A Relatively Picky Eater

I've always been known as the picky eater in my family. My parents would try to get me to try new stuff, but I was never interested and they never forced the issue. When we would go out to eat, I would always order the same thing, and I would usually have a special request to go with it--no sour cream, or tartar sauce on the side. I generally had one dish at a time that I would try at any new restaurant that we went to.

As a pre-teen, the meal of the moment was chili. At every restaurant, I would scan the menu, agonize over my choices, and then order the chili. When it arrived, I would taste it with my discerning palate, and my brother would delight in asking me how it was so he could laugh at my response--I would almost always have the same answer. "Decent," I would say with a sigh. "It's decent."

I didn't mind being a picky eater, though it wasn't something I reveled in. I just liked the foods that I liked, and beyond a few exasperated comments about how my taste buds would mature when I got a little older, there was no reason to bother with expanding my horizons.

Enter the Swedish husband.

When I fell in love and decided to marry someone from another country, I knew that we would always need to be aware of the ways we approach certain issues because of our inherent cultural differences. Since we're both absurdly communicative, we had countless detailed discussions on hundreds of issues that might or might not come up. We talked the spanking issue into the ground, and agreed that politicians are mostly corrupt no matter where you live. By the time I visited him in Sweden a few months before our wedding, I thought we had explored every avenue of possible discord between our respective cultures.

Clearly, I had not taken food into account.

I live in the southeastern part of the country, and my family is no different from any other true southern household. You start off with the freshest ingredients available (preferably straight from the garden) and then cook them all extremely thoroughly with the maximum number of calories possible. Nothing weird; nothing you can't get at your local small-town supermarket; and certainly never fresh seafood, being so far from the ocean.

In retrospect, I can't believe I didn't see this coming. I was marrying a man whose favorite foods included smoked fish paste and pickled herring. When I met my then-fiancé's parents for the first time, I don't know why I was surprised when the first course included a piece of toast with shrimp on it.

As it happens, my biggest food hang-ups live under the sea. If it's battered and fried and conventional, I don't usually have a problem with it. On the other hand, if it's identifiable--if it has eyes, or a tail, or is lying naked on a plate, well, that's when my skin starts to crawl. And shrimp is high on my personal creepy list. I hadn't been able to eat shrimp in any form other than "popcorn" since I had seen a picture of them in a textbook in grade school. But these were my fiancé's parents, and I was terrified of making the wrong impression. They already knew he was planning on moving to another continent to be with this girl they had never met before, so I felt like I was on shaky ground to begin with.

I don't know what anyone else would have done in the same situation, but I can tell you that I ate the shrimp--with the fork in my left hand, as any proper European would do. I made slow progress, and every bite was an exercise in determination, but I survived the meal. I didn't even protest when the roast beef was rare, even though you would never ever see anything served less than well-done at my house. (Food is just not supposed to bleed, alright?) I just shut my mouth and ate.

I still think about that moment fairly often because it coincided with the beginning of the end of my extreme pickiness. In a short span of time, I was suddenly being exposed to foods that I had never even heard of before, I began learning to cook myself, and... well, as much as I hate to admit it, my taste buds really did change after I was grown. Later in that same summer, I didn't even wince (much) when I was handed a plate full of pickled herring, and I ate reindeer before I came home again. My niece, also a picky eater, refuses to believe me on that one--she still can't believe that anyone would eat Rudolph.

In the five years since that plate of shrimp, I have come to realize that the matter of "gross" just depends on how you look at it, and how your background influences your opinions on everything... including the food you eat. I am still amazed at the food that my husband will put on a plate and call dinner, but I have learned to accept it without serious criticism now, as long as he cleans up his smelly messes as soon as he's done. As they say, it's all relative--you should have seen his face the first time they served chicken dumplings at our house for Sunday dinner! I have totally different standards when it comes to food now than I used to, mostly because I was forced to actually think about what it was I found so objectionable.

But you still will never get me to touch sushi with a ten-foot pole (and next time, I'll say "no, thank you!' to the shrimp.)