This is the reason I almost always clean my plate, even if I know the amount of food is going to make me uncomfortable if I do eat it all.
Oh, and another Navy*-related habit - I eat fast. I’m almost always the first person at the table to finish…
I have soooo many food quirks.
I also eat pizza and lasagna in layers.
I trim the edges, fat, gristle, etc off all pieces of meat. I inspect each bite before eating.
I am extremely picky with eggs. I can eat the cooked egg whites, and I can eat the cooked hard yolks. But once the yolk is mixed with the whites, liked scrambled eggs…I can NOT stand the smell and can’t eat it unless its mixed with cups and cups of cheese. Lol.
So far, I haven’t met anyone with that same aversion to eggs as I have.
I eat lasagne in layers but pizza is fine the way it is. Both taste better cold the next day as breakfast.
I don’t mind fat in smaller amounts if it is properly crispied in cooking but if it is all warm and rubbery it sucks. I hate gristle, and the cartilage on poultry bones, or the tiny little bone flakes/dust that you frequently get with pork chops.
I have a mouth textural issue with finding something hard or crunchy in a food that is not supposed to have little crunchies, like fish bones, tiny bone shards, seeds in grapes. Getting a shell or bone fragment in my mouth means the entire mouthful is getting removed - trying to swallow it makes me want to vomit. [Apparently when I was extremely young I got a fish bone stuck in my throat and ended up in the base ER getting it removed.]
I am just now getting to where I can have onions sauteed in butter - back in the early 80s I was pregnant, and having serious constant nausea issues, and my roommate of the time insisted on making liver and onions at least twice a week. She about drove me insane with it and I developed a serious nausea reaction to the smell, and even the smell of just onions in butter would trigger the problem. I had to screw with the recipe for french onion soup and simply simmer the onions in stock instead of gently rendering them in butter for hours.
I will not at at serve yourself buffets.
My son likes chicken nuggets from McDonalds. He likes to methodically peel off all the breading. Eat that first and then the actual chicken.
It drives me crazy.
I let my food sit until it is cool. Not cold, but definitely not piping-hot; a comfortable temperature for eating. I let my plate of food sit for 5-10 minutes. I don’t understand why people think that’s weird. I hate burning my mouth on super-heated right-out-of-the-oven food.
Here’s a really odd one: I eat Oreos like cookies, without first deconstructing them in any way.