On Picky Eating
Scene One
It must have been during the fall or winter—our small kitchen was dim in the evening. The overhead light was off, the light above the sink was on, and my sister and I sat between dark windows, eating. My best guess is that I was 3, no older than 4. We were at the kid-sized Strawberry Shortcake table with matching chairs and my sister, being 2 1/2 years older than me, would have been too big for that table otherwise. We were eating beef stew my mom had made: chunks of carrot and russet potato and beef in brown broth. I put spoonful after spoonful in my mouth, but there was a difficulty in the eating of it. I went slow, making small progress against some force that was like a headwind: not localized, but pushing steadily against me. I don’t know how far I was into the bowl before I looked down and understood what this force was. The words came to me: “I don’t like this.” I put down the spoon.
That was the first time I became conscious of not liking a food. I’d had a long history by that time, of course, of not liking foods, as all babies and toddlers do. People don’t believe that I was born not liking mashed potatoes, but it is true. I have disliked them time out of mind. The story in my family is that I wasn’t given ice cream until my first birthday and I refused to eat it because I thought it was mashed potatoes. I only changed my mind once my parents shoved it in my mouth. But the beef stew was different. After that first refusal, I had a strange new power: to look at a food abstractly and to declare, “I don’t like this.” Refusal to eat it on principle. Not to avoid it as I had done mashed potatoes—like the body instinctively draws back from discomfort and pain—but to consciously assert my prerogative to not to eat foods that are unpleasant to me. That’s when I first became a picky eater, and there has been no stopping me since.
Pickiness looks a certain way in American society, and perhaps in some ways it’s a uniquely American trait. Kids become inured to fried foods, to bland foods: chicken nuggets, french fries, mac and cheese, crackers, and it’s hard to wean them off of that diet. They may like foods that are sweet, salty, or malty, but dislike any kind of strong flavor, spice, or funk. Texture is an issue, too, which is why most vegetables and even many meats are off the table: too fibrous or slimy or gristly or flaky.
Yes, I eschewed most vegetables and meats, but only with the benefit of hindsight can I see that I was only partly to blame. On weeknights, vegetables came out of a can, mashed potatoes came out of a box, and cuts of meat were cheap. I remember eating cube steak that turned into flakes in my mouth when I tried to wash it down with milk. The vegetable I hated more than anything were green beans: limp, a horrid green, and a foul smell and taste. When I was in my early 20s on a date with my future husband, I experienced a re-hash of the mashed potatoes/ice cream incident. I was served a dish with delightful, long crunchy vegetables in it. (And to be fair, any dish is going to taste better in the presence of someone you are newly in love with.) “What are these?” I asked him. “They’re green beans.” I had never in my life seen fresh green beans before. (For the record, I still find canned green bean as awful as I did then.)
By this standard, I was a bit of a strange picky eater. The canning was probably why I hated most vegetables, but I did like fresh green bell pepper and cauliflower, provided I could eat them raw. I also liked grapefruit juice, even the cheapest white stuff from a can. And when I was 3, presumably the same year that I rejected the beef stew at home, I gladly ate the pickled pigs’ feet and peppered buttermilk that my babysitter served me. Looking back, I can’t see an overall pattern to the foods that I liked or didn’t like. But I have carried a surprising number of those tastes into adulthood, even as I have diversified my palate and diet more widely.
While pickiness may or may not be uniquely American, it is, I think, of a certain time in the human species’s history. Of the over 100 billion humans that have inhabited Earth over the millennia, I am in a very small group: those who have never had to go without, or worry about going without, food.1 Even among the 8 billion people alive today, I am in the minority. As you might have surmised, I did not grow up wealthy by American standards. At the time when I learned to reject beef stew, my parents both worked in a non-union rubber factory that supplied car parts to General Motors. But my parents owned a house and kept themselves and their children clothed and fed. Food may have been somewhat low-quality, but getting enough of it was never an issue.
That doesn’t mean the adults in charge of me tolerated my pickiness. I remember sitting nights at our dinner table and afternoons at our babysitter’s kitchen table, punished for not finishing my food. But I don’t recall this punishment ever working. Why would a child who rejected the food when it was hot be more likely to eat it after it’s been sitting cold for hours? In those days, I heard the infamous line many times: “There are children starving in Africa who would be happy to have that.”2 Such morality failed to make an impression on me as a child, although it haunts me now as an adult. I wasn’t consciously thinking of it this way, but I knew that if I refused to eat lunch, there would be dinner. If I refused to eat dinner, there would be breakfast. And so I could wait out anyone at the kitchen table.
I wonder how many meals a child has to miss before pickiness goes away or fails to develop. My grandfather, my mom’s step-father, grew up in a German immigrant family in the 1930s. I don’t know much about his childhood, but I do know that for all of his life, he would eat spoiled leftovers and suck the marrow out of bones. I wonder how many times you have to go without before a deep terror keeps you from being able to leave anything on your plate, even when your pantry is so full of food it won’t close.
Scene Two
The Ming Dynasty had one large, windowless dining room. On the left, a row of red vinyl booths went down the wall from the front to the back of the restaurant, where a hallway led to the bathrooms and kitchen. On the right, there was an open space full of tables, including 2 or 3 of the round tables for eating family style. Only at its busiest were people ever seated at the tables; I’m not sure I ever sat at a table during the many times I ate there.
Usually, I would come here with Tom, or sometimes with family or friends, but for some reason on this day I was alone. The Ming Dynasty prided itself on having a large vegetarian menu with faux meats I hadn’t see on menus at other Chinese restaurants. On this day, I ordered Vegetarian Orange Beef; it was my first time eating fake beef made from wheat. As I sat alone eating, a couple of things coalesced in my mind. The first is that I had never liked most meats very much. Picking and choosing my way through the Standard American Diet as a child and teenager, the only meats I ate were chicken, ground beef, bacon, salmon, tuna, shellfish, and lunch meat. I can’t say that I ever really enjoyed meat for its own sake. Even when my family moved from the working class into the middle class and I was exposed to higher-quality cuts of meat, I didn’t like them any better.
However, up until that point, giving up meat seemed impossible. Since most of my experience with vegetables was with canned or frozen, the idea of being vegetarian (which, when I was young, I thought meant basically only eating vegetables) was inconceivable. If I wasn’t crazy about meat, vegetables could trigger even greater disgust.
Those ideas began to change when I met Tom, an acetic musician who had given up eating meat slowly over the course of his 20s, influenced by the straight-edge punk and hardcore scenes of the 80s. He also had an abiding interest in Buddhism and absorbed its take on the ethics of eating meat. By the time I met him in 2005, I had just turned 20 and he was 48, although he didn’t look a day over 30. I’m 38 as I write this, and I know what you’re thinking, but there are exceptions to every rule. Yes, Tom did have an outsize influence on a lot of my tastes and proclivities, but never tried to manipulate or mould me. Through him, I saw that vegetarianism was possible, could even be pleasurable, but he never directly tried to persuade me to it. That’s what the fresh green beans and the Vegetarian Orange Beef were for.
As I sat in the booth at Ming Dynasty, I realized that I enjoyed what I was eating far more than I had ever enjoyed real beef. And from that day, I stopped eating meat. A year later, I became vegan and remained so for 11 years before going back to vegetarianism in my early 30s.
As a vegan in my 20s, I was not combative or confrontational. I endured a number of withering comments about my choice of food, but never criticized someone else’s food unless they started the argument. I rightly sought to distance myself from those people we now call the Vegan Police, who are just as miserable for other vegans to be around, as for vegetarians and omnivores. I mostly focused on my own food and began cooking, which I’d never had to do before. My mom had cooked us dinner almost every night after she got home from work and never had time to actually show me how to do it.
Cooking vegan food meant learning about various world cuisines, mostly Asian, that leant themselves to being veganized far more easily than American cuisine—or so I thought at the time. I learned to make Indian dal and roti; I learned macrobiotic takes on Japanese food; I learned about Mediterranean food like ful medamas. I learned that, actually, whether by choice or necessity, meat shows up in a lot of world cuisines more as a flavoring or condiment, rather than the main component of every meal, and that there were cultures who were centuries ahead of us in creating fake meats.
But this world is a hard one for those who would purify themselves by choosing their food, although humans have a long history of trying. Religious prohibitions on some foods are one version of this, and there is even a subtext of morality embedded in more modern understandings of diet like “clean eating.” And while I was not a confrontational vegan, I certainly was inwardly smug about it. I believed I didn’t have to worry about the ethics of my food because it was “cruelty free”—no animals were being exploited or killed to make it. But around the time of my 30th birthday, I began to understand that perhaps I was not exempt from the moral ramifications of eating.
Unlike my epiphany that I didn’t want to eat my beef stew, or that Vegetarian Orange Beef was tastier than real beef, this realization came on slowly and piecemeal over the course of a few years. I began to understand that none of us, except some plants and algae, can live on this planet without killing or maiming other beings. There is no such thing as a clean or pure life on Earth. A mouse chews grass roots, a quail eats insects on the grass, a fox laps up a quail’s blood. The vagaries of human food systems aside—there is nothing cruelty-free about the processes by which most food is grown, harvested, transported, and sold—to live is to eat is to take life.
The biological definition of predation is wide: from a bird eating seeds to a lynx felling a deer. I think that is so because there does not exist any organism in its natural state that, when faced with predation, is indifferent as to whether it lives or dies. We can witness this through perseverance of even the smallest or least complex creatures. Their vigilance, their drawing away from touch. I’ve heard the argument that oysters can be considered a vegan food because, as far as we know, they do not have a nervous system capable of feeling pain. But those who try to pry open an oyster will find out just how hard the oyster tries to keep its two halves—body and soul—together. Whether I take the life of a plant or animal, I am still taking life. That is the blood covenant I entered when I came out of the womb.
This is not to say that since food cannot be consumed without doing harm there is no point to pursuing an ethic of eating. There is a demonstrable amount of difference in the harm caused by eating a pound of beef vs a pound of beans. What I’ve learned instead is that there are many dimensions of ethics as they relate to eating. I don’t know that I can say that buying fake meats wrapped in plastic out of the freezer section is more ethical than hunting your own meat. But I do think that both are probably more ethical than buying real meat wrapped in plastic from the freezer section. But does that make the person buying the plastic-wrapped meat an unethical one? How many choices do people really have? Is ethical pickiness really much more high-minded than pickiness based on taste?
In my late 30s, I started lifting weights after not having done much physical activity for my entire life. Being a slim person, I thought that “getting healthy” only meant losing weight, and given that I am thin why would I need to go to the gym? I never considered the need to build muscle mass or bone density as I aged, or to increase my cardio-respiratory endurance to keep my bodily systems healthy. I’m not even sure I would have stayed with strength training for any of these reasons, except that I like doing it for its own sake. I could not tell you why I get so much happiness from stepping up to a loaded barbell and pulling my own body weight off the floor, but I do.
Here is the rub, though: to build muscle, you need to eat. A lot. More food than just for survival or basic health. That’s because strength training is the process of damaging your muscles through exertion and healing them with rest and food, over and over again. Protein, perhaps the most beloved, expensive, and vexing of all our nutrients, is central to that process.
Since I stopped eating meat, I’ve fielded the question, “But where do you get your protein?” a number of times. Usually it’s asked by well-meaning people who have been unduly influenced by the American cultural narrative that you can only get protein from meat. Vegans and vegetarians roll their eyes at this one, because almost all foods have protein, and as long as you’re eating the right ones in the right combinations in the right quantities, it is very easy to get enough without meat.
In the world of strength training, however, there is even more emphasis is on protein, with some people believing in the magical powers of protein to such an extent that they eat more than any human being would ever need. The amount of protein one should eat when building muscle is endlessly re-hashed among those who lift weights. Many say that you need a gram of protein per pound of body weight a day. Some say you need more than that. This is what leads to inexplicable behaviors such as eating a dozen eggs or drinking a gallon of milk a day or eating protein powder dry, straight out of the jar. I myself go by a more conservative, science-based estimate of between .6 and .7 grams of protein per pound of body weight, which for me looks like about 85 to 95 grams of protein a day. (Keep in mind that if I were not trying to build muscle, the recommended daily allowance of protein for me would be .36 grams per pound of body weight, or 48 grams per day.)
Life begins to look different—and more expensive—when you suddenly start consuming nearly twice as much protein as usual. I will be the first to admit that it is much harder to get high protein to low calorie ratios on a vegetarian diet. Lifesavers for me include tempeh, Greek yogurt and skyr, and the many (expensive) fake meats out there that usually combine soy, pea, and wheat protein. Eating meat would just be easier—some chicken or salmon here and there would give me enough protein for the day without having to eat as many total calories. But the trade off of having to live with myself for killing a chicken or fish is not worth it for me. Eating a high-protein diet and driving to the gym has already made my carbon footprint greater than staying home and being a sedentary vegan.
Scene Three
What to eat for dinner? The cupboards and fridge are full of constituent parts, but I don’t much feel like putting any of them together. I see a bag of tortilla chips on the shelf that are dwindling to crumbs, and on that building block I get out a can of vegetarian refried beans, some shredded Mexican cheese, a fistfull of baby spinach, salsa, and an egg. What kind of godforsaken thing this is, I’m not sure—some weird mix of chilaquiles and huevos rancheros but with spinach thrown in out of a sense of obligation. I sauté the spinach and set it aside, and then fry the chips with the salsa and then fry the egg and stack it all together with warmed beans and put the cheese on top.
I sit down with my dinner in that yellow evening dining room light, like where I used to sit with a cold plate of cube steak and boiled carrots, waiting to go to bed. This is healthy, I suppose—yes, the beans came from a can but they are beans; if ketchup can be a vegetable, so can salsa; the tortilla chips are locally made; the cheese and egg add protein; the salsa is from a small company. And the taste? Not bad. Maybe I don’t care as much as I used to.
My small consolations accompany me as I eat, a patchwork of covers for guilt. If something is bad for me, at least it was made by real people. If something tastes bad, at least it’s healthy. If it’s neither, at least no animals died to make it. And I don’t leave any on my plate.
By the time I scoop the last bites into my mouth, I feel accomplished, as if I have really pulled one over on the universe. But I know that’s just for this rocky outpost called today, on which I sit, feeling a little like a hero perched high above the cold mouth a cave into which I know, eventually, I must adventure. There is no food that doesn’t savor of complicity in life. There is no food I can eat to escape death.
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(1) Given the trajectory of climate change, I do not have full confidence that will always be the case.
(2)As an adult, I now know that the Biafran War was the first media event to bring the ubiquitous images of starving African children on to the television screens of Western nations. This happened before I was born but would have made an impression on all of my caregivers. By the late 80s and early 90s, when I was getting scolded, these images were common on TV commercials; Kevin Carter’s photograph The Vulture and The Little Girl was first published not long before my 9th birthday. During my childhood, Africa was a contextless far away place in which people starved. No one ever discussed why, and I’m not sure any of the adults around me knew enough of the contexts of colonialism, war, and exploitation enough to say. ︎