I look a little hippie-ish, so when I try to tell people about the egg thing, or when they’re trying to drag me to brunch at their favorite Omlette Hut, they assume I’m vegan. I’m not. I love meat. I love milk. I just don’t like eggs, at all. I’m one of those picky eaters. I got to eat what I wanted as a kid, so certain things just fell on to the Do Not Want list. I have a short list of food I don’t like, a list that is getting shorter every year even as I move solidly into middle age. Last year I started liking asparagus, who knows why? My list, one that I give to people who may be cooking dinner for me, is “I’m not crazy about eggs, seafood, olives, and mushrooms.” Until recently, that list included tomatoes. I’m still not sure about artichokes, but it doesn’t come up very often.
When I was a kid, this list included pizza (eww melty cheese!), most cooked vegetables (ack slime!), chicken with the bones in (ptui cartilage!) and any dairy product that wasn’t milk, ice cream, butter or cheese. To me it’s about mouthfeel, and surprises. I didn’t and don’t like surprises, mouth surprises least of all, possibly only second to bug surprises. My feelings about eggs may have been complicated by growing up with a well-meaning though ineffective mom who, when she did cook, was always trying to sneak nutrition into us. So when she’d make scrambled eggs, she’d mix cottage cheese in with them. I always thought this was how the yellow and the white part of the egg looked when they were cooked, and I thought it tasted terrible and felt gross in my mouth. Warm eggy cottage cheese. I don’t remember when I stopped eating eggs, but it wasn’t long after this. We’re a family of opinionated people, and having an opinion about what you wanted to eat or not eat was generally thought of as a sign of some sort of pluck or character, not a personality flaw. So I grew up plucky and picky.
“If it’s eggier than french toast, I probably won’t like it.” is a more complete explanation that I spell out to people who care about such things. I do love french toast. Unless, of course, it’s too eggy. And I live in Vermont so most any syrup vehicle is okay by me. I’m not a purist; if I were on a desert island and my options were poached eggs or starving, I’d take the eggs, otherwise no. I’d eat bugs first. I’d rather find the thing that laid the egg and eat it.
Jeffrey Steingarten in his book The Man Who Ate Everything
My picky eating is seen as some sort of a challenge to people, while smokers and drunks and vegans and Hindus don’t get poked and prodded about their preferences when they’re out in public doing their thing. I think it’s because it seems so irrational, that it’s almost as if I were making a fashion statement with these idiot food choices of mine. It’s hard to explain why you don’t like how something tastes or the way something feels weird in your mouth, in the same way I can’t say exactly why I like the color orange or cinnamon toast. It’s a taste thing, in all sorts of ways. I never make it anyone else’s problem. I don’t make faces at food people serve me. I’m not a whiner or a pain at someone else’s clambake, though I do keep a powerbar in my bag just in case.
Occasionally I’ll run into a fellow picky eater. We’re rarer and rarer these days as people with strong food preferences often tend towards vegetarianism or gluten-free diets or something else with a name, making it easier to guess which restaurants they’ll like and more difficult to give them a hard time about what they do and do not eat. I’ll hear someone at the table asking the waitress “Can you tell me if there are olives in this?” and I’ll know — no one is allergic to olives — and I’ll ask “You don’t like olives either…?” and often we’ll compare short lists. It’s rare that an olive-avoider eats all other foods, and I’ve been surprised how many fungophobes there are among otherwise seemingly normal people. It’s nice to feel that I’m not the only one.
How do I like my eggs? Pretty much how I like my olives and my mushrooms and my seafood: on someone else’s plate.
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image by -Gep-
