Food Musings
Huh. I may be beginning to not like hot dogs anymore. Over the years, I've added to my palate but the only other food I can recall ever to stop liking is bologna. I used to LOVE that stuff - I'd eat nearly a whole package straight out of the fridge without bothering to make a sandwich out of it. Now I can't even stand the smell. But I stopped liking bologna about 25 years ago, when I was still a kid.
I suppose it's not terribly surprising, given how closely related hot dogs & bologna are (although I have only eaten beef hot dogs in the last decade), but I've been steadily increasing the number of foods I like and only dropped the one. So that's surprising to me.
I have a weird relationship with food. I was one of those picky eaters who would only eat like 3 foods. It turns out that I have an overly-sensitive sense of taste, which is why I didn't like so many foods. The taste was always too overwhelming. And then, on top of that, I became anorexic and forgot how to enjoy food and how to eat food and even how to recognize hunger.
When I turned 18, I slowly learned to like the taste of food again, after I mostly healed my anorexia. But that learning curve sharply steepened after a few years. Now I do two things with my food, and they are exclusive to each other:
1) I eat to fill my stomach and taste is more or less irrelevant. This is mostly what I do at work and how I originally got over my anorexia. I have something of a military-esque relationship to food at work. I eat because I need to eat, and I eat what I'm given, and I wolf it down because I don't know when I'll get the chance to eat again. I can eat a lot of food that I don't particularly care for this way, but I have to be motivated for it, like when I'm at work.
2) I eat for the sheer pleasure of the taste or the positive associations the food has, and its nourishment or even my desire for fuel are more or less irrelevant. This is where I learned to like food again, and to broaden my palate to include foods that I couldn't even stand being in the same room with before - mostly strong flavors like Indian food, hummus, asparagus, ranch dressing, stuff like that. I eat to feel happy and to revel in the experience. I don't need to be hungry and I will probably not be able to tell that I'm not hungry until I'm overly full.
For some reason, I very rarely, if ever, combine seeking out food for both nourishment and pleasure. Most of the time, I seek out food for pleasure and it just happens to coincide with times that I need nourishment, since that occurs roughly twice a day.
Hot dogs is one of those rare foods that fulfilled both categories for me. I used to love the taste of hot dogs, especially at those venues that are associated with hot dogs like baseball parks and movie theaters. But I also used to work at an an arena setting up and tearing down for concerts, and the kitchens would usually bring out all their left-over hot dogs for the crew rather than throw them away. These were mostly still warm, but they had been out for a while and they had no condiments at all. After a hard night of loading trucks and hauling truss and amps up and down ramps, I needed protein and sugar (hot dogs and buns). When I ate hot dogs for pleasure, I would usually only eat one. But when I ate hot dogs at work, I would usually eat 3 or 4, dry, in a couple of bites, with one gloved hand while pushing a road case with another.
So I'm really kind of surprised to realize that I may be losing my taste for hot dogs. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. This is sort of new territory for me. Then again, a lot of my explorations with food is in new territory :-)