Prosaic Paradise

I speak to you today as a recovering picky eater.

Yes, it’s been a decade since I first allowed shellfish into my life (thanks to an unreasonable butter coverage), and I’ve been merrily opening my seafood options ever since. But I still somewhat identify myself as a picky eater. I’m not sure what threshhold you have to cross in percentage of foods you will eat to be an ex-picky eater, but I must be fast approaching that.

See, I started out as every parent’s nightmare. I ate jelly sandwiches because I couldn’t abide peanut butter. I would not enter any restaurant that did not serve spaghetti. When I went to friends’ houses for dinner, I wrestled with nature – to not eat anything weird – versus nurture – to be polite. (I could write a blog post every day for a month just about embarassing memories like this.) When it was time for a kid’s birthday trip to Pizza Hut, I worried about going hungry. When handed a deli sandwich, I would dissect it, seeking out only the cheese and the meat, and only that which had not touched dreaded condiments.

This was how I spent almost 20 years. So technically, more than half my life. Of course, every bird must leave the nest, and ultimately, off to college I went where I met my food mentor & BFF, Telf. Telf is a food hobbyist. An adventurous chef. And it is to her that I owe the opening of possibilities beyond a list that would fit on one side of a sheet of notebook paper. Here she is in her natural habitat, last year, preparing to provide myself and some friends with a meal that will be remembered for years to come. That meal included prosciutto-wrapped dates. I still think it’s positively hilarious that I will eat anything with prosciutto or dates in it, let alone something that is solely composed of prosciutto and dates, but I am writing this now hoping that knowing this will give someone out there some hope.

You might be wondering how she did it. Well, it took a smidge of peer pressure (“Everyone else is eating it…”) tempered with a bit of good-natured ribbing (“Well, we know Kim won’t eat it!”) helped along by a that most motivating of factors, starvation due to lack of funds. At some point, once the door had been opened, things started to trickle in until I had some health issues later on, and then they started to flood in.

I still remember when Steph took me out for tapas around 2001. Even then, almost everything on the menu was horrifying. I think I ate only potatoes and acted like a child. Last year I asked to go to the tapas restaurant for my birthday!

Now I can eat salads with something other than iceberg lettuce in them, including actual dressing which I eschewed for many years. I eat not only shrimps with butter all over them, but some varieties of fish (raw even!!) and scallops. I am sitting here right now eating an intact sandwich called “The Last Cowboy” (creatively and mysteriously named by our local deli) which includes horseradish sauce.

There are still some things I won’t eat. Broccoli is edible, but not exactly on the top of my fun foods list. Mayo, mustard and ketchup are verboten. (Unless we’re talking about cocktail sauce, but I choose to continue the fiction that cocktail sauce is not just ketchup with horseradish in it.) Mushrooms still taste like glorified, smooth dirt. But hey. Those things are gross!

So if you or someone you love is a picky eater and want help, I am available to sponsor you.

This post was written for the Living Out Loud project hosted by Genie at inabottle.

Tags: food

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