this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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I grew up in the midwest and moved to west coast. I realized that I needed to learn to expand my taste in a variety of foods when a group of us wanted to get food after work and suggestions were getting shot down by other people because "some_guy won't eat that." It was eye-opening.
I eat all kinds of things now that I wouldn't have when I was younger. But I remember the first time I ate at a vegan restaurant I felt like I'd been served a plate of sticks and leaves. Great place that I now enjoy years since.
Good for you for being open minded to new experience. That's what I've never understood about picky eaters. You will eat food your entire life. It is one of the main things you will continue to do for your entire existence. Confining yourself through your adulthood to bland or junk food purely because that was what you grew up with seems like such a waste.
*Insert caveats about privilege/access/ignorance/income (I'm speaking from the perspective of people who have the option but refuse it; those are the people I know, but it's not a universal experience)
As a former picky eater, part of it in my case was certainly that my rural family did not know how to make vegetables. They would be boiled with some salt or sugar, no exceptions. So I thought meat good, veggies bad.
Then I dated a vegetarian and learned not only about the different ways things can be prepared (roasted, steamed, fried, baked, grilled, etc) but also other veggies like asparagus, bean sprouts, bamboo, different types of mushrooms (I know they're fungus, but just play along with me), mock meats, straight up different types of food like Thai and Indian, and it was such an awakening. I do think picky eating is learned somewhat.
I'd say I'm fairly picky, not as bad as some, and not entirely limited to junk food as I've found one or two vegetables that I like in certain ways. I do make it a point to try new foods from time to time, and occasionally it does work out and I'll have that thing more, but most times, I just end up not liking what I've tried. It's not always just a matter of being too afraid to try new foods, sometimes one really does just not some popular flavor or ingredient or texture, and if some of the things one dislikes are very popular and common, that's going to limit what one likes a bit
Flip side for me: I'm from Michigan, not the Detroit area but a mid size city (Lansing) and we have a huge variety of food, albeit not a lot of choice inside some of those varieties.
I had the profoundly weird experience when visiting San Francisco of being with some people who were excited to try the new food they had never heard of called "pierogi" that a place had opened up to sell nearby.
It was perfectly good and I was delighted to be able to tell them that they in fact did want onions in their food, but it was real weird watching them get excited to try what I consider grandparent food. (It's a food your grandparents give you, or you make a bunch of and freeze)
I think there's a thing where certain ethnic groups "big migration wave" came too early for them to reach big populations super far west.
I had the opposite thing happen to me. I was raised in the PNW, I vaguely knew that we had more teryaki restaurants in the Sea-TAC metro area than the rest of the nation combined, but when I went to Indiana for a summer I discovered that the people there had largely never even heard of teryaki before.
Now, I didn't travel up to Indianapolis. I probably could have found a Japanese steakhouse that had $30 teryaki chicken and gyoza, but the rural areas... only the people who had served in the military had ever eaten other culture's food beyond Mexican (but solely the TeX-Mex variety) and family style Chinese.
This was 2010ish, 30 minutes or so from a college campus. I hope things have changed.
There was a strip mall in Indianapolis a couple miles from my house that had the best cheap Russian restaurant, Ethiopian restaurant, and a Thai restaurant run by my friends uncle. Just down the street from that there is a make your own spring roll option at a Vietnamese salad bar.
Really there's tons of great ethnic food all over the place but if you are in a tiny town in the Midwest you'll Just have fewer options.
I was on the Kentucky border. I have no doubt that Indianapolis has culture.