I've got enough gazpacho for everyone!

[kleenexwoman]

So I'm playing D&D at a friend's house, and he is courteous enough to cook a meal for everyone coming over--broiled steaks, pasta with pesto, and pizza rolls for appetizers. After dinner, everyone is sitting around preparing their characters, and he asks, "Does anyone want more? Steak? Pasta? ...Salad, perhaps?"

Everyone murmurs that they'd like more pasta and pizza rolls, and I say, "Salad sounds great. Let me do something?" He looks slightly flummoxed, so I decide that I will go ahead and make my own salad, because he has the pizza rolls and pasta covered, and they are fairly simple, but assembling a salad can be labor-intenstive. While he does that, I go rummage around in the vegetable drawer. I find some big fat sugar snap peapods, baby tomatoes, baby bell peppers, and cucumbers, and slice up a few things and arrange them on a plate, like so:



He was impressed. "Very orderly!"

"Do you want me to make you one?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I don't eat vegetables."

"No...vegetables? Ever?" I munched. The peas were delicious, the cucumbers okay. The tomatoes had suffered somewhat from being in the fridge (tomatoes do NOT go in the fridge, they lose flavor), but the peppers were tasty and really cool.

"Here's how I think of it," he explained, as we went back into the living room. "Meat...is good. Vegetables are the opposite of meat. Therefore, vegetables are bad."

I was going to argue that his premise AND reasoning AND conclusion was all wrong, because it would have been one of the few times I would have been able to out-argue this particular friend, but then we started the game and outwitting Daleks was more of a priority than discussing nutrition.

But what the fuck? We are not talking about someone who lives in a food desert and has no access to fresh foods or time to cook; we are talking about an upper-middle-class person who clearly knows how to cook and has been doing so for a while, whose parents had a wide range of ingredients and pre-packaged foods in their fridge and pantry. The sad thing is that this is not the first friend I have had who has utterly despised vegetables and refused to eat them on what appears to be general principle. (And it's usually geeks, and it's usually geek guys, at least in terms of people who've actually announced this as though it's something to be proud of.)

I don't get it. Not all vegetables taste the same, not all of them have the same texture. A bell pepper feels and tastes different from a cucumber from a carrot from romaine lettuce. Why all vegetables? Does anyone have any insight on this phenomenon? Some sort of food-related rebellion or trauma? Unusual sensitivity to fiber? Misguided machismo?

Comments

[woodburner.livejournal.com]

From her tellings, her mother was a spectacularly horrible cook (some of her stories about the dishes her mother made were pretty nauseating), so maybe that had something to do with her apparent ingrained fear that anything and everything might be puke-worthy horrible. She also said the reason for her combativeness whenever anyone tries to convince her to eat something was an abusive relationship when she was a teen with a guy who bullied her into eating lots of things she didn't like.

Oranges do the same to me sometimes! A nice sweet mandarin is fine, but I'm really cautious about oranges b/c a sour one will just about give me exploding head syndrome. Like a real high-pitched squealing in my head. I love strawberries, but if they're not perfectly ripe (and the ones from the store never are) they have to be covered in sugar.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

:( that is so sad. My mom was not the greatest cook when I was growing up--she tended to leave spices out of things. I recall the bean soup that tasted like nothing, and tilapia with sauce that was nothing but cream because she kept paring down the herbs in it. But I think I went the opposite way; for a long time, I could scarf down even bland, off-flavor food without disliking it, because it was something I was used to. It's only recently that I've been able to admit it to myself when something I eat just tastes bad.

omg, exploding head syndrome D: I just get this sort of tickling, sharp sensation in my jaw and neck. Funny, I can bite into lemons and limes and they just taste normally sour; it must be the combination of sweet and sour in the orange.