How do I learn to eat better?
I second btwillig’s advice: try to force yourself to eat tiny pieces of food. I’d also recommend to start with sweet-tasting fruits, since sweetness is one of the two basic characteristics of food we inherently like as little babies, richness being the other one. Be sure to hand-pick your fruit, and make sure it looks and smells tasty. I imagine this might be hard for you to judge, so don’t be afraid to ask someone else for help. Taking a bite from an overripe, mushy apple can be quite disgusting indeed. I suggest you start out with strawberries. Work your way up from there. Also, try to actually learn to savour the little bits of food instead of gulping them down as fast as possible. Hopefully, you’ll find out that your gag-reflex and dislike were purely psychological. Another tip: experiment with different preparations of the foods you currently dislike. For example: you might try dried tomatoes as an intermediate step between the sauce and raw slices. Don’t be disappointed if it tak
Move to France. Seriously, find someone who knows their fruits and veggies. I was just visiting a sister who brought out some strawberries for breakfast. I eyed them skeptically and took one — biting into that thing was a mistake. It was flavorless and hard. It was nothing like what I learned to love as a strawberry. I hated strawberries when I was younger. Now I know to hate bad ones. This is the trick — if something disagrees with you consider first that it might actually be disagreeable — trust no one’s opinion until you find that person who is always on the mark with the best examples. Repeating this for all fruits and veggies (and meat and fish both raw and cooked), I have learned to embrace the entire spectrum of food. It will take time but with good examples, good help (someone who can show you the better examples), and peer pressure you will find a way.
Chew every bite at least ten times. This is important for real food – most of us learn it as kids, but you might have missed out. If you chew a piece of raw celery twice and swallow that, you’re going to trigger your gag reflex. b) Consider avoiding supermarket produce until you learn what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like. Growing your own, making friends with someone who grows their own, or paying $6000 a pound for vine/tree/bush ripened whatever, are all good ways to discover what these things are supposed to taste like. c) Consider going on a long camping trip and only packing in some of the foods you’d like to learn to appreciate. After a 40 mile hike, whatever you have always tastes much better when compared to things that aren’t there.
Dang, but you sound a lot like my ex-daughter-in-law, anon. When she and our son would come over for meals, we’d always serve fruit, and she got so that she’d eat stuff she’d had at our house, anyway. However, if the rewards of eating something as wonderful as, say, strawberries doesn’t appeal to you on its own merits, you may be able to talk yourself into it when you discover how good for you eating fruit and veggies is.
I was a really picky eater as a kid, but I’ve come around to enjoying most foods. Not that I like everything–green peppers on pizza I’m not fond of, broccoli I can do without, I don’t like horseradish/dijon mustard/wasabi either. Among some others. It’s ok to dislike some foods, most people do. I completely understand the aversion to texture…I live in Japan and many, many foods here have a rubbery texture and sauces can be a gelatinous goop at times. And the Japanese have no qualms about leaving the fat on cuts of meat, which makes me shudder….it’s the only time I wish I had a fork and knife rather than chopsticks to cut the offending fat off. But I think of food as an exploratory experience. For trying new food I try to have a “when in Rome” attitude about it. I figure if so many people like it, there must be something to it, if I happened to be born in this part of the globe, I’d like it just as they do. So I just step off that cliff and even if I don’t like it I try to pretend
