In full diet/exercise “get back in shape” mode, food is ever on my mind. A fellow blogger writing recently about a picky eater in the family sparked this:
I remember how EASY life got after I just started trying all the new foods I was presented with. And damn! Some of them – sushi!! – were GOOD!
I have friends back in Texas who have never had sushi and never will – you couldn’t get them in the same room with it – and darned if that isn’t a tragic loss for them. If I was 12 years old and you presented me with a foot-high chocolate sundae with a gallon of whipped cream and a pound of walnut sprinkles, I couldn’t love it any more than I love sushi. This weird-looking, conceptually freaky – OH MY GOD IT’S RAW FISH!!! – stuff is food so great poor people like me shouldn’t be allowed to have it.
And I never would have known it if I hadn’t tried it.
For me, there was a pivotal moment in trying new things, and it actually came in reading about a dog’s sense of smell.
A dog book I was reading said “There are few smells dogs seem to feel are actually bad. Instead, they appear to consider them interesting in different ways.”
And I thought “What would that be like to consider all smells, even the ones I now think of as bad, as ‘interesting in different ways’?”
I started smelling things, asking myself “Is this a bad smell? Or is it an INTERESTING smell?” The more I tried it, the more I tended to agree with the observation from the book. Even skunk smell, if you take the time to study it (and if it’s not TOO close and strong) has some interesting nuances to it.
I extended the idea to food. If I changed the original quote, it would come out as something like “There are few foods that are actually bad. They’re only interesting in different ways.”
I’ll admit I REALLY don’t like biting into a piece of gristle in meat. Fatty meat just gags the hell out of me. And you’d transgress the Geneva Conventions if you forced me to eat eggplant. (I also don’t eat wild game, but that’s for reasons of my own personal moral code.)
But other than that … I can enjoy a VERY broad range of foods. I’ve eaten at a five star restaurant, and I know a little bit about how five star fantastic food can be. But I’ve also eaten at McDonald’s – and sometimes I even prefer it.
And damned if this open-mindedness isn’t just easier than all that prissy, sissy picking and rejecting. Man, if I had to be like that today, it would feel like being in prison.
And considering the vast range of dining adventures out there, to SEE somebody else like that … it’s like knowing there’s an acre of gold just over the hill, and having them tell you with purse-lipped petulance “I don’t care! I like it right here just fine! I’m not moving!”
You just want to bitch-slap him and yell: “Grow the hell up!!”