Picky people and food aversions

   Picky people – food-wise – annoy me. I know they shouldn’t annoy me. After all, it’s their own business what they choose to eat and to reject. If they choose not to eat fresh white truffles from Perigord, that just means more for me, doesn’t it? As if I’ve ever had a fresh white truffle from France. Or even a stale one.
   I think there are two reasons they annoy me. The first has to do with their unwillingness to even taste a particular ingredient or preparation. Just try it, for chrissakes! They’ve never had it, yet they “know” they won’t like it. I’m not talking about a meal of raw monkey brain. (I seem to recall Johnny Mathis saying on the Johnny Carson show over thirty years ago that this is a delicacy in some parts of the Philippines.) I’m talking about perfectly normal ingredients. So I’m puzzled that otherwise intelligent people can be so illogical, so willing to obey their a priori assumptions based on no evidence whatever. If they have at one time tried horseradish and found it too sinus-clearing, fine, or if they’ve tried mustard greens and disliked it, fine. But I’m referring to people who have never allowed certain foods to cross the barrier of their teeth; hence, they can’t possibly know their taste.
   These are people who live their entire lives consuming an extremely limited number of foods, preparations, and ingredients that the world has to offer. They’ve consumed only, let’s say a hundred of the lebenty billion items that can be safely and enjoyably consumed by humans. They breathe their last after a long life without having tasted saffron or truffle oil or even a raw garden fresh tomato. Even if they have to their credit a Nobel Prize, their lives contain a sad, empty place. I hasten to add at this point, that they annoy me only in this small area of life; they might be perfectly nice, kind, ethical, considerate, etc otherwise. This has to do only with their tortured rationales for their food aversions – or the absence of even tortured rationales, as in simply saying, “No, I don’t wanna.” For the rest of the post, click here.