We all have our idiosyncrasies when it comes to food tastes, with some of us much pickier than others when it comes to what we’ll stuff in our mouths. I’m not talking about culinary choices made for reasons other than taste, such as food allergies or diet guidelines or animal rights; I’m talking plain old childish “I ain’t going to eat that crap because I don’t like it.”
Some of it is taste and some of it is texture; beets, for instance, taste like the dirt from whence they came, while the Jello I happily slurped around in my mouth in my youth now seems like some unnatural alien foodstuff that I’d just as soon not, er, slosh around with.
As adults, of course, we are free to spit food out of our mouths when we don’t like it, or we can refuse to even touch it with our fork without the threat of sitting at the dinner table until bedtime. As the primary cook in our household, I have oversight of the food purchases, so rare it is that the odd turnip or stray ham makes its way into our kitchen in the first place, much less onto my plate.
A lot of my food aversions spring from childhood, although fortunately there are many that I have overcome. I went to kindergarten in Hawaii, and as the only haole kid in class was given an early lesson in cultural culinary peculiarities by being served – every day at lunch, five days a week – an ice cream scoopful of sticky rice. It would be plopped down on my plate and sit there unmoving like a miniature igloo, tasteless and bland and starchy and, after days and weeks of plop, plop, plop, way too much for the delicate palate of a five-year-old to handle.
It was years before I could eat rice again without my stomach churning, to say nothing of what the click-clunk sound of an old-fashioned ice cream scoop did to my tender young psyche.
But the rice experience was small potatoes when it came to some of the other meals I was forced to endure later on in elementary school. Continuing my introduction to cultural food oddities, I remember to this day the stench emanating from the lunchroom in third grade on Wednesdays in southern Ohio, where with its large population of German descendants they assumed everyone would want a taste of sauerkraut and barely cooked sausages and mushy carrots on a weekly basis.
Those were the days (after walking to school barefoot in the snow for two miles) when there was no school choice, at least in the cafeteria, and there was a teacher up by the trash can who scanned your tray to make sure you had eaten at least three bites of everything. Well, I was not a big fan of milk, either, but I would suck it down happily in order to surreptitiously stuff that smelly kraut and at least half of that big, fat, nasty gray sausage into the little half-pint carton – not an easy task, let me tell you – and close it back up with the straw still poking out to sneak it past the trash police.
Today, I like sausages just fine as long as they are not fat and gray and undercooked, but you can keep your kraut, thank you very much.
As I have gotten older, though not necessarily more mature, I find my taste buds are pretty much set in their ways. But I do try to eat higher quality and healthier food (which is not to say that pizza, hamburgers, fries, etc. can’t be occasionally rationalized as healthy). The easiest way to do this is to buy locally as much as possible, preferably through a farmers’ market or roadside stand. The food generally is much fresher, much tastier, much healthier for you, and – although usually slightly more expensive – a much better deal. As an example, the lettuce I buy at the farmers’ market is better tasting and lasts twice as long as the stuff you buy in the grocery store, probably because it hasn’t spent a week in the back of a truck.
Actually, all this talk of food is making me hungry. Some rice sounds good….