Thursday March 28th, 2024 8:39PM

Careful what you put in your mouth

I used to hate it when my mother would make me sit at the dinner table until I finished eating my green beans or turnip greens or Brussels sprouts or whatever nasty thing she put on my plate.

But years later, I am thankful for one thing. As a result of being exposed to lot of kinds of foods, I am not a picky eater.

To be sure, there are a few types of food that I don’t like to eat. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I don’t like mushrooms. I’m still not wild about Brussels sprouts. And the only way you’d ever get me to choke down some sushi is if you’d deep fry it first.

I sometimes write that I don’t like rutabagas. Rutabagas is a funny sounding word, and it just seems funny to put that on a list of things you wouldn’t eat. The truth is I don’t ever remember eating rutabagas.

I went home to visit my mother one time a few years ago and she was cooking some rutabagas for herself. Nothing that smells that badly when it is cooking can possibly be edible. On the other hand, bacon smells incredible when it is cooking, and bacon is delicious.

I don’t know if you can actually judge a food by the way it smells when it is cooking, but for now, I’m sticking to this theory.

I bring all of this up because I’ve noticed recently that a number of my friends are incredible picky eaters. A group of us goes out to dinner every Thursday evening. Where we go often depends on who in the group is available to go that week. For example, a couple of friends don’t like Chinese food. So when they aren’t free that week, we hit a favorite Chinese restaurant.

Another friend has a complete aversion to vegetables. She doesn’t even want the lettuce, tomato and pickles that comes with a cheeseburger. She tells the waitress, “Just meat, bread and cheese.” I don’t even think she puts mustard or ketchup on her burger. Just eats it dry.

I know several people with kids. If the kids’ eating habits are any indication, they’ll spend their lives eating chicken fingers, grilled cheese sandwiches and french fries. My teenage niece, Hunter, has a friend who occasionally has played trivia with us at a local restaurant. She always orders a grilled cheese sandwich. Not sometimes. Always.

I understand that things are different today than they were when I was kid. Growing up in a rural town in Southwest Georgia wasn’t like growing up in metro Atlanta. When I was a kid, Blakely didn’t have many restaurants. We didn’t have a fast-food restaurant until I was nearly in high school. So what we had for dinner was whatever my mother decided to cook that night. And the rule was always this: If she cooked it, we had to eat it.

It wasn’t until I was much older that she would ask us what we wanted for dinner. By that time, we were accustomed to eating fresh vegetables so we seldom chose a meal that didn’t include black-eyed peas or butterbeans.

Now I have nothing against chicken fingers, and I happen to make a mean grilled cheese sandwich. But I’m grateful to my mother for making me eat my vegetables as a child, even those cold, nasty, congealed green beans.

But you still aren’t going to get me to eat sushi.

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