On Picky Eating, Human Connection, and the Tradeoffs We All Make
As I help my picky-eating 5-year-old learn to tolerate new foods, I’m realizing that I merely tolerate most of the foods I eat, too.
And I’m going to keep tolerating them. Here’s why.
All my life, only a handful of foods have appealed to me at any given time. Like many neurodiverse folks out there, I’ve gone on quite a few “food jags,” where I ate the same foods, prepared in the same way, on a near-daily basis.
I can still remember my 10-year-old go-tos:
- White bread, cheddar cheese, and mayonnaise. Mayyyybe some yellow mustard, but let’s not get crazy.
- Kraft Mac & Cheese. Not the generic Safeway kind that, I still remember, tasted oddly sweet. The noodles had to be slightly undercooked, and you couldn’t use too much milk in the sauce, or the flavor would be unacceptably diluted, and I wouldn’t eat it.
- Sugary cereal, straight out of the box. Milk was OK, but only for the first minute; once the cereal was soggy, I was done.
- And my favorite: cake or brownie mix. Uncooked. I hid the boxes beneath my bed and covertly snuck spoonfuls after the lights were out.
As an adult, my jags are a tad more sophisticated / more nutritious / less embarrassing. My current favorite is the veggie combo platter from a beloved neighborhood Ethiopian restaurant. I also like whole-wheat pasta with a red sauce made with Rao’s marinara and Beyond Meat. For a snack, I crave this very specific mint-chocolate protein bar.
With a few exceptions, most other foods that I eat are things I tolerate.
It’s not like I’m suffering through every meal. I often enjoy eating, so long as I’m partially distracted by other stimuli. But if I have to focus on the tastes and textures in my mouth, there is almost inevitably something about my food that grosses me out a bit. The lettuce on my sandwich is soft. The raw fish in my sushi is slimy. The coconut milk in my curry is too strong.
Realizing this about myself is helping me help my daughter. Until now, I’ve been encouraging her to keep trying new foods so she can learn to like them. But I suspect this has felt incredibly frustrating to her, because even after she’s tried some foods multiple times, she doesn’t like them. Some small or big thing—a texture, a seasoning, an aftertaste—is off.
So I’ve started using the word “tolerate” more.
“Kid,” I say, “you might end up like me and not love a lot of foods. But it’s still important to learn to tolerate them. Yes, it’ll help you stay healthy—but it will also let you share meals with the people you love.”
And really, that’s the crux of it. If we can stomach the food served at the occasional birthday party or restaurant outing—if we can tolerate the taste of it—then we get to full enjoy something else: the emotional connection that comes from communal meals.
We’re always making tradeoffs. When we only eat what we want, even when everyone else at the table is eating something else, we win on the taste front. But the tradeoff is loneliness and disconnection.
And the opposite is true, too. If we eat what’s on the table, we can feel a greater sense of belonging. Of course, we might really dislike the taste of the meal. That’s not great either.
As a picky eater myself, I’ve found it hugely beneficial to land somewhere in the middle. It’s how I stay embedded in a society, not on an island of one.
You give up something you love for something you can be okay with, in service of strengthening your bond with the people around you. And, if you’re living in a fair, kind society, others do the same in return.
That’s why my mom still eats Ethiopian food on occasion, even though the texture of the injera skeezes her out. And it’s why, sometimes, dinner is a plate of my daughter’s all-time favorite foods, even though they’re not mine.
She loves them—and, well, I can tolerate them every now and then.
