The Picky Eater and Her Vegetables

My mom prides herself on the fact that when my brother and I were little, we got homegrown, home-pureed baby food.  Apparently when I was a baby, I devoured beets like there was no tomorrow.  Now that I have an older, more sophisticated palate, I've grown into a "pickiness" out of which most people grow.

I have a hard time eating uncooked and unsmashed tomatoes, onions, peppers that are not cold and raw, pickles, cucumbers, beets, fennel, leeks, cabbage, most fancy lettuces and things like kale, and rutabegas and turnips (though I've never tried them).


I love fruit though.  Berries of all kinds, apples, oranges (if they're good), bananas (if they're unripe), grapes, peaches, plums, nectarines, pears, cherries, and most of all pomegranates.  I haven't found a fruit yet that I wouldn't eat.

My taste for vegetables pretty much knocks most typical salads off the list in general.  When I was a kid, my mom would serve bagged salad mix with blue cheese dressing on top.  When I got older (and weight conscious), I started using Italian dressing.  I'm now to the point that just the smell of Italian dressing makes me nauseous.  And don't get me started on ranch dressing.  I wouldn't, and couldn't, touch it with a ten foot pole.  I worked at Denny's - I've seen how it's made.

I was at Chuck E. Cheese's with my nephew last week (the first time I've ever been in my life), and got a salad because the pizza was gross.  Blue cheese was the only dressing they had that I was remotely interested in.  And wouldn't you know it, I destroyed that salad like it was the best food on Earth.

So that's the key.  I can eat some random food that will be hundreds of calories, or I can have a salad smothered with ~200 calories of blue cheese dressing.  I'm not too upset about it anymore, because there are fat-soluble vitamins in veggies that I'd be missing.  I'd rather get my vitamins than worry about fat content.

I know that the dressings in the store tend to have a bunch of preservatives in them.  My next mini-project will be to make my own salad dressing and to learn to love salad as a step toward our yearly goal of sustainable food.