That’s not all that odd. Most professional cooks, and especially the good ones, tend to have deep love of classics, trash food, and street food. If you’ve ever heard anyone get way too up their ass about the perfection of McDonald’s fries they were probably a trained cook.
And more than that there is absolutely nothing about working in a restaurant that is conducive to a healthy life style. 12-16 hour shifts, 6 days a week for minimum wage doesn’t leave much time or money for taking care of yourself. Cooking all day long tends to make you really reluctant to do so in your free time, 9 times out of ten most of your meals are the shift meal provided at work. Eaten on your feet, and almost invariably pasta or chicken and rice. When you get off work, options are pretty short in most cases. A lot of times only fast food, Chinese take out or pizza.
I was a cook of various kinds from 14 till I left for college. After I stopped working in restaurants (the first time) I made a rather large point of not cooking for myself or anyone else for like a year. I was just disgusted with the whole thing. After college I spent around 10 years behind the bar, there were whole years where I ate 1 meal a day, whole months where it was nothing but pasta and chicken. 4 years out of the business my eating schedule is all sorts of jacked up, and I couldn’t really eat pasta for a couple years there.
Eating well is for the days off, when you can visit friends at other restaurants. Where you will be taken care of. Meaning basically binge eating and binge drinking on some one else’s dime.
I know a guy who’s partially responsible for a couple of Michelin stars. The only thing I’ve ever seen him make for himself is “shitty Chinese food” a sort of generic chicken and veg stir fry. You just sauté whatever’s around with a splash of each vaguely Chinese sauce in the cabinet. Just about every professional cook knows that one, and they all call it “shitty Chinese food”. His favorite thing in the world is a hoagie. Followed closely by hotdogs. For some one who lives in Manhattan he is awfully fond of Dominos.
That was how I was, plus I was very strong willed. For whatever reason, though, the things that I found disgusting (I don’t really like this word, but that’s how I felt) were many of the staples of this stereotype. e.g. Macaroni and cheese (slimy), anything that has been microwaved (wet), and even pizza at one point. My mother’s food was bland and wet. I got an edible wild plants book at one point and honestly enjoyed eating random plants from the forest better than our home food.
Things changed in my early/mid teens though, when I started taking over the kitchen.
My response to the “starving children” argument was always “well, if I eat it, they’re definitely not going to get it”. I think I might even have said that out loud, although I don’t suppose it got much traction.
I wonder how much of it comes down to taste, ie, exactly how our individual tongues work.
A while ago a friend was going to bring some hummus to a social occasion, but said that if anyone tasted coriander (aka cilantro) as soap, that she’d make another batch.
Now, it does taste soapy to me, but I’d always assumed that that was how it was supposed to taste. Equally, even though most adults I know like the taste of vegetables (I have one friend who will actively seek out broccoli, which makes no sense to me), to me, mostly they taste bad. For me, most green vegs taste mostly of ‘green’, which is to say, similar to grass. (There’s still plenty of vegies I like, peas, carrots parsnips etc.)
I still eat green vegetables, but only because they’re good for me, they still taste bad to me. I guess I see them like medicine.
(My friend brought both kinds of hummus in the end. I ate some of both. Vegetables are supposed to taste bad after all)
I don’t know if this is related, but I absolutely will not eat something unless I know what it is and what’s in it. I am fine with any type of cuisine from any country in the world. I don’t have any allergies or religious reasons not to eat something. Hell, I will try just about anything…as long as I know exactly what it is. I just need to know first.
I feel the discussion has progressed and ebbed to the point that I can digress. I will now admit that EVERY SINGLE TIME I glance past this headline, I think I see “What’s with men who like to eat little boys?”
I knew a chap who ate only chips (fries) with ketchup. He managed to survive ok as far as I can tell. Chips, ketchup, beer. That covers most of your food needs right? The rest is covered by cups of tea.
The whole idea of kid food being different from normal food (once you’ree off baby food, anyway) is odd to me, and I expect a big part of the reason for people being picky eaters. Traditionally most people ate one cuisine their whole lives, from childhood to old age. A limited repertoire by modern standards, but much more than what’s described in the article; also, no one around them would have thought it odd because they ate the same things.
@anothernewbbaccount Due to forced feeding of foods he didn’t want, my father-in-law developed serious food aversions as a kid that he still can’t overcome. He gets almost no joy out of food and prefers to eat the same basic things every meal. I’m all for encouraging trying things, multiple times, but unless you have a way to get your unused food to those people and/or are food-insecure yourself and can’t afford to do otherwise, please don’t be overly strict about this.
Personally, I was never picky. When I was in preschool and had to bring a snack for the class, I asked my mom if I could bring cheese and crackers - specifically asiago. I was surprised when she said the other kids might not like that.
I never talked about forced feeding. It was ‘there’s no choice so take it or leave it’, with some attempted shame if I left it, but I could have left it (and occasionally did, with the comment that a starving child in Africa would have liked it, to which my response was similar to @bobtato’s - ‘they may have it’)
Fortunately my Mum cooked well and provided varied, nutritious, well-cooked meals. So I never had much to be picky about, anyway.
Because they hear things like, “they are supposed to taste bad, that is how you know they are good for you” or “eat them and you can have yoghurt” – repeat that often enough and children will believe it.
I have only one vegetable dislike – carrots, which I put down to being given shredded carrots dressed with vinegar as a salad (which is patently irrational, but is certainly embedded since childhood).
This was my biggest frustration as a parent – and awakening moments teaching me not to judge. We were those people who fed our toddler everything that we ate. Our toddlers loved capers and sushi and liver pate and broccoli and string beans and garlic and whatever. We rested high-and-mighty on our laurels – “well, of course our children like everything, we feed them everything, if only other parents did that…”
Then, like a Greek hero getting taught a lesson in hubris, between the ages of about 5-6, our eldest stopped liking most adult foods, and we realized we were the parents of a picky eater, just like everyone else. Her 4-year-old sister is not far behind, starting to close the doors on previously-loved foods.
It’s an endless source of frustration to see her not like the same foods she loved as a kid, and not even like pasta with tomato sauce for heaven’s sake. We’re now people who rotate the same 14ish meals between two weeks. But we just have to think “if we keep occasionally trying a new thing, she will eventually grow out of it.”
(The bright spot is that she still adores sushi, as well as poke bowls which are a lot easier to make at home. And the whole nine yards: raw fish, pickled mackerel, fish eggs large and small, seaweed, pickled squid, etc. So we look at that and it’s hard to really call her a “picky eater.” But eat some damn tomato sauce, kid.)
