Is there any logical reason that people should have such different preferences for food, to the point that some people can’t eat certain foods at all? Is the disliking of foods enviromental or genetic? Is the body perhaps telling someone who doesn’t like, let’s say green peppers, that he really shouldn’t be eating green peppers (similar to women’s cravings during pregnancy)?
I have no real idea why people are “picky” eaters. I do know that it gets on my last nerve. I’ve lived with two. My X husband and now my son. I thought my X was just immature. Now I see the same kind of behavior in my son. A reluctance to try anything new. My son can take one look at something and decide he isn’t even going to try it. So for him it isn’t simply a matter of what doesn’t taste good. My husband didn’t like onions or green peppers when we first got married. He didn’t like to bite into an onion, cooked or raw. He didn’t like the way it felt in his mouth. His mother was a lousy cook and he was not exposed to much variety when he was growing up either. But that isn’t the case with my son. Often I think that “pickiness” has a lot to do with maturity. The older my husband got the more things he was willing to try. He eats a wide variety of foods now.
I tease a few of my friends because they don’t like onions. I tell them you aren’t an adult until you learn to love a big slab of Vidalia on your hamburger.
My mother has simply gotten weird about what she eats as she ages. She’s rather phobic and started in on this preservatives thing about 10 years ago. She claims they make her tongue feel funny. She’s also paranoid about meat. She won’t eat anything unless it’s cooked to death. She won’t eat ground meat of any kind, sausage or lunch meat. She’s afraid of micro bugs like E Coli. She really gets on my nerves. She came over and had a piece of pizza one day last week. It was an everything so it had a tad of Italian sausage on it. I had to leave the room because it got on my last nerve to sit there watching a 65 year old woman pick stuff off of her pizza! It’s childish.
I really don’t think it has that much to do with your body telling you that “you shouldn’t” eat something. I’ve known too many people that had allergies to certain foods and they were the very foods they loved the most. Food preferences most certainly involve more than just taste. Sight, smell and texture are also large factors in the appeal of different foods. I wouldn’t eat liver for years, not because of the taste but because I didn’t like the mealy texture. I have a grown friend that won’t eat anything green but butter beans. If she sees anything green in her food she won’t eat it. Even little specks of oregano in spagetti. I guess she’s afraid it will “taste green”?! Weird huh?
Needs2know
I think something must have happened during the person’s childhood to instill some dislike in certain kinds of food. Take me for example. I hate vegetables. No, it’s worse than that–I can’t eat vegetables. Just the smell of veggies, or even thinking about eating them, makes me sick. Yet I know that veggies are good for you. Doesn’t matter, I can’t eat 'em.
I don’t remember a specific incident that would cause this revulsion to develop, but my mother assures me I ate veggies as a baby. It must have happened sometime around toddler time. Then it just got reinforced when my parents tried to make me eat veggies. I’m as stubborn as they are, so I outlasted them.
Do you really want a bean-counter in your mouth? Do you know where they’ve been?
I think a lot of it is what you’re used to. If you grow up not being expected to eat food that’s different (whatever different might be), you might develop an attitude that ‘different is bad’. This holds true for many things other than food, BTW.
My father-in-law is a living example of this. Typical meat-and-potatoes guy. Anything that’s not readily identifiable as a hearty, mid-western meal, and he’ll probably say that he doesn’t like it, or even that he’s allergic to it. Naturally, when the in-laws visit, I cook stuff that he’s likely to find a little unusual, but stuff I grew up eating, and that Mrs. ricepad and the kids love. Beef tongue, for example. Freaks him out - I love it.
Wait, I didn’t mean it like THAT… When I read the subject, I got this picture in my head of little accountants running around your mouth with their ledgers, making double-entries for everything you put in your mouth.
Then I re-read the post. It’s not… umm… well, you know what you were thinking…
Who do you describe as a “picky” eater? The guy who want’s only cheese on his burger, simple. Or the guy who want’s cheese, lettuce, no tomato, mayo, 2 pickles, no hot peppers…, complicated.
I’ve been called a picky eater just because I want cheese and only cheese on my stuff. And when I ask for it at a fast food place, it’s a “special order”. Whip out the books on how to make this one.
I love tomatoes and onions. But most of the time when I eat them, I toss them in the middle of the night. 
I’ve always been a picky eater. I’m certainly better than I was when I was a child, but I’m still a bit picky. Some of it is visual (asking me to eat shrimp is like asking me to eat overgrown maggots - sorry for the mental image there, but that’s really what it looks like to me) and some of it is taste. Certain things just taste like - oh, what’s a nice way of putting this… shoot… well, like vomit warmed over. I can’t help it. Certainly I know that from a logical point of view, lots of people eat these foods, but I can’t help but cringe when I see them. Hey, lots of people are cannibals and lots of people eat bugs and dogs, but it’s just not right for everyone.
On a similar note, my oldest son is so picky that he weaned himself from breastfeeding after I had a spicy meal, and refused to ever breastfeed again. 90% of the jars of baby food I tried to feed him never made it past his tongue. To this day, he has never swallowed steak, hamburger or hot dogs. Being a picky eater myself, and sympathizing greatly, I leave him alone, and allow him to exist on mostly Cheeze Whiz and cereal (after being assured by several Doctors that he’s pretty healthy despite being rather pale).
I honestly don’t think it’s a learned behaviour. My son’s been picky since he was 5 months old. I’ve been picky as long as I can remember, and am assured that I was picky even before then. It must be a genetic thing, to have so many foods taste and look disgusting.
This has a personal value to me.
My daughter went to India for four months.
Even though she’s a vegetarian, and ate a lot of Indian cuisines before she left, she just couldn’t get used to much of the food she had to eat. Much of the curried items taste rancid to her. (She was living with another family, and couldn’t prepare much for herself without being insulting to the host family.)
She slimmed down quite a bit so I should be grateful (she was always too heavy), but I fear if she goes back she could become malnourished, missing balance as well as calories.
I want her either to begin to like the food before she goes back, or promise to fill in with substitutes.
I’m just not sure her exchange family will understand that tastes aren’t universal, since they are poor and never have gone 40 miles from where they were born, so everyone they know likes the same things.
I don’t know if this is a basis for disliking foods, but there is a genetic basis for certain tolerance: Frequency and Distribution of Lactose Intolerance. It wouldn’t seem that unreasonable to have a linked gene that also results in the dislike of milk products - it’d certainly forstall a lot of trips to the bathroom and having to buy large quantities of room deodorizers.
IMHO a great part of it is just being spoilt. When food was scarce people ate what they could grab without being picky. Now that food is plentiful, those of us who had mothers that made us eat everything have pretty much learnt to enjoy everything. But those who have been spoilt will always be picky. I suppose it is their right but being flexible in this and other matters makes life easier and more enjoyable for you and those around you.
I am very easy to please in matters of food and in general and I would not like to be with a picky person. A woman who is picky and spoilt has very little chance with me.
People are just looking for material comfort and will not invest effort or discomfort for a greater reward. All that time that they spend looking for the perfect meal or the perfect whatever, I can spend in pursuits more rewarding to the spirit (my spirit I mean, maybe not theirs).
We have gotten to the point where people are lonely because they are living alone and they are living alone because they are so inflexible and so unwilling to adapt to other people. This is a disease of rich societies.
I’ve been accused of being a picky eater most of my life. Seems most of my accusers are indiscriminate hogs.
Why do people care so much about my tastes that they see fit to comment, and try to make me feel defective for not liking the things they do?
By far the most annoying is “Why aren’t you having any of the chicken?” I shouldn’t have to explain, but it’s usually something like “I’ve had enough chicken already… (mumbling) in my life.”
Fact is, I simply don’t get much enjoyment from food. Never have. Food to me is mostly fuel.
>> Food to me is mostly fuel
OK, so eat whatever is available. I can’t stand it when you are trying to organize a group of people and they can’t agree on anything. It just makes any progress impossible.
Once I was trying to organize a group of people. We were to travel as a group from DC to Boston. It was hell and I swore never to do it again. Even before we started out everybody wanted to change the plan to suit themselves. then we all pile into a rented car and every few minutes someone has a need. “I need this, I need that, I am hungry, I need to pee, I …” At least you can tell kids to shut the f**k up but my goodness! enough already! It seemed impossible to find a plce to stop that would be good for everyone. The discussions go on forever abou the most inane things (McDonalds restrooms versus… gimme a break!)
I have better things to talk about. Yes, I will not ask you why or why not you ate chicken. It is absolutely of no interest to me. I hate it when the food seems to be the main topic of the conversation. Just eat it (or don’t) and let’s talk about something worth talking about. Talking about the food bores me to death. But people who are picky tend to make the subject of their pickyness the subject of the conversation and impose it on others.
If I go out on a first date and she spends a long time with the menu discussing every little thing and not making up her mind… well, that is not a good start. The menu is not an interesting topic to discuss. You should be able to find something you like easily and move on with the conversation.
I would think that it has a lot to do with varying degrees of sensitivity to taste and texture. Someone who takes minimal pleasure in food, who regards it as fuel and little more probably doesn’t notice small variations. Particular tastes don’t disgust him, but neither do they thrill. I have a friend who is this way. She doesn’t understand why people will go on and on about particular foods because it all tastes the same to her. She assumes that other people must be able to detect subtle differences that she is unaware of. The upside is that she has never been a picky eater.
I can think of a couple other examples of what I mean. My friend’s son is extremely sensitive to food textures. As a toddler he could not eat things that were soft and sticky-like mashed potatoes-because they made him gag. He couldn’t enjoy puddings or yogurt, things like that. He also, until recently, didn’t like chocolate, which has a similar “coat the mouth” feel to it.
My son has sensitive skin and can tell, by feel, whether his t-shirt is all cotton or a cotton/poly blend. According to him, the poly blend is itchy. (I am allergic to wool, and can determine quite accurately the percentage of wool in a garment by touch.) But the other night, his sister complained that her milk tasted funny. I tried it, and realized that it had started to turn. My son had already finished his because he hadn’t tasted the difference.
I am going to disagree, to an extent, with sailor’s assumption that pickiness comes from being spoiled. Certainly, hunger is a powerful motivator, and people will eat all sorts of things to quell it, but that doesn’t mean they like them. I don’t think you “learn” to like something by being forced to eat it.
I grew up in a family where there wasn’t much extra money. We ate what was served or went hungry. Which would have been fine, except that my parents also had the “clean plate=good moral character” belief and I was often forced to eat things that I found truly repulsive. I did not acquire a liking for them in this way. When I left home I avoided many foods. It was only years later that I was able to try different things with an open mind. I eat many more things now than I did 10 years ago, but it has been a battle in some ways. I still cannot eat green beans because I have such negative associations with them.
I used to hate vegetables and it was a batlle with my parents (which they usually won). I am not saying that made me like vegetables but it did instill in me a sense that the world does not revolve around me and that you cannot always have what you want. Years later I started forcing myself to eat more vegetables and less meat and, gradually, my taste has changed to the point where I eat mostly vegetables and hardly ever eat meat any more.
people are just to spoilt these days whether it’s i don’t like certain foods, I have to have things my way, I can’t lose weight (yes you can! stop eating!), I can’t quit smoking, etc. We are spoilt and we pay for it in our own unhappiness. Spoilt people are not happy people, much to the contrary.
Comparing ‘Logic’ and ‘preference’ is an exercise in futility from the get-go.
Why did God make apples the forbidden fruit instead of Brussels sprouts? Why do people always buy the same brand of bottled water when the same stuff, from the same hydrant but with a different label is on sale on the shelf next to it?
Why do we talk about ‘the birds and the bees’ instead of what the poodle is doing on the bride’s leg during the outdoor wedding that you planned all year? You could explain to the kids that the reason for the wedding in the first place is so the groom can do that to the bride himself…or already has at least once too often.
Why would someone buy a cabbage patch doll and never take it out of the box?
Why do I reply to these questions instead of someone who knows the answer?
I’m sorry I haven’t sources, this is something I either picked up in a class or read in a book. But human children will generally eat what their parents tell them is acceptable (and when young will generally try to put everything int heir mouth). This makes sense since the adults will usually have a clue as to what is edible and what is poisonous. As humans get older they become more reluctant to try new foods. This also makes sense since trying that pretty berry over there that you have always been told to avoid will probably make you sick. So food dislikes or aversions tend to last and a willingness to try new foods is low and much lower if not introduced by authority figures. I do not think there is anything at all to the idea that finicky eaters are spoiled or eating a variety of things makes you more moral. I’m not sure how well this relates, but the early settlers from Europe in the Americas almost starved to death (well some did) primarily because they avoided all the abundant food that they didn’t recognize. They didn’t want to eat the seafood, because the European waters were bad. They didn’t want to eat tomatoes because they thought them poisonous. etc. I’d imagine that diversity of diet increases as various foods become available to children.