As a child, you're allowed to be a picky eater. Most kids don't like vegetables, and that's okay. You can go your entire childhood years eating mac and cheese, chicken nuggets, and chocolate milk, and that is seen as normal.
But once you enter your teen years...and then your twenties...it's not as acceptable.
Trust me, if you ask me to try something, I will try it, but the odds of me liking it or not gagging are slim to none. Every once in awhile I really try to incorporate more vegetables into my meals, but I can never get myself to enjoy them.
My pickiness when it comes to food is controversial on many levels. I don't even like a lot of fruit because it's too tart, including strawberries (I know...how?).
I always expected my pallet to expand as I grew older, as most people's do, but there are very very few foods that I have adapted into liking with age. The only one I can think of is cream cheese, which I probably should have liked in the first place.
If I go to a restaurant and see "healthy" variations of regular foods (e.g., wheat pancakes), I start sweating. There have been times where I've scoured the menu trying desperately to find the most "normal", child-friendly thing to eat, and I still ended up with something I could hardly choke down.
Trying new restaurants is an involved process for me. I must be able to see the menu ahead of time or else I fear I will have to literally eat from the kid's menu. And if I find something I like at a restaurant I can never find the courage to try something new because the chance of me liking something else is not high.
Trust me, I truly wish with all my heart that I could eat normal adult-foods and actually enjoy them. I spend hours looking up healthy meals that don't have some ingredient that will make me gag because I'm also tired of eating food marketed toward children.
My willingness to want to try normal, healthy foods is constantly blocked by my extremely sensitive taste buds.
As someone who has always wanted to travel, I am terrified of being surrounded solely by another culture's food that I know I will most likely hate. I want to try it all, but I also just wish I knew I would be able to enjoy it.
Being a picky eater as an adult is embarrassing and hard for me in many ways. I look childish in front of others, it is much harder to eat healthily, I have to pretend I like people's homemade food, I would never be able to go to a fancy dinner for a job, and the list goes on.
To people with refined palettes, picky eaters just seem stubborn and childish. But trust me, it's not something any of us want to be. I truly hope that one day I can enjoy normal foods, but until then, I'm not going to purposefully put foods in my mouth that I know I hate just to seem normal. I eat for my body, not for anyone else. And my body just likes very childish foods.
