I love how very societally constructed people’s food preferences can be.
And yet how viscerally disgusted people get when anything goes against those food preferences– like they are 100% convinced the disgust is objectively in the unfamiliar food itself, rather than their reaction to it.
And I’m not even talking mainly about culture clashes, here. I’m talking about people who have developed an idea of the Right Way to Eat based on their upbringing– and their clashes with other people raised in the same culture, but with some mysterious sensory or neurological issue causing a different idea of The Right Way to Eat.
I am talking about the autistic person who cannot eat cheddar cheese and drink orange juice in the same meal because two things that look the same color but taste different are unacceptable, and can’t eat more than three different distinguishable foods touching each other, including ingredients in stew and salad and fried rice, but not including pizza, because pizza ingredients for some reason don’t feel like different foods.
And I’m talking about the neurotypical who calls this person utterly unhinged and flakey– and also thinks it’s gross to put orange juice on cereal but totally fine to drink orange juice while eating cereal, and refuses to eat a hamburger with ice cream in it but will happily have an ice cream shake with the hamburger, even sipping it in between bites.
And the other autistic person (me) who has no dietary restrictions whatsoever around the concept of “what food goes with what,” and would willingly eat a pizza topped with pineapple and candy corn and Marshmallow Peeps, and finds both of those other people’s hangups totally alien…
…but has a lot less sympathy for the neurotypical, because, y'know, that’s who chose to be a jerk about it.