I’ve never understood picky eaters. I’ll eat anything — and I mean anything. I’ve always eaten anything and everything, even as a little kid; I knew from reading the comics pages that kids as a species didn’t like liver, or Brussels sprouts, or spinach, but I liked all of those things just fine. And I could never understand the parents that cooked “around” their picky kids, either, because that never would have flown at my house. Mr. S and I couldn’t say we didn’t like a food until we’d tried it, and “trying it” meant taking three bites, and we had to chew the bites completely, not throw them down our throats like a pill and wash them down with a drink, either. And even if we’d established that we didn’t like a given food, we still had to take the three bites. I hated so few foods that it seldom posed a hardship for me, but still, I had one friend in grade school, Woods, who seriously would not eat anything except candy and beef. Literally. She hated everything, especially foods she hadn’t tried, and I couldn’t believe it when I’d go sleep over at her house and she’d just…refuse to eat something at dinner. “I haaaaaate pork chops! I want a haaaaaaamburger!” And then her mother, who had three other picky-eating kids to deal with, would get up and make it for her! Incon-thee-vable! And I’d just eat my pork chop, and my mother made a superior pork chop to Woods’s mom’s, but I ate it, because I liked everything, and Woods’s mom would always look at me and sigh wistfully, “Look at that. That plate is clean!” And then Woods would come sleep over at my house, and I’d have to duck into the kitchen for a conference with my own mom.

“Ma?”
“Chicken Florentine.”
“Yay, I love chicken Florentine! Except…”
“Peas.”
“With mushrooms?”
“Of course with mushrooms.”
“Yay! Except…”
“Does Woods want milk with dinner?”
“Well, see, that’s the thing. Woods…doesn’t like spinach.”
“Well, she can pick the spinach off, then.”
“Woods doesn’t like chicken either.”
“I see. Well, Woods can have an extra helping of noodles.”
“Woods doesn’t like noodles.”
“‘Woods doesn’t like’ — how can someone not like noodles?”
“I don’t know. She just doesn’t.”
“They’re noodles!”
“I know.”
“How is Woods with peas?”
“Bad.”
“And the mushrooms –”
“Of course not.”
“What foods does Woods actually like?”
“Hamburger and caramels.”
“Hamburger and car — you know, if Woods thinks I’m cooking her up a caramel-burger on my short-order grill, she can think again.”
“But –”
“I am not running a restaurant, Sarah. You march right back upstairs to your room and you tell that friend of yours that I will serve dinner at seven-thirty, and your friend can sit here and watch the rest of us enjoy a delicious meal of chicken Florentine on a bed of noodles, and peas with mushrooms as a vegetable, like normal people!”
“I didn’t –”
“What kind of parent allows a child to subsist on ground beef and refined sugar?”
“I don’t –”
“Has she even tried chicken Florentine? How does she know she doesn’t like it if she hasn’t even tried it?”
“Ma, I really –”
“I should really have a word with her mother. ‘Doesn’t like noodles,’ for God’s sake.”

And so it always went with Woods. Or with another grade-school friend, Red, who required at least half a bottle of ketchup per meal in order to continue existing. My mother would stare at Red as she busily evened up the mashed-potato/ketchup ratio with massive noisy splurps of Heinz, and she’d purse her lips, trying not to announce yet again that she did not, in fact, run a restaurant. (My mother reminded us frequently of the businesses that she didn’t run — like when we didn’t make our beds or pick up our rooms [didn’t run a hotel], or wanted an advance on our allowances [didn’t run a bank], or shucked off our shoes in the foyer [didn’t run a Japanese temple], or failed to shuck off our shoes in the foyer [didn’t run…wait for it…a barn]. But we heard “not running a restaurant” the most often, until the day my brother came back with, “No kidding — at a RESTAURANT, if you HATE scallops, they DON’T serve you SCALLOPS ANYMORE.” And then he found out that, at a restaurant, they don’t send you to your room for back-talking either. Anyway.)

I just never understood it — hating foods I hadn’t tried, or hating a lot of foods. I had foods I detested, of course, but all the stereotypical foods that kids hate, I loved. And I still do. I love anchovies. I love olives and capers. I love endive, and I love mushrooms — raw and cooked. I love stinky, ripe cheeses aged in thousand-year-old Carpathian-mountain-range tombs. I have eaten circus peanuts and Funyuns and the nasty cookie-dough candy at the movies. I have eaten watermelon sherbet with chocolate sprinkles. I have spread mustard on croissants. I ate an eggplant-and-bologna sandwich once…with Miracle Whip. I ate honey-filled ants once, too. And brains. And tongue. And tripe. I think sauerkraut kicks ass. It doesn’t matter if it’s haute cuisine or straight out of the trailer-trash cookbook; I’ll probably like it, or at least not hate it. Name a nasty snack — I’ve eaten it. In fact, I’ve invented a couple — the peanut-butter-and-tomato sandwich, for starters, and before you open up Outlook Express and send me an email all “ewww, NASTY,” don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it. It sounds kind of sketchy, but it’s really good. The tomato cuts the richness of the peanut butter and keeps it from sticking to the roof of your mouth. And another thing — if you see me eating a PB&T, or kidney pie, or some other food that grosses you out, don’t look at it with your face all pinched up like you smell a fart and say, “Dude, what is that? You like that? Ew, that’s disgusting,” and shudder all dramatically. I don’t know how your parents raised you, and if you don’t like what I eat, that’s fine — more for me — but commenting negatively on the meals of others during the meal in question is really bad manners. Anyway. It’s fine not to like certain foods. Everyone has different tastes. But to wind up like my ex-boyfriend, Slim, who wouldn’t eat my mother’s potato salad — which rules all within its sight, by the way — because it had “too much white in it”? I mean, what? Of course it’s white. It’s made of potatoes and mayonnaise and onions! I tried to point out the celery greens that make it so good and crunchy, but Slim wouldn’t have it. “Too much white,” he said.

In all fairness, though, I have a few food hates of my own that don’t exactly follow logic. Milk, for example. I hate it. HATE it. I’ve always hated it. My mother likes to tell an apocryphal story about how it’s her fault because she once ate a whole sleeve of Oreos while breastfeeding me, but I don’t know if that’s it. I just know that I despise milk. There’s something about the smell…and the way it clings to the glass…gack. I like all other dairy, and I take my coffee with milk, but I haven’t drunk a straight glass of milk in fifteen years and I never will again if I don’t have to. I can’t even watch someone else drink a glass of milk. Or drink it out of the carton, with all the little dried milk bits clinging to the cardboard…oh, man. I have to lie down for a minute.

Okay, I feel better now. Except…you know that layer of fat that floats on the top of a glass of whole milk? Ohhh dear. Have to lie down again.

Okay, sorry. Next food on my hate list: raisins. I despise the raisin. The raisin is the Hope Diamond of breakfast pastries; it ruins everything it touches. Raisins in cooked foods get all gushy and leaky, and they bleed into the surrounding food, and they have that icky chewy skin that sticks between my teeth, and picking them out doesn’t work because they leave a little raisin-y wound behind that tastes all rotten and sour. It’s weird, because I don’t mind other dried fruits at all, and I like blueberry muffins okay and everything, but raisins — bleah. And I really hate it when I think I’ve gotten a raisin-free oatmeal cookie or something, and then I bite into it, and waaaay back in my sinuses, the raisin alarm goes off, and I remove my teeth from the cookie and look down into the bite mark, and there’s…a raisin. Shriveled. Poo-colored. Evil. MOCKING ME. And what, I ask you, is wrong with a plain old ordinary oatmeal cookie? Fine on its own! Why must a cinnamon bun also have infernal bug-like crusty fruit pests? Not necessary! Why do people add raisins to everything? Coleslaw does not need raisins! Rice pudding does not need raisins! “Ants on a log”? No thanks! Log only! No ants! Don’t put raisins in my ice cream, don’t sprinkle raisins in my coffee cake, don’t try to sneak raisins into the Chinese food! And the yellow raisins? Yuck! Don’t give me that “sunshine raisins” business. Fruit has no business looking like tiny little sacs of pus.

Although I’ve crafted a détente with eggs in the years since my childhood — when I couldn’t fully enjoy Saturday-morning cartoons, knowing that a plate of scrambled eggs awaited me in the kitchen — I still cannot stand the idea of a cooked egg white. As long as it accompanies something else, like in egg salad or as part of a deviled egg or something, it’s okay, but on its own, all bland and sweaty and squishy, I just can’t take it. I haven’t eaten a fried egg since high school, and I don’t anticipate eating one ever again.

Nor will I ever knowingly eat a rutabaga again, ever. Not to save the lives of the innocent would I eat a rutabaga. Whatever culinary Mengele yanked the rutabaga out of the earth and decided it belonged in the mouths of human beings should have just stuffed the damn thing back into the dirt where it belonged, and then killed himself. Rutabagas taste like dirt and look like baby poo, and nothing can tame them. Not black pepper. Not massive infusions of garlic. Not hiding them deep in the bowels of a goulash. Rutabagas cherish evil in their knotty little hearts, the kind of evil that has a yucky bitter aftertaste. They sit on the plate, mushy and smug, daring you to choke them down without gagging, knowing it can’t be done by any mortal. I can tolerate turnips, because the average turnip is more apologetic about tasting like mud, and it will submit to a violent salting, but the rutabaga is like Puck from Real World San Francisco; it’s an asshole, and arrogantly proud of it.

And you know what other food has an attitude problem? Zucchini. Oh, sure, it has a zesty Italian name, but eating zucchini is like eating a slimy mothball. My mother worked for years on a zucchini dish that wouldn’t reduce me to tears, finally settling on an onion-and-tomato sauté with plenty of garlic, but still. Cooked zucchini gives me the heebs. And squash? Can’t do it. It’s…slimy! And…nutty! I don’t want mixed media in my food — I don’t like entrees that try to get cute with the currants and bananas, and I don’t need alcohol in my desserts, and I don’t want a vegetable that tastes like a nut. Butternut squash…ick. And okra? Forget it. Apparently there’s a way to prepare okra so it doesn’t come out all slimy and stringy, but I’ve never seen it prepared in this mysterious way known as “edible.” My family still laughs about The Okra Incident, when a family friend brought us okra from her garden, and my mother attempted to fix it so that she could tell the friend how much we all loved it if the friend asked, and she did the best she could, but it just sat there in a pile on our plates, and because my mother does not run a restaurant, we tried to choke it down. It did not end well.

Ma: “So, this isn’t so bad!”
Dad: “It’s…[gulp]…it’s…”
Sarah: “…interesting?”
Ma: “Good! It’s good, right?”
Sarah: “Don’t push it.”
Dad: “Pass the pepper. All of it.”
Mr. Stupidhead pushes his chair back and runs over to the sink to puke up the tiny bite of okra he managed to swallow after chewing for ten agonized minutes.
Sarah: “Okay, Ma? I know you tried, but –”
Ma: “It’s revolting. I know.”
Sarah and Dad: “Oh yes.”
Mr. S, from the sink: “Sorry I barfed, Mom.”
Ma: “Okay, experiment over. Okra Lady asks, we loved it. She gives us any more okra, I throw it away. I’ll just make a salad now. Deal?”

A lot of people have “texture issues” with their food. I don’t, usually, although certain oily slimy things get to me like squash. My mother can’t eat oysters. I can’t drink things with bits in them. For years as a child, I wanted to become an astronaut — not so much because I had an interest in astronomy, although I did, but because astronauts got to drink Tang, a blissfully pulp-free juice substitute that wouldn’t trigger my gag reflex. My grandmother, already horrified that I didn’t like milk, always tried to get me to drink fresh-squeezed orange juice when I came to visit; because I figured I had to pay a price for getting to stay up late and eat Cocoa Puffs, things I couldn’t do at home, I always choked the juice down, usually trying to shotgun it so the pulp didn’t touch anything on its way down. But Lord, how I hated it. Even worse, she would serve fresh orange slices. I have no interest in any citrus fruit that has not undergone an extensive deveining, deseeding, depulping process. Fresh, schmesh — process it.

But do not process it to the extent of, say, olive loaf, which is the single most terrifying processed food in the world. How the hell did anyone come up with that idea? “Bologna isn’t weird and ooky enough — let’s jam olives into it too”? I mean, I like bologna, but olive loaf is wrong. Pimiento loaf is also very, very wrong, in a way that you can’t understand the word “wrong” until you’ve seen that part of the Sgt. Pepper movie where George Burns does his soft-shoe routine, and you realize that you’ve come into the presence of a thing that, while composed of recognizable and seemingly innocent parts, resembles nothing as a whole that you’ve ever seen before, and is therefore so subtly bizarre and terrifying that the hairs on your forearms stand all the way up. I enjoy olives. I enjoy pimientos too, I guess, although there’s not much to enjoy, really — teeny little things, pimientos. And I am a fan of loaves, generally speaking. But cats and dogs should not mate, Pat Boone should not cover heavy-metal standards, and an olive should not associate with a loaf. It’s against nature. And I’ve eaten head cheese, ladies and gentlemen. And scrapple. More than once. I know “against nature” in food. If they remade Deliverance starring food, olive loaf would play the kid on the porch with the banjo.

Compared to the inbred loaves in the lunch-meat aisle, celery seems relatively innocuous. I like the taste, but I like it chopped up. Otherwise, the strings get me every time. The automotive industry, or the energy industry, or some industry should really look into harnessing the strength of the celery string somehow, because if molars can’t grind them up over a period of twenty minutes — and I assure you, they can’t — then some inventor-type should find some long-lasting use for them. Celery brake pads! Celery shingles! Celery gasoline! Celery bungee cords! Seriously, celery strings? Indestructible. And inedible as well.

Another vegetable I could do without is the radish. It tastes like nothing when you first pop it in your mouth, and then it tastes sort of bitter, but only faintly, so you aren’t sure you taste anything, which creeps you out even more, and the more you chew, the more you taste, and slowly it overpowers the dip because it takes so damn long to chew it. And then you swallow, and then the radish kills the brain cell that stores the “you hate radishes” information, and you keep eating them at parties and hating them.

And finally, the last food on my hate list: cherry stuff. Cherries themselves I like. Cherry pie is fine. Anything else cherry? No, no, a thousand times no. Fake-cherry-flavored anything is absolutely intolerable to me, and I don’t know when the cough-suppressant industry selected cherry as the default flavor, but I’d really like to circulate a petition for a return to honey-lemon, because cherry cough drops and cherry cough syrup make me want to barf. And cherry Alka-Seltzer? The hell? I already feel sick, people! Ixnay on the errychay! And a mere mention of the chocolate-covered cherry is enough to kill my appetite for days. If olive loaf isn’t proof that God has abdicated control over the destiny of the human race, the chocolate-covered cherry will seal our doom. Many people love the chocolate-covered cherry, and I don’t wish to alienate those people, but — FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NO! It’s a candy that SUPPURATES, okay? Candy should not do that! And do you know how they MAKE those things? They dip a cherry in chocolate, obviously, but BEFORE that, they dip it in an ENZYME PASTE so that it starts DIGESTING ITSELF before you even EAT IT! It’s a SELF. DIGESTING. FOOD. OH. MY GOD. EW! Do you REALIZE that men and women of the Brach’s Corporation WORKED THEIR WHOLE LIVES on a technology that does not cure CANCER, or correct BIRTH DEFECTS, or CLEAN DIRTY RIVERS or reduce FUEL EMISSIONS or further the cause of SPACE EXPLORATION or anything else that might actually BENEFIT HUMANITY, OH NO, but on a CANDY that EATS ITSELF? This is not the stuff of science-fiction, folks! You can FIND it at the DRUGSTORE! It is a kamikaze candy, AND IT LIVES AMONG US, and if it will eat ITSELF, just think what it might do TO YOU! TO THE HILLS! WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST! REMEMBER THE ALAMO!

I think I’ll just lie down again, thanks.

An article on yucky food.
Hating the mushroom.
What is WRONG with these people?
DIE, SATAN! DIE!

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