How to be mustachian with a picky eater

[shanesauce]

In a perfect world I could buy cheap staple foods and spices and make wonderful delicious dishes.

My spouse is a very picky eater, we are talking like a 5 year old picky. I guess this isn't a huge issue but how can I optimize lunch/dinners with lots of beans and rice and soups when my wife doesn't like beans, vegetables or any kind of soup? Is there some kind of step process that picky eaters can use to overcome their habit? 

[Lyssa]

Picky eater here.

Does she like pasta? Lots of cheap pasta dishes are availabe. If I like something (like anything pasta...) I don't mind having it 5-6 times a week. That's the case with most picky eaters.

And yes, we can get over ourselves to a certain extent. As a child I was picky up to the point of loosing my hair because of lack of vitamins. And I would scream and fight of any supplements. Great times for my parents. :-)

Now I can eat almost anything except fruits at least occasionally. Re some products I've more or less "trained" myself to become familar with and occasionally even like them (e.g. introduce tiny amounts of a "new vegetable" as part of a pasta sauce before having it as a side dish). Frame this as an opportunity for your wife rather than as you correcting her and teaching her to eat right. It's fun and relaxing that I can now choose a dish from a menu without cutting out two and replacing another component. Cut her some (as in huge amounts of) slack re her "no-gos". My no-fruit-policy is bizarre for most people but that is just because I find the faintest hint of fruit acid downright nauseating. There is a theory around that picky eaters are created by a biological and a cultural element. The cultural element of course being the overabundance of food choices and the way a kid is raised. The biological element is thougt to be an enhanced perseption of some or all tastes with some of them being perceived as disgusting.

[ooeei]

Former picky eater (yet now completely reformed) here.  I did a few different things to get a taste for vegetables and different ethnic foods.  I started by getting meaty oven bake pizzas (good ones) and putting things like bell peppers on them.  After awhile, probably between 5-10 pizzas later, I started to miss the bell peppers if they weren't there.  I figured out that there are other pleasant flavors than "savory" and "sweet."  Fried rice is another good savory dish with vegetables in it where you can gradually up the veggie content as the person gets more used to it and crave the "freshness" of veggies to lighten it up.  After I got to where I liked vegetables, I went with coworkers once a week to an ethnic place I'd never been.  I'd get the most "mainstream" dish there, and at least try everything.  I didn't like it all, but did end up liking most of it.

I think getting involved in cooking helped me a lot too.  Jamie Oliver got me interested in what I was eating, and showed how "proper" meals should be cooked.  I don't do too much of his stuff anymore, but he's pretty inspirational (his TED talk is really good as well) and fun to watch.  The difference from what I thought a salad was (flavorless lettuce, a huge hunk of bland tomato, and a few 1/2" thick slices of cucumber with some shitty bottled dressing on the side) vs what a salad can actually be (mixes of greens, dried cranberries, toasted walnuts, with a honey vinaigrette tossed evenly over the salad.  Also love a good caesar.) is mindblowing.  I remember after having one of those real salads I thought "THIS is why people eat salads, it makes sense now, this is actually good!"  Depending on where you live, good quality restaurant food may not be around.  Frying food is easy and cheap.  Properly grilling fish or vegetables, or making a good quality salad is a bit harder to train someone making minimum wage to do.  Going to a relatively pricey place occasionally is probably worth it to get her to try new things, then you can learn how to make them at home.  I go with my girlfriend to a restaurant called "North Italia" a few times a year.  It's pricey (~$20 or so per person if you split a salad), but we get a new salad whenever we can and then try to reverse engineer it to make at home.  I actually just had a try at making ciabatta since they always bring it out as an appetizer, turned out great!

What it comes down to is the person has to want to expand their eating habits.  I realized I was being kind of a baby about different foods, there are people all over the world brought up in totally different environments from me, and as far as I know nobody's starved yet because they hated everything but fried chicken and hamburgers but were born in Asia.  In fact, most civilizations have built their food culture on things completely different from ours.  Are they really all crazy, or is there something to it?

If your spouse doesn't want to change, she probably won't.  It might be worth talking to her about her health, but I don't know what kind of person she is.  I know in some of Jamie Oliver's videos he talks about getting kids involved in gardening to get them to try new things.  Give a kid a carrot out of a bag and they won't touch it, have them grow that same carrot and they're excited to try it.  There's a whole world of food out there, and believe it or not, the food that is on kids menus in American restaurants isn't the pinnacle.

[Cpa Cat]

Fully reformed picky eater. When I met my husband, he would eat anything. He seems to enjoy ordering and learning to like really disgusting things - even things that don't seem like they should be edible, like weird chewy organ meats and fermented rotten eggs. His theory is that not liking things is all in your head and that you can grow to like anything. Like Ooeei pointed out, a lot of "gross" things are considered delicacies in other cultures and have been eaten for thousands of years.

He would push me to always try everything he ordered. I'd be sitting in a Chinese restaurant with my pork fried rice or General Tso's Chicken and he'd be eating Szechuan-Spicy Six Organ Soup with Extra Gross Bits. He encouraged me to try things that I thought I disliked, or tried in the past and wasn't keen on. And eventually something changed. A lot of things that I initially disliked, I realized later that I enjoyed and wanted to order. Spice wasn't scary. New ingredients weren't scary.

One of the blocks I had was that my parents would insist I eat something even if I hated it. It was eat the food or go hungry. If I expressed any openness for new foods, it carried a strong risk that I would go hungry. Since my husband was the hoover vacuum of disgusting foods, I was able to freely try new things without wasting them. The worst that was going to happen was that I wouldn't like it.

I also had a delicate digestive system as a child. As an adult, I was convinced that was allergic to a lot of things or would get sick if I ate certain things. It turns out that I had outgrown most of these issues (or they were caused by my weird childhood food anxiety) - but I had to keep tasting and pushing myself in order to gain the confidence to try new things. I also had to admit that maybe my parents just weren't great cooks - it seems to me that many of the items that I disliked were simply poorly prepared.

Again, to echo what Ooeei said, I had to decide to stop being a baby about food. My husband helpfully called me out on being childish about food at a time when I wanted to impress him, so that helped me - but I'm not sure it works outside of the key head-over-heels courtship point in a relationship!

I stopped using strong language for my dislike of food. Your wife hates beans? Really? All beans? No matter how they're prepared? Unless beans cause her throat to swell up until she chokes on her own vomit, she can't possibly hate ALL beans. And even if they did make her sick, she doesn't hate them - she just can't eat them because they make her sick.

Your wife hates soup? ALL soup? Pureed Soup? Chunky soup? Soup with just a little broth? Meat soup AND meatless soup? Cold soup and hot soup? It's ridiculous. "Soup" is too general to hate. What does she hate about soup? There is a soup out there that minimizes or eliminates what she hates.

Your wife hates vegetables? Seriously? All vegetables? Of all the thousands of ways to prepare the thousands of types of vegetables in the world - she hates all of them? That's even more ridiculous than hating all soups. She needs to be more specific about what she dislikes.

She needs to put food in her mouth and say, "I don't like this specific food because it's bland/mushy/salty/bitter/etc. It could be improved by doing X." The thing is that she's not 5 years old. She's a grown up. She can handle being a participant in developing specific solutions to improve her childish trait. The first step for her will be to admit that it's childish.