I Was a Teenage Pizza-Hater! and Other Horror Stories About Food and Selectivity

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lied to me. At age six, I saw that cartoon and believed that pizza was the most delicious thing I could possibly imagine. Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo scarfed down what looked like golden slices of warm, salty, cheesy goodness.

Instead, what I got was a strange-smelling triangle with flour on the bottom that tasted strongly of — blech! — tomato sauce and basil.

Today, I have no problem with cooked tomatoes. I like chili, pizza, and even spaghetti bolognese. But when I was a kid and teen, I had to suppress my gag reflex to chow down on tomato sauces and soups. Why? Who knows. I just couldn’t stomach it.

I suspect this made me a rather difficult guest at other kids’ birthday parties: I didn’t like pizza… or Coke… or barbecued hotdogs… or basically anything with any flavour at at all. At restaurants, it drove my grandma crazy that I’d order plain pasta with butter and salt. Mine and my sister’s worst insult for each other was “Miss Picky-Picky.”

Nowadays, I’m exactly the opposite. I love just about everything edible. Even the flavours I don’t really like, like beets and dill, can taste yummy when mixed with others. Bland food feels boring, like painting with only one colour.

You’d think with my own extremely picky past, I’d be understanding of my peers who still have very specific food likes and dislikes. But, since I have some work to do as a person, I’m not.

Part of it is, for me, food selectivity was a childhood thing. I grew out of it as I was exposed to more foods and my tastebuds matured. It’s difficult to believe that other people’s tastes are different. I tried it and liked it — why don’t you? Why are you being so immature? I catch my brain snapping hangrily, before I remember that just because I did something as a child doesn’t make it a universally childish thing.

Most people have experiences like that: many adults outgrow past behaviours that didn’t work for us, and because we often attribute our own success in this to our attitudes, it’s easy to decide someone else still displaying this behaviour didn’t have the same willpower. But that’s not fair — maybe it works for them. Maybe it’s not from the same causes. Maybe it only looks like the same behaviour. Everyone’s different.

But another part of it is the ubiquity of food in our social conventions. In so many ways, food is laden with meaning.

For example, I come from a culture (Canadian Ashkenazi Jews) and a family in which providing food for someone is a way to show how much you care. When I plan parties or dinners, sure, I’ll invite exes to the same event (we’re all grown-ups who can maturely decide for ourselves if we want to be in the same room as another person, right?), or I’ll schedule an activity that I know might be unpopular (why not? People can sit out if they want to, and if no one wants to join in, we’ll figure out something else to do). But risk running out of food? Never!

I know that I’m extremely privileged to be able to run out of my apartment and get more food or pick up the phone and have some delivered, anytime. I know that most of my friends are equally privileged in that, if they leave my place still hungry, they can go fill up from a restaurant or the fridge at home. But for me, providing food to my guests is a way of showing how much they matter to me — how diligently I’ve anticipated and filled their needs. If I run out of popcorn at my movie night, it’s like I didn’t care enough to think through my preparations.

Sometimes, that means I inadvertently perceive unintended messages from my guest. If someone rejects the food I’ve worked hard to prepare — food I love to eat myself — it’s difficult not to take it as a rejection of my effort, not a disagreement in taste.

Food is also tied up in issues of money and experience. At least a quarter of my income goes toward groceries, and the fraction gets bigger if you count eating out.

Again, I’m privileged to have been brought up by a mom who loves and is able to cook. I like to cook, too. And that makes me feel like so many restaurant mainstays — burgers, chicken fingers, pasta, baked goods — are wastes of money. After all, I could make the same thing almost as quickly for much cheaper, and I know I like the taste of mine. I can control what goes into it, and I can decide on portion size for myself. So often, when I’m going out with my friends who prefer more white-middle-class-North-American food, I feel like I’m throwing money away.

I am financially privileged compared to most of the world and a lot of the community where I live, but I can’t eat out whenever I want. I hate the idea that I’m “wasting” my money on something I could make at home myself. If I’m going to pay for a meal, I want to maximize the variety of my food and try something I can’t mix up, like haute cuisine, foods I’ve never seen before, or dishes from other cultures.

Now, that’s not fair. I have time but no money. Homemade food costs less money, but way more time and organization. Having time to buy groceries is a privilege; so is having the experience to know how much food to buy and how to use up leftovers efficiently. For many, eating out is cheaper than eating at home because so much of the food they’d have to purchase to equal the variety of a restaurant would go to waste.

I also am privileged to have the experience to make things for myself that make me just as happy as food I’d get in a restaurant. I like my own sandwiches better than Subway’s. I prefer home-baked bread to Wonder Bread. I like my homemade soup more than the instant kind and desserts from scratch better than store-bought cookies.

At the same time, I can’t change my own tastes any more than other people can change theirs. I don’t know why I finally started liking pizza, beer, or broccoli; all I know is those things happened. Some of it may have been physical — for instance, in the way that tastebud sensitivity has been seen to decrease with age — and some of it may have been mental. Maybe I got better at dealing with tastes I don’t like, and maybe I started to associate some foods and drinks I previously didn’t like with people and situations that I do.

So, as with everything else important, I am in constant negotiation with the people I love about the social aspects of food: taste, variety, meaning, and money. But rather than be annoyed about that, I am grateful. I’m incredibly privileged that this is my biggest food-related worry, and even if I sometimes let my own assumptions and hunger get the better of me, I try not to forget it. I don’t want to be Miss Picky-Picky.