To Be a Picky Eater in Peace

            My mom was a very fastidious person when it came to logging the first few years of her children’s lives. I have a very comprehensive baby book which details all of my early childhood development and interactions. My favorite page in the book contains a crumpled orange nametag in the shape of a kitty. This was from my first day of school at the Gerber Baby School (I was 2 years old) in which my pre-school room was named The Kitty Room. Apparently it was crumpled because I thought I wouldn’t have to go back to school if I didn’t have my nametag (hey, if they didn’t know who I was I could have just been some random kid off the street who was not registered, but wanted to play on their jungle gym!) I did not want to go back to school because I thought my mom lied to me because we did not finger paint on the first day and I was not going to have any of that! If we did not paint in school I was not going to go, yet my dad still was surprised that I chose to go to art school and get a degree in painting.

            Although the crumpled orange kitty was always my favorite page in my baby book, by far the most useful was the page that cataloged my reaction to new foods. Every single baby food that my mom tried was logged with an emotional and physical reaction, i.e. after peas it says “DOES NOT LIKE PEAS! Rash.” Not every comment was written in capitals; however I am sure that my reaction to peas as an infant warranted it. Most of the foods in my baby book were not well received by me emotionally or physically; basically if you based my future eating habits solely on my infantile reactions I would be a straight carnivore, not an omnivore but a carnivore. I either did not like the food or I broke out in a rash (or worse) from it.

            Since my mom was paying so much attention to what I did and did not like when I was a baby it really didn’t surprise her that I grew into a picky eater, and she never forced me to eat anything I didn’t like, and the only other person that was like that was my Obaasan. I spent every day after school with my Obaasan until I was eight years old, and considering that I started school when I was two that was plenty of time for her to spoil us rotten with a grandmotherly diet. Obaasan is the most patient woman on the planet (actually I think most Japanese women of her generation fall into that category) so she cooked dishes that my brother and I would eat, but lets be more specific about this. My repertoire of acceptable ingestible foods was about 12 items long, and some of them are Japanese and down right strange, even detested by a majority of the population of Japan, so I can guarantee you that they weren’t the normal things that kids will eat. Miki, on the other hand, ate a wider variety of foods so Obaasan was a dutiful Japanese matriarch and would sometimes make us separate meals. Oh my god that is so evil, but to top it off, when my father would arrive after work to pick us up she would also cook a separate Japanese meal for him, which was about one hour after she fed my grandfather too.

            My dad would usually ask us what we ate, and my response would generally be one of two things, Tonkatsu (a Japanese pork cutlet) or Egg Rice (don’t ask.) To this my dad would lower his head and give me the look that is often immortalized in Japanese wood cuts of Samurai about to do battle. It kills my father that I am a picky eater. This is mainly because he will eat anything; almost. I once asked him if there was anything that he didn’t LIKE the taste of. His response was “I won’t eat dog.” I didn’t ask him what he had moral objections to eating (memo to me; kittens, penguins, pandas and humans were not on the list) I asked him if there was a flavor that he found distasteful. I take that as a “NO.”  Truffles, dog biscuits, monkey brain, it all has a redeeming quality somehow. So how could the man that eats anything (that really isn’t fair, my dad is actually a very good cook, unlike my mom who thinks that left over turkey, noodles, cream of mushroom soup, peas and potato chips come out of the oven in an acceptable dish labeled “tetrazini”) have a child who wouldn’t eat a cheeseburger until the age of nine? Yes, that is correct; hamburger ok, but slap a piece of cheese on that and my childhood self would throw a fit.

            My mom understood that trying to force a kid to eat something they didn’t want to eat would backfire on you. My mom has never fed me liver because she was forced to eat it. Yay, I was never forced to eat the toxic waste dump of the body. My dad was never forced to eat anything, because obviously my grandmother would bend over backwards and make a new meal if he didn’t like it. So I always found it odd that my dad is the one that tried to force me to eat things. Despite my well documented hatred for peas he tried to make me eat them and it quite literally backfired on him, the dining room table and floor. I have been given a lifelong pardon from eating peas ever since.

            You would have thought that this would have taught my father a lesson, but no, apparently this concept was just too abstract for him to grasp on the first go around. A few years later when I was eight years old he made salmon with a cucumber sauce. I looked at it and wanted no part of it, could I please just have a peanut butter sandwich (oh yeah, I didn’t like jelly on my PB&J till I was about ten.) I was made to try his culinary concoction and it took my breath away, and not in a good way. It was at this point in my life that we discovered that I have food allergies. Actually not that precise moment, as both my parents thought I was just being melodramatic and they made me take another bite, and it happened again. It felt like the wind had been knocked out of me.

            My mom, who works in the medical profession, wouldn’t concede that it was a true allergic reaction for a very long time.  They probably wanted to believe that they hadn’t risked their daughter’s life on the principle of it being expensive salmon (and she was probably jealous that I didn’t have to eat is it because she hates salmon.) The reason that they did finally concede was because it became apparent when I was 24 years old that I do, in fact, have food allergies. I have gone into anaphylactic shock from all sorts of different things that I have eaten and it is all because I am not such a picky eater anymore, although I still would not say that I am an adventurous eater. Hallelujah, saints be praised, now whenever my dad (or anyone else for that matter) presents me with something that I just don’t want to try I have a real legitimate excuse for not wanting to eat it. I might die. I can now be a picky eater in peace.