food, pickyness rambling
One thing in life that I do not think I will ever, EVER have a capacity to understand by any method whatsoever:
Picky Eaters
I can understand a food allergy or perhaps some sort of stupid traumatic sensation association. Brains are weird like that and if a food will straight up kill you or like, make you WANT to die, that's fine, sure. I get that. I can't take penicillin for similar reasons.
But "I don't like that" is so alien to me. "I didn't like <food> as a kid so I've never eaten it my whole life!"
Fucking...how? Because it's never WEIRD food. It's not "Oh, I don't like the texture of sauteed horse lips and I just refused to eat them!" It's "I won't eat [some standard-ass vegetable like carrots, or all vegetables as a whole] unless they're COVERED IN CHEESE!"
It is so baffling to imagine a child of less than ten years going NO I DON'T WANT CARROTS and the adults present going "Well, I guess we don't eat carrots now". How did you get away with that? I'm so confused.
And I know I talk a lot about how I'll eat virtually anything (and I will) but there's plenty of foods I don't like! Olives (specifically black olives in dishes. alone they are fine!) and mushrooms actually have an unpleasant texture to me. But you still...eat them? I have a hard time articulating my confusion because I feel like I am trying to use the dictionary of a language I don't speak to relate a nuanced concept.
Why do you not like free food? Someone is giving you this food, and you didn't buy it, what is the problem. It's not poison just eat it. I don't get it.
(I will admit there are some foods I am not sure I could eat, though. Like...brains. And surstromming.)
Yelling into the void aside, in all seriousness: If you're picky about some food for reasons outside of trauma or allergy, how or why?
"I don't like how it tastes/smells" isn't good enough, I don't like how a sauceless, mozarella-substitute, olives-only Dominos pizza smells but if you handed me a slice on a plate for dinner I'd eat it.
I'm being pretty judgey here but I am legitimately curious of the inner workings of just NOT eating something ~because I don't wanna!~ because it's so far out of my goblinesque "shove it in your mouth if it's free and won't kill you" experience.
re: food, pickyness rambling
@Edelwood It's very strange for us, because there are foods where, if we know they're present, we won't eat them, but if we don't, we'll actually enjoy the flavor of them. Like onions; we can't eat onions if we know they're there--we actually gag. But we really enjoy a number of dishes that can't be properly prepared without at least a little bit of onion.
It also has to do with texture, so that could be related there, though. If the texture is sufficiently noticeable for us to know it's present, then it's unpleasant.
re: food, pickyness rambling
Huh! I understand that, yeah. Thank you!
re: food, pickyness rambling
@Rosemary
Fair, but I also count that as one of the totally reasonable reasons! It just didn't occur to me while writing. (a friend's brother in high school was like that and struggled to eat anything but a very very narrow range of foods)