The misunderstood reality of a "picky eater"

Have you ever tried focusing on new information with a really, really bad headache? The kind of exhausted, sleepy headache that ibuprofen doesn’t kick, that seems to surround your every thought. You know you need to read that next chapter, plan what you’re doing for the rest of your day - you know you can. You know you’re capable of it, that others are depending on you to figure it out, but your head is having a deep, physical reaction to trying to make sense of things. Have you ever had that happen?

That’s what being a picky eater is like, at least to me. It doesn’t matter if I should like the thing. It doesn’t matter if I’m being told that I’ve liked similar things before, or that the ingredients are “all things I already eat.” It doesn’t matter if I can logically understand how the specific food would be good or I would probably like, in another context. My brain, my mouth, my nose, my stomach - my body - is physically reacting in a way that I can’t really comprehend eating the thing in that moment. Even if I “just try it” and my tastebuds respond positively, I still have a negative experience with the food and “don’t like it.”

Being a picky eater as a kid is really hard. You have absolutely zero clue why you “don’t like” a food you’ve just been introduced to and have yet to try… you just don’t like it. Signals fire all over your brain and other senses that say it’s not a good idea to eat it. Pressure from adults certainly doesn’t help. You’ve got to feel safe to try new things and risk exposing your senses (primarily smell, taste, and touch) to something gross and unwanted, even if some of the clues suggest good things. 

Unfortunately, being a picky eater as an adult is still quite confusing, too. You have more words and context for why something might be undesirable to eat: Texture plays a far bigger role than taste and is often completely ignored by pushy parents trying to break their kid of picky eating. You can also discern a lot more about a food’s ingredients and potential undesirable traits from smell as an experienced adult, which may not even begin to register as a kid. But at the end of the day, there’s plenty of individual ingredients, variants on known meals, or new food types entirely that still cause you to freeze or panic because you’re suddenly unwilling to try it, without explanation.

I can’t tell you how to convince your picky eater child to eat more. I’m still very early in that adventure with my own kiddo. But I can walk you through my own process for trying to expand my own palate, as someone who ate like a 6 year old until his late 20s. I’m still pushing myself to try new things every day - and it’s a LOT of work, and I’m not always successful - and I’ve found that getting involved in cooking and deeply, truly understanding how each ingredient, cooking process, spice, rest time, and so on impacts the final result has made a world of difference in me feeling comfortable and safe enough to explore new foods, new flavors, new textures, or just fun new twists on the same old food. 

That’s what this blog is hopefully going to focus on: My experiences, lessons learned, recipe successes and trying-new failures, everything that has helped bridge me from the limited-eater in his early 20s who only ate plain fast food items and frozen dinners to a more confident early 30s eater who rarely eats pre-made frozen dinners or fast food anymore and has expanded his scope of eating to incomprehensible levels just 10 years prior.

Did you know I eat salads now? I don’t use dressing, but I actually look forward to them now, and that was never even considered a possibility before. I tried re-creating the omelet from The Bear (and failed at it) and as a teenager and younger I would have never even touched eggs, despite them being in many things I did eat. These seem like silly examples, but these were some things that were just assumed permanently “off-limits” for me by my parents, yet I worked hard at this enough that I enthusiastically integrate them into my regular meals quite often now.’

Alright, this is starting to sound really sales-y. I have nothing to sell you here. I’m not doing this for some sort of profit, I have no aspirations of making a cookbook - I’m more likely to buy yours, instead - I just want to share my experiences. I had basically zero guidance for how to address my picky eating beyond the brute force “just try things enough times and you’ll like them” approach, which doesn’t work when feelings of safety, confidence, or anxiety are in play. I primarily started this blog to share my recipes or modifications on recipes that I’ve been asked for so often when sharing my cooking adventures on social media these past 5 years or so - and realized I could also use it to more openly discuss my struggles with picky eating, how that’s limited and been enhanced by my experiences learning to cook, and how I’ve been working so very hard on myself to eat more. 

I love eating, it’s just scary to eat new things sometimes. And there’s just some things that “everyone likes” that I just don’t. And that’s okay. Maybe you feel the same way, too, and you’ll get something out of this. Or at worst, you’ll just get a cool recipe idea or two.

~ Addie aka. the kid who had to be accommodated all throughout daycare for not eating pudding (I got cinnamon applesauce instead), the pre-teen who didn’t want Coke/Pepsi, the high schooler who ate a bologna sandwich every day (except Papa Johns pizza day!) for all 4 years, and then didn’t touch bologna for 5 years after that.