Food quirks: rescuing canned peas & others

Have you ever thought the tin of peas in the supermarket needs to be rescued because some absent-minded shopper has left it among the tomatoes? Lana has. Nicky won’t eat sweet food before midday. Food quirks. We all have them. But when we were discussing our lists around the office, it was me who rattled off a list longer than the Magna Carta.

I’ve come close on several occasions to climbing into a confined space and sobbing uncontrollably after burning my toast slightly beyond ‘brown’ and venturing into ‘crispy black territory’. It’s the kind of food misadventure that I just won’t stomach. It sends me bonkers.

I have no idea why I have so many OCD moments when it comes to eating or food preparation. I remember my first rather distinctly as a child. This is the part where I recline on my metaphorical therapy couch. Join me, it’ll be a hoot!

I was raised on a cattle station where we used to kill our own cattle for beef. I had no qualms helping my father cut the beast up and into various meat servings. Rump, shortbread, ribs. The tongue. Oh the tongue was the best part! Yet when it came to eating steak I abhorred it. It was always fault-lined with gristle and tough and chewy. I don’t like to chew. If I could unhinge my jaw and swallow my food whole, I would.

My mother knew that if I wanted a meat sandwich she had to cut the meat so finely that it almost existed entirely on the quantum level and couldn’t be viewed side on lest it be rendered invisible. She knew this. When I asked my father to cut me some meat for a sandwich (I was very young) he would lop it off in 2cm thick cuts that could be used to stabilise a wonky table.

This is why I quickly developed a taste for tomato sauce sandwiches. Just tomato sauce sandwiches.

I don’t like crunchy healthy food. Onions only when caramelised. If I detect a single crunch in a salad that is plant-based I will stop instantly in revulsion. But nuts are fine. Crunchy anything else is fine. Raw carrots are terrible. Roasted carrots are awesome. Celery can go to vegetable purgatory and spend its days there as I do not want a bar (or a stem) of it.

I love tomatoes. Adore them, in fact. But I will only eat them diced. This makes less sense than a scat singer, but there you have it. I could eat a bowl of diced tomato but if you handed me one whole tomato I would build a fort from couch cushions and let nobody near me for a week.

I like burgers but won’t eat them with my hands. Nor pies, nor sandwiches if I can help it. Knife and fork, for me, please.

A yet more terrible offence against my food habits would be to watch me eat. I’d sooner have you videotape me on a first date. Without pants. I can’t eat my lunch around the office table unless it’s easy to handle. And even then I’m overcome with this fear that people are critiquing me from across the way.

I hate buffets. I’m always paralysed by the excess of options. I can’t cope with that amount of pressure while trying to calculate the tidal effects of beetroot juice on my mashed potato and whether it might pool too near the beans. I turn to spy the line of agitated people behind me and panic, frantically throwing assorted food groups on to my plate in the most mismatched dinner since Hannibal cooked us that mystery meat barbecue.

Despite growing up on an animals-are-raised-for-food station, I can no longer, today, eat any meat that is still attached to the bone. No wings. No chicken drum sticks. No chops. You might as well hand me a live animal and say ‘here, this is Bertha, you’ll be dining on her today’.

Most stringently of all, I need to read when I eat. Anything. Anything at all. Backs of food labels, the newspaper, my phone, menu boards, advertisements. I am compelled to read and I would rather do this than go on a dinner date and have to talk to anyone. Or even lunch with friends. But only while I’m eating.

Yes, I know. I’m weird. I’m destined to stew in my own neuroses forever more. And I bet I’m not alone.

Now that I’ve been remarkably honest and gratuitously odd, tell me, what are your food quirks? What’s your routine when you eat? What must you simply do when it comes to food?

Let’s all, err, be supportive of our collective oddity. I promise not to laugh.

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