For a while, I tried just cooking things I knew he’d like. These things were, to my palate, heavy and boring for everyday eating. I gained 35 pounds, a fact I blamed on my approaching 40th birthday. Then things got busy and we stopped eating dinner together so often, and like magic, the weight fell off.
I tell you all this by way of introducing a conversation we had a year or two back. I made a roast chicken and served it with a chickpea-and-raisin tagine on the side. “I like it, but you don’t have to eat it,” I told him. He looked at me, and took a tiny spoonful, featuring one carrot, three chickpeas and a raisin. A few moments later, he looked up at me and said “You should make this as a main course sometime.”
Those of you who have never lived with a picky eater probably do not appreciate the drama of the statement. Those of you who have will understand the thunderous shock I experienced. I stared. I dropped my fork. I said: “Who are you, and what have you done with my husband?”
Over the following months I kept asking the same question, with increasing concern, as he asked for sautéed mushrooms, sausage ragu, poached-egg-and-arugula salad. Was my husband being well taken care of on the alien spaceship? Did he have access to books, movies, his Xbox? Were they feeding him lots of meat? Because this guy who had replaced him was not a picky eater. To be honest, he’s now less picky than I am, since the taste of cooked fish still triggers my gag reflex.
With columnist drama, I have presented his transformation as a single cinematic moment. In fact, it was the culmination of a long process, one that I wasn’t ever sure was going to work out. And since I know that there are probably other people out there trapped in the tragedy of a foodie-picky relationship, it seems worth sharing how it happened. Some of what we did was fortuitous, but quite a lot of it was deliberate choices that we both made.
Megan McArdle, “When Your Spouse Is a Picky Eater”, Bloomberg View, 2016-03-18.
April 9, 2016
QotD: Living with an adult picky eater
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Turns out there’s a bit of science to this. People can be divided up into three groups, those with the normal concentration of taste buds on their tongue, those with a lower concentration of taste buds, and those with a higher concentration of taste buds.
We all know some folks in the lower concentration group, they’re the ones popping habanero peppers like they were Hershey Kisses, and they usually bring their own bottle of hot sauce to restaurants.
Then there are us folks with way more than the normal concentration of taste buds, known scientifically as “super tasters” (Google it, it’s real). We’re the ones who get branded as “picky” eaters.
Different super tasters have their aversions to different things, but coincidentally, one common thread is the brussel sprouts Megan mentions.
For the average person, or those folks with lower taste bud concentration who can be happily indiscriminate with their diet, it’s almost impossible to comprehend how much stronger certain foods taste to a super taster, short of perhaps sipping up a quart of gasoline and then putting a match to your mouth.
For a recent example, I picked up some blue cheese flavored crackers from Aldi’s for my blue cheese loving roommate. To her, they may as well have been unsalted saltine crackers, but to me, they had a nice, moderate blue cheese flavor. Long experience and her diet tells me that she’s at the low-end of the low concentration group.
So before you brand anybody as picky, find a flavor you both enjoy, or at least tolerate, in a food where that flavor is borderline – not overpowering, but not watered down – and try my cracker experience. It may take a few tries to find a food/flavor that makes the difference as clear to you as our blue cheese crackers were to us, but when you find it, the experience will be quite enlightening.
All that said, beyond taste, texture is a much bigger factor than most people will believe. I’ll eat a bushel of tomatoes or strawberries in salsa or jam respectively, but give me a slice of tomato or even half of a strawberry, and I’ll gag trying to eat it.
My low concentration roomie and I eat tons of fish, but she won’t touch the meatier varieties like shark or swordfish, even though most of these varieties have little taste beyond what comes from how they’re cooked (marinade, sauce, coating, etc).
Once these basics are understood, there are plenty of ways to cook your way around people’s different levels of taste intensity. But until one abandons the concept that others are “picky” and realizes that we all don’t taste things the same, you’re just guessing in a game of dinner roulette.
(cross posted at Bloomberg)
Comment by Tom Kelley — April 9, 2016 @ 02:39
Gee this sounds familiar.
Comment by Wallhouse Wart — April 9, 2016 @ 06:54