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Monday, February 27, 2012

Whoa. I'm Not Eating That Ever, Ever, Ever Again.

There I was, eating a fruit cup of what I thought was mostly oranges, and in no way resembling a small child eating lunch on the playground while swinging their legs back and forth on one of those green plastic-coated-metal picnic tables, when suddenly! A wild grapefruit piece appears.

Not paying that much attention, as is typical of my afternoon-snacking attention span, I speared it with my majestic plastic spork, popped it in my waiting mouth, and was thoroughly disgusted by the grapefruity grossness that immediately impaled all my senses on a burning, sad, relentless taste-ride of horribleness. A fact that I'd long forgotten came suddenly to the forefront of my still-mildly-terrorized-by-grapefruit mind. I hate grapefruit! And the juice it rides in on!

I was a mildly picky eater as a child. My mother is an insanely picky eater. Actually, I take that back. She really isn't that picky in WHAT she eats, so much as HOW she eats it. Imagine this: The setting? A typical American restaurant chain in suburbia. The time: I don't know. Who cares! Obviously near or at a typical mealtime! Jeez, what's with the 20 questions? The woman: Middle-aged mother, tough but fair, a teacher, a reader, a crazy-funny person who prefers to wear socks with sandals because she says her feet get cold, but won't wear regular shoes.

Her order: "I'll just take a salad. What comes on that?" *listens intently, may or may not ask for a repeat of all or portions of the list* "Hmmm...ok. I want extra tomatoes, no cheese, light on the cucumber, make sure there's no pepper on that! And no meat. Also, I'd like extra dressing. On the side. Oh! And I'd also like some carrot curls. And the sweetest, most impossibly sweet tea you have. And even when you think it cannot possibly get ANY SWEETER, I'd like some extra sweetener on the side." (I totally just wrote that from memory, and is mostly not made up. I have heard this woman order at restaurants about a bajillion times.)

So, I do not order like that. But, I was a picky eater. No matter where we went, I could find something I liked, but I didn't really branch out much. I was thoroughly against trying new things, especially if they looked at all "icky" or texturally weird. Perfect example: I don't eat cottage cheese. At all. Never have, never will. I can't get past the lumpy-smooth-cellulite-y texture of it. It just looks gross!

So, now that I am an adult, and especially since I live in the mecca for a ton of different food choices, I have been trying things that I didn't like or wouldn't eat as a child. The good news: I now adore scallops in any way, crab meat (but not the whole crab, eww!), edamame, peanut sauce, asparagus, and a lot more. Bad news: trying some of it makes me nervous because of things like that stupid grapefruit. It was so incredibly terrible and committed food-terrorism on my palate that I STILL have an aftertaste of it, 20 minutes later. Stupid grapefruit. Hmph. 

Food I still hate, but at least I have the actual, legitimate reason of "I actually ingested some of it and still detest its icky grossness": raw tomatoes, snap peas, any squash that isn't specifically butternut (lol. awesome word), mussels, and onions. I know, everyone likes onions. But I just can't stand to be happily eating something and suddenly crunch into an intense onion. Ugh.

This entire story was to make one thing clear: it is absolutely, unequivically, irrevocably true that grapefruit, no matter the color or race, no matter where they are from or what they want out of their tiny grapefruity lives, are terrible. However, I do not paint all fruit with the same brush! Oh, no. In fact, I love most fruits! It is just that misleading jerk, the grapefruit, that I will never love. YOU WILL NEVER HAVE MY LOVE, GRAPEFRUIT! No amount of pleading, love notes, songs written to me, or poetry will ever change my mind. We are THROUGH!

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