eating a hamburger “upside down” (i.e., with the “muffin top” piece on the bottom) and sometimes I have to flip the burger over if the ratio gets reversed.
My life got a lot easier and less guilt-ridden when I acknowledged to myself that I needed to plan meals for a new thing every night. Because having nothing but leftovers in the freezer doesn’t mean that I will eat the leftovers, it means that I will usually just skip the meal. Or order out. I can tolerate reheated chicken and Chipotle burrito bowls. Everything else just gets tossed when I’ve finished the first round.
I have to cut off all visible fat and gristle from meat. It just gags me. I can eat it on bacon but only if the fat has been browned and crisp. I looooooove pork rinds but don’t let myself buy them.
Icing is the whole reason for eating cake. I try to make sure that every bite of the cake contains at least some icing.
Sheet cakes baked aboard ship sometimes end up rather thicker at one end than at the other. Most Navy cooks ice the cake so the finished product is equally thick from one end to the other. I always tried to get a piece from the end where the icing was thicker than the cake…