I’ve had to deal with a lot of friends, all adults and mostly neuro typical, with food pickiness, and it’s made me stop entertaining because one person won’t eat peas, carrots, corn, another won’t eat onions, another won’t eat fish, another won’t eat peppers, another hates mustard, yet another won’t touch anything with tomatoes in it, and it’s like, well, fuck.
I once started with a recipe, and after I went down the list of things someone didn’t want to eat, the only two things I didn’t have to sub out were the chicken and the salt.
I guess I should be glad that nobody was vegetarian or vegan in that scenario.
None of these people have allergies to these foods, the restrictions are all mental ones.
And I haven’t even gone into the texturally adverse people, where it’s no longer as simple as just leaving out or substituting an ingredient, it’s also how it’s made too.
A couple of them even lie to servers and claim they have allergies because “then they’ll take it seriously.”
And I eat pretty much everything, so this baffles and frustrates me.
The only food I can think of having a mental block on are insects.
Hell, I’m actually the one with a food allergy, to bromelain, but as long as the pineapple and other bromelain containing products are canned or fully cooked, the protein completely denatured, they’re fine.
And the reaction thankfully isn’t anaphylaxis but itchy pustules the next day.
So, while food allergies are real and potentially deadly, and in the rare instances I’m around someone with one, I take it seriously, I can also understand how intense pickiness has desensitized people, foodservice workers especially.
