The year of eating dangerously
Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.
The warning signs came in the summer of 2006. My mom was helping me move to New Mexico, and along the 3-day drive from New York, we stopped at a Cracker Barrel in Amarillo, Texas. It was early in the day andbreakfast-time. I don’t know if it was the strange shell-shock state of mind that comes with moving, but for some reason I ordered scrambled eggs despite being pretty sure I didn’t like eggs.
Turns out, I love ‘em.
I credit this incident with really opening my eyes to the idea that I couldn’t trust my memory with regards to what food I liked and disliked. They were memories formed by perceptions I had at very young ages that really couldn’t be trusted by my adult mind. I may have thought eggs were gross as a five-year old, and translated that thought into a memory-warning not to eat them. What relevance did this really have to the 22-year-old me?
But it still would be three years until I delivered on that realization. Starting sometime last spring, I began to deliberately seek out the foods that I had labeled in my mind as disliking. The results were staggering. My palette expanded a thousand-fold and my options opened up to an incredible new range of food. At the same time, a lot of the unhealthy mainstays in my diet began to drop out as I found I had so many other choices.
Here is a list of foods that I’ve changed from dis-like to like in the last year:
Spinach
Grapefruit and grapefruit juice
Bell peppers and chilis
Radishes
Nuts
All seafood (I used to always say I “didn’t like fish.” Turns out I do, as well as crab, shrimp and other shellfish)
Mustard
Steak sauce
Avocado
Goat cheese
Onions
Hot sauces (sriracha and tabasco primarily)
Sushi
Beans
BBQ sauce
Muesli
Yogurt
Curry
Mushrooms
And Many More