Per my Mum, I did not start off as a picky eater, I would eat just about anything she fed me. Out of the blue one day, I decided I was no longer a fan of mushy foods. Looking back, perhaps this was my retaliation against only being able to eat baby food the first few months of my life.
When I was around seven years, one evening, a smell from the kitchen lingered its way into my room. As soon as the smell hit my nose, I raised my eyebrows as my nose turned up. I made my way to the kitchen to discover the origin of this smell. I saw what looked like a giant casserole of mush cooking in the oven through the glass on the oven door. “What’s that?” I asked as I turned to my Mum.
“Shepherd’s pie,” she responded. “Beans, mashed potatoes…,” the list went on but I was not interested. The face I made and saying ew turned into an evening of learning valuable life lessons.
Lesson one, do not insult your mother’s cooking. She decided it was shepherd’s pie or nothing. She put a huge glob on a plate and placed it in front of me. The smell and the look caused me to slip out of my chair to under the kitchen table, where I curled up into a ball. Valuable lesson two, some people do not have the choice of picking what they eat or the choice of eating something they like. We made a deal that if I eat what was on my plate, I could eat something else afterwards. I complied, but I never insulted my mother’s cooking again.
I moved to my dad’s an hour away when I was 16. There, I choose what I ate. My five food groups during this time consisted of cereal for grains, pizza for dairy, ramen for fats, Chinese food for vegetables, and ice cream for fruits.
Less than a five-minute drive from the house was a restaurant, Double Dave’s Pizzaworks. My dad would take us here like every other weekend to eat their buffet. He noticed they were hiring and suggested that I apply. I got the job, and little did I know that pizza was about to rule my life for the next five years. Pizza is all my favorite foods cooked into one flying saucer of deliciousness, so this was not a bad thing. I literally ate pizza five out of seven days of every week. I got free pizza all the time, life was good.
To sum up how food affects my life these days, I occasionally help at my Uncle’s pizza shop, so I still enjoy pizza every now and then. A tradition that my mother and I have kept, is enjoying the heck out of crawfish at least once a year. Concerning my pickiness, nowadays, I eat a variety of mushy foods. Ironically, I eat multiple mushy foods every day. As I’ve grown older I have been much more open to trying new foods. I discovered all the amazing foods I was missing out on.