As a young child and into my early teens, I was an obnoxiously picky eater. To better understand what exactly this means, I present to you a stereotypical adventure to get food with my family. One night my mother decided to take me and my sister to go eat at our usual restaurant. As we arrived, I decided a trip to the toy store around the corner was in order while the rest of my family went in to sit down. Lacking foresight at such a young age, I didn’t realize my absence during ordering would hinder my ability to pick something edible from the menu. My ignorantly blissful state of mind was quickly shattered after returning to the table. To my horror, my family had ordered me chicken fingers. Any normal person would either like or dislike both chicken nuggets and chicken fingers. I was the special anomaly to the statistic in that chicken fingers did not resemble the same shape as chicken nuggets and were thus inedible. It was only after several minutes of fussing that I was finally convinced to eat the chicken nuggets.
Several years later found me being presented with my first opportunity to travel abroad to China for three weeks with my sister and our friend. This would be my first extended stay in a place that didn’t regularly consider chicken fingers and other similar American delicacies to be important enough to end up on the menu. Not content with such a situation, I decided to add my own items to the menu. Into my suitcase went forty health bars, enough to last my three week stay so that I would not have to try anything new.
The first few days went rather successfully with me generally consuming only rice and health bars. Any ‘weird’ foods passed my way were discretely disposed of to my traveling companions. Around day five I took an inventory check of my health bars and found that I still had twenty bars left. Twenty bars!? At this rate I’d be eating nothing but rice for the last ten days of the trip.
Something had to change and fast or else starvation would slowly take over. I found my solution in a few words of wisdom passed on to be by my sister. “It’s only a mental thing, nothing more.” I tried to take these words to heart but a transition from chicken nuggets to chicken fingers does no way compare to a transition from chicken nuggets to chicken feet. In hindsight there probably isn’t much difference between the two except maybe a trip through the blender, but hopefully you get the point. Thankfully, I halfheartedly took these words to heart and managed to finish off the three weeks with no loss of weight or signs of malnutrition.
I can’t say that my trip ended exactly the way I wanted it to but it did spark my shift towards being more open to new foods. The gradual transition however did take its toll and four years later I was ready to go again to China, this time with a more open mind.
