Food, Inglorious Food - Part I

Famous food stories from my childhood, plus one from my adulthood:

My mom (optimistically): "Jody, what do you want for lunch today?"
Me (completely put-upon): "Mom, I had lunch yesterday."

My parents took me to Montreal when I was about five years old. The whole time we were there (five days? a week?), I ate nothing but tomatoes and toast.

I once accepted an invitation to have dinner at a friend's house. I think I was in the first grade. Everything was fine until I was served a plate that included mashed potatoes. With gravy. I burst into tears and had to go home.

In high school, I dated a guy from a strict Catholic family. His grandmother lived with them and did all the cooking. Everything she made was delicious, but there were always things I would (politely) refuse to eat. She never understood that I was an exceptionally finicky eater. She just thought I was keeping kosher.

Early on in our relationship, Zach or I must have warned his mom that I was a picky eater. She asked me to give her a list of the foods I didn't like so that she could avoid them when we came to visit. "I'll give you a list of the foods I do like," I said. "It's shorter."

In my own defense, I am much less picky than I used to be. Just ask my mom or Zach if you don't believe me. Still, I am quite sure that any family member, friend, classmate, or co-worker asked to list my character traits would put "picky eater" at or near the top of the list.

And I accept that.

Because despite the fact that I have enlarged my culinary horizons far beyond tomatoes and toast—and even seek out a well made gravy for my Thanksgiving turkey (although usually not, I confess, for the mashed potatoes)—I now have other dietary limitations that threaten to overshadow all of my progress.

Life would be simpler, or at least more easily explicable, if I could summarize these limitations in a neat little label. People understand "vegetarian" or "vegan" (well, mostly) or "wheat-free."

They don't so much understand "Well, I'm a picky eater to begin with, plus I avoid meat and dairy products unless they're hormone-free, and I gave up caffeine in 1994, and I have to be careful with garlic and ginger and anything too acidic or I get heartburn, plus I need to watch my sugar, because I tend to have high triglycerides, and I shouldn't really drink because I'm on anti-inflammatories for the joint pain caused by having my ovaries removed last year."

You're just dying to invite me over for dinner now, aren't you?

And this is why I've waited until halfway through Breast Cancer Self-awareness Month to even raise the specter of diet—because it's a fraught subject for people who aren't picky eaters. (There's good reading about this here and here.) So where does that leave me?

Confounded, generally.

But I'm working on it.

More to follow in the rest of this multi-part post.