A breakthrough for me came in fourth grade at Kent Knaus's house. Jeff and I were staying there for dinner, which was spaghetti. In sauce. Up until then I had only eaten my spaghetti in the time-honored traditional sauce of butter. It was childish, but hey, buttered spaghetti tasted damn good. I had a little bit of meat in spaghetti sauce put on the side of the plate so I'd get my meat and fruit requirements, but I ate that in one big bite followed by as much water as a 52 pound kid could drink. Don't bother telling me how similar spaghetti sauce and ketchup are; it's a difference only an eight year old tongue can appreciate.
I never tried sauced spaghetti as of then, and unless I made a huge fuss about how I was still in diapers and liked only buttered phisgetti, I'd get a plate full of red. Since I didn't make that fuss, I got the red. And as I ate it, I thought, "... This is OK." After a few more tries it actually got to be an acceptable way to eat pasta. Once I tried the damn stuff, it was never that bad to begin with.
I think this is true of most food. Most all of it is consumed by big chunks of the world without complaint, so it's all edible. Our instant dislike to its smell or look or simply the concept of it gives us opinions before we've tried it, and we stick to those opinions our entire lives.
Despite me knowing that, I still don't grow much foodwise. I despise when the sandwich I order comes to me with a big pickle slice soaking the bread next to it in nasty brine. My salad bar purchases are usually lettuce, carrots and bacon bits. I like burgers with just burger and cheese, which requires me to stand by the counter while my burger is made my way right away (right away being about ten minutes) and when I bite into that burger, I realize that the guy behind me must have gotten the clean one because I just hit a layer of steamed onions and horseradish. Short list of foods I hate without ever giving them a decent shot: mustard, pickles, raw tomatoes, sauerkraut, peach Jolly Ranchers, Good 'n' Plenty, peppers, anything gelatinous that's not Jello, corner pieces of lasagne, orange juice with pulp, pineapple soda, and sweetbreads.
I've been working on expanding my food repetoire to include everything but the sweetbreads. When I go into a restaurant, I'll order what I haven't had before. In New Hampshire (yes, the same New Hampshire trip from the diploma story), I ordered the venison stew. If someone had told me that deer season was November and I was ordering in May meaning I'd be getting a bowl of potatoes with perhaps a deer eyelash for $17.95, I would have reconsidered, but it's one less food I need to try. Well, I probably still haven't eaten any venison, so I need to order that damn stew again. But I tried, dammit.
My most recent attempt to eat new crap came last week at a Greek restaurant in Philadelphia. Anyone who's eaten Greek knows the story coming up. I was Christmas shopping with someone who wishes to be known as Lauren Brandymart because she's ashamed to have a part in me eating this food. I kept on telling her I need material for complaining about, and so long as something was horrible and had the potential for mild amusement, I didn't mind it. I'll also not give the real name of the restaurant, but that's for strictly legal reasons. Let's just call it Tommy's House of Spanakopeta.
The restaurant was crowded, so we had a half hour wait for a table. We saw plenty of food being prepared in the meantime, most all of it being filed in the No Department for possible entrees. One particular dish consisted of eight different pastes and some scraggly looking meat. This wasn't Greek cuisine, it was Star Wars food. I had a bad feeling about this.
We finally got a table, the size of a playing card a convenient half an inch from the kitchen door. Instead of the knife/fork/spoon combo on the napkin, there was just a knife. Maybe we had to kill our own lambs.
Reading the menu was (get the drum roll ready) all Greek to me. I no longer wondered what an illiterate had to go through. Lots of food with no descriptions, just prices. Hopefully sweetbreads weren't hidden in here.
Around half the time I'm in a restaurant, I wimp out and order a hamburger. Since I didn't know the Greek word for hamburger, I decided to go full the other way and experiment like I never experimented before.
We got the sample platter for an appetizer, and some trio dishes for entrees. Each entree had three different foods. By default, some of them had to be OK. How could the birthplace of civilization accept all nasty food?
The sample platter was the eight pastes and the scraggly meat we had promised not to go near. Calling it an 'appetizer' was a cruel joke. The only thing I recognized was the scraggly meat, which was octopus. Not octopus meat, but entire baby octupi. There were five sauce things that were midway between salsa and applesauce, all with a garlicly lemon plaque taste. We were given two spoons to eat it with, as if it was a big bowl of pudding.
One of the non-applesalsa sauces was called tsakziki, a cucumber and yogurt medley. Even wonder why there's no cucumber yogurt? I don't have to any more.
Some of the applesalsa was wrapped in a dripping green leaf with a real minty taste. I was happily surprised to find something that didn't taste like garlic lemon plaque that I sucked it down before my tongue could figure out the filling.
There were some regular bits of food there for garnish, or maybe for dipping. Unfortunately, they were a pepper, a raw tomato, beets and cucumber slices. (Go back to that nasty food list above and throw beets and cucumber on there. Told you it was just the short list.) I only had two math classes in college, but I still knew that yucky crap * yucky crap = yucky crap squared. No amount of ketchup can save yucky crap squared.
I went to a Greek food web page to piece together what went through my system that night. So far I'm batting around .400, which means there were seven or eight mysterious things that could have dropped from the ceiling or a wound from one of the kitchen staff that I subsequently ate. Stomach acid seemed to kill everything so far, but if I break out in hives or go blind in the next week, stay away from that octopus.
After the hungry ten year old's nightmare, the entrees came out. Each entree was a combo of three different things. I've got a better job with gastric nomenclature. I had moussaka, this sort of Greek lasagne with some whipped cheese stuff up top, pastitsio, the exact same food only with a little bit of pasta on the bottom in place of the little bit of eggplant on the bottom, and spinach pie, which you can all figure out, and if you can't then you probably read 'gastric nomenclature' and gave up on this paragraph, so it's moot. Lauren had souvlakia, which is literally just food on a stick, some sort of non-stick souvlakia, and some vegetable rice combo stuff.
Here comes the shock: all of the entree food was pretty good. If I went there again I'm have no problem ordering entrees; I'd just get a hamburger for an appetizer. Unfortunately, I couldn't get that, as Homer calls it, belt-popping fullness, because I was eating exclusively new food. The first five minutes is always testing the waters, especially after the pirahna attack we just went through. And it's tough to get that full sensation that comes only when you shovel three pounds of food in two minutes.
We were going to order the baklava, the honey nut pastry that brought Lauren to recommend this restaurant the last time she was here, but ultimately we decided against it.
The mystique of new food is the mystery involved. Knowing right off the bat that food's going to be good is in some way a disappointment. Only through sampling of the new items in the world can we truly understand and have a grasp at the cultures of the rest of the world we so often remain ignorant of. Getting the baklava would be only taking the refined best from a culture and not appreciating what it gets put on a pedastal against, like plundering an Egyptian tomb and immediately melting the gold down for scrap. There'd be too big a moral problem, even though we tried most everything ever cooked in Greece.
Or, we wanted to get home in time to catch the X-Files, take your pick.
