Picky Eaters
Wednesday, December 20th, 2006Dear Clarice, regular commenter here, is a self-confessed Picky Eater, and has inaugurated adultpickyeaters.co.uk in order to seek out others like her. There is also a blog.
I can eat pizza if it is margherita, I can eat some pasta, scrambled eggs, peanuts, bagels, fajitas (depending what’s inside), even smoked salmon. But I’ve still never eaten or even tasted a fruit or a vegetable (though I can eat potatoes in all their forms).
So, yellow and brown stuff, then.
Although I am very much not a picky eater, I can certainly understand how someone could not like certain foods. I don’t care for liver at all, at all, so the possibility of someone feeling that way about curry or sweet-corn is an easy concept to grasp. But for someone to have never tasted any fruit or vegetables seems quite improbable and extraordinary. How is it possible to know that you dislike a particular food, without trying it? Just as I am annoyed by people who refuse to listen to new music, so picky eaters are frustrating characters. They seem to be sealing themselves off from vast tracts of sensation, human experience… life.
Of course, one might say there are many practices and activities that I am unlikely to try. I am reminded of a character in Salman Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus. The man says he tries everything twice. The first to see if he likes it, and the second to see if he was right the first time. He ends up fucking a donkey. However, I think act of just ‘tasting’ something differs from, say, art or sex, in that it is even more primative, instinctive. We do not approach the taste of a strawberry with the same cultural baggage and preconceptions that we approach a piece of music, or an act of intimacy… Do we? Clarice suggests that maybe we do. I shall watch out for more thoughts on this.