In The Big Inning...

I'm what you would call a "picky" eater. I think this is somewhat of a misnomer, but still accurate. I believe that I just, generally, gain less pleasure from food than your average person. Maybe I just have very simple tastes - I like sweet things. I like meat. I like some salty things. I don't like fish, or any seafood for that matter. No eggs, no salad. I don't mind some vegetables. Basically, complicated foods seem like too much work. When someone tells me that something's an acquired taste, I believe them, but rarely do I think it's worth the effort to acquire that taste. In fact, most of the time, I see eating as a burden, not an act of enjoyment. When I get hungry, I get annoyed that my body is betraying me. I should get to do what I want to do! Don't make me eat!

Don't get me wrong - there are some foods I like very much. However, even those foods, I believe that I enjoy less than the average person enjoys their favorite foods. Also, going out to restaurants is certainly enjoyable as well, but mostly, I think, for the company and the atmosphere. (And the advantage of not having to cook - it's tough to justify working hard to make food that will only provide a moderate amount of satisfaction, especially because it's also hard to justify learning how to cook well if it's not going to benefit me that much.)

I think this may help explain a lot of behavior that my friends may find strange. It explains why, once I find something I like at a particular restaurant, I rarely will order something different - I know there's only so much "food pleasure" I can maximize. People may not believe this, but it's also the main reason I don't like alcohol - not because I care about not being drunk, but rather because I don't like any drink with alcohol in it. Beer's an acquired taste? Well, it doesn't seem worth the effort to me. And even the "fruity" drinks, which I've tried plenty of, I can always taste the alcohol, and almost never think they wouldn't be better without said alcohol. (There's a whole different component to this as well - the part that makes me not really want to try to like alcohol, which is that I find the "alcohol is cool" culture extremely stupid. That's for another blog entry, however.)

My particular food quirk has health benefits and deficits. The obvious health deficits are that I don't like a lot of healthy foods - salad probably being number one, and fish number two. On the other hand, I like a lot of things plain, and it seems to me that the devil's really in the condiments. I don't like cheese, I don't like mayo, I don't like butter. When you get down to the nuts and bolts of this country's eating habits, I imagine those three things are some of the leading killers of Americans.