Oh, and on the opposite end of the spectrum, my daughter (who is adopted from Siberia) will try any food you put in front of her. Octopus? Bring it on! Squid! Sure! 2 years of eating beets in a Siberian orphanage makes you appreciate anything, I suppose.
I don't eat eggs or salmon. If I think about eating a fried egg hard enough it will make me gag. Other than those two things I'm an adventurous eater, and I think the absolute best part of traveling is trying local food. When I was in high school a couple of friends and I took a road trip to New Orleans from Seattle. Two of us ate at all the little hole in the wall local spots we could find. The third guy would only eat at McDonald's the entire trip. We're all about 28 now and I'm 75% that the guy who hate at McDonald's is still a virgin.
This is a pretty narrow minded view about picky eaters that I see a lot of people take up in order to feel superior, like smug vegetarians and the other groups that you have mentioned above. People who like a lot of foods will hold it above others, and act like they are far better because "oh, I totally ate the weird stuff in (insert SE Asian country they visited for a week). It was awesome" and, 'oh, I eat the weird sushi, because I am adventurous" With those groups, vegans, vegetarians, raw foodists, they are usually making a choice based on more or less political/ mental delusions that usually are grounded in la la land. However some people do taste things differently than you or I. Cilantro is a great example. To some people it tastes like the best thing since whiskey. To others it has a nasty, metallic, soapy flavor. I have read that this is a genetic thing, but I imagine other tastes/textures repulse the tastebuds on an evolutionary level. Humans basically are alive today because our ancestors learned through trial and error what was safe to eat, and a lot of that was taste. Certain tastes indicated that something was bad, and we learned to spit it out so we didn't end up dead, or shitting our caveman brains out.
I am not lording my superiority being an adventurous eater. I personally don't care what people eat, it is that they flaunt their vegan/vegetarian/raw-foodism like I am some sort of monster for not being how/what they are. When someone feels that they need to bring their politics to the table, then that is not a table I will be staying at long. I really do not need to know that they have moral or political compunction with what they see as 'acceptable' to eat. Specifically, when I go to a restaraunt, I do not begin bleating and mooing about how I will eat anything on the menu, conversly, I do not want to hear about how cruel it is to kill other animals for food, and how steak-houses are comparable to the mass graves a'la the holocaust. If it's that offensive, then leave. I am not about to walk into a head shop and start saying that pot smoking hippies are the bane of my existance, and are harvisting stupidity on a galactic level. I will simply NOT GO THERE. I avoid something that I am opposed to doing myself, and people with whom I have nothing in common. This is not a slight against pot smokers, or smoking pot. I live in a place where it has been decriminalized, and deal with high people daily. TL;DR I don't care what people eat, I just get bothered when someone broad-casts their food foibles as if it matters.
An interesting thing is that a small percentage of people actually do taste things differently, and are known as super-tasters. The majority of people that do food tasting for a living are super-tasters, and they taste things with way more of an intense reaction. Scientific American did a cool show on it, if you want to learn a bunch of useless trivia. I can see this potentially making them "picky eaters", as things like capsaican (the hot in hot peppers) are way more intense than for non-super-tasters. But to me, there are 2 type of pickiness... the type that is if they have a choice or a say in the matter, they will choose not to eat/prepare certain foods. These, I can appreciate. The ones that piss me off are the ones that can't just roll with it when it's not just them involved, they have to make a huge production out of it. Same goes with people that order off the menu in a restaurant, and send food back just because they're dicks. Can't stand those types. Really, though, I could care less about picky eaters, because I treat it like religion. I don't care what you eat, or how, with whom, using what... as long as it has no impact on me, fill your boots. If you start to fuck with my serenity, you can fellate a shotgun. Just don't get it in my food. I'm picky that way.
Focus: I think you can tell a lot about a person based on whether they choose to use spiral (side)-bound notebooks or legal pads. Whenever I see someone using a legal pad, I think "There's someone who doesn't have time to fuck around." A legal pad is sturdy enough to provide its own writing platform, can easily have pages torn from it, enables one to flip between pages quickly (tabs help, my legal pads always have a ton of tabs), and the binding never gets in the way. Don't even get me started on pens. Alt. Focus: I don't mind picky eaters if they have a handful of specific foods they don't eat. My problem is with the people who refuse to eat an entire type of cuisine and veto any restaurant suggestions in that range. If there are twenty items on the menu and you can't find one you can eat without bitching, you're an asshole.
People who don't eat vegetables piss me off. If I'm talking with someone who proudly announces "I only eat meat and potatoes" they immediately go in my retard bin. From experience these folks are boring as fuck and are not prepared to step outside a comfort zone that was installed when they were a child. Similarly when I’m travelling and I come across people who won’t even try the local cuisine, I can’t help but feel contempt. Eating is a big part of being alive, to not explore all the available experiences with no valid reason is painfully depressing.
Like it's a chore and I wish it were over. Yeah, this one doesn't work for me. I have a weird relationship to food. I don't think it says much of anything about me at all, except that maybe I don't taste as well or as strongly as the average person. But that's just a guess. Generally, I don't enjoy food and I find eating to be a total chore. If there were a procedure I could undergo which would mean I never had to eat anything ever again and not worry about fatigue, weight-loss or death. I would do it tomorrow. I don't stop eating when I'm full, or when my plate is clear. I stop eating when I'm no longer hungry. Unfortunately, this means I'm usually hungry again in an hour or two. If it's dinner, I'll make an effort to stuff down a little extra. But I've gotten used to feeling hungry by the time I crawl into bed. I'm used to feeling hungry in general and if I'm not about to do something that requires energy, I'll just wait it out. That's right. I'd often rather feel the pain of hunger than eat. As a result, I am often labeled as a picky eater by some and wildly adventurous by others. I am always open to trying new foods because I am always hoping I'll find it to be delicious. But others see how rarely I enjoy my meals and label me as picky. But it's not the food, it's the eating.
Alt-focus: I can understand people don't like food, it does not bother me in the least. What annoys me the most is that people dismiss entire food groups for no apparent reason. When prodded they usually end up saying they once ate fish somewhere and it did not taste right, this for them is reason to dismiss fish as a tasty food group all together. This rages me so hard, there are a ton of different fish that have completely different tastes. The preparation also makes a huge difference, pickled herring with dill sauce is going to taste radically different from a fresh herring with onions straight from the barrel.
For me, seafood tastes metallic. All of it. I have tried ONE thing, ever, that didn't taste like metal. It was the crawdaddy fondue crap from Razzoo's. I don't eat cheese anymore so I won't have that ever again. Other than that, shrimp, fish, calamari, all of it has a distinct metallic taste that I can't stomach. And that is why I dismissed seafood.
I'm an insanely picky eater, but I've gotten better over the years. For several years I refused to eat steak.. wtf? Now looking back I wish I liked steak when I was little. I'm that plain hamburger kind of guy, but mainly because I grew up on a beef farm so to me, if a burger has quality beef, and done perfectly, one shouldn't need to hide the taste of MEAT with shitloads of toppings. I love bbq sauce, ketchup and bacon on it, that's about it. I went to a Hardee's the other day and the cooks in the back were making fun of my order. I'm used to it, but as I said.. I've branched out (thankfully). One thing I love to cook is bison beef, my entire family is scared of bison beef (yet prides themselves in deer meat). Some days I wish my dad was a bison farmer instead. Now days I'm a beer connoisseur, absolutely not picky when it comes to beer (sans Bud Light/lime crap), my parents/sister are the exact opposite, they're insanely finicky. Apparently Unibroue maudite "tastes like hell" to them. Food/etc I can't stand: *Fish/seafood - I'll just puke it up *Chicken - however I'll eat it, and sometimes I'll enjoy it *Mustard - just a hint of mustard on a burger makes me puke *Scalloped potatos
Ok, you do realize that BBQ sauce and/or ketchup will hide the taste of the meat WAY more than any veggies or other toppings you would put on it, right? If I'm getting a good quality burger I'll still pile on the toppings but will do without the condiments. Kind of like when I eat a good piece of steak I still have some veggies with it, but Heinz 57 and A1 will not be in the same room as me.
Although the premise seems reasonable at first glance, my experience is different: my housemate absolutely will not eat a fruit or vegetable that isn't potato or onion. No lettuce in burgers, no orange juice, nothing. Shit, he won't even let me drop a slice of lime into his rum and coke. The smell of mangoes kept in the fridge makes him ill. However... This is the same housemate that cycled across Bosnia on a stolen girl's pushbike, by himself. He hung out with armed Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and made his way across rural China for a year on about 30c a day. He spends as much time as he can afford living in places even experienced travellers think twice about - Africa, Bosnia, Serbia, rural India/China, etc. This is a guy who doesn't feel alive unless he is solo travelling some 3rd world place that would give me nightmares, and I try not to be too precious in the travelling department. So, the correlation between food and general attitude towards life just doesn't strike me as accurate. Focus: Skirting politics, but I find that people who believe that any Government really, truly exists to act in their best interests tend not to be particularly deep thinkers. I don't mean that they aren't intelligent, just that they tend not to be that interested in reflection or debate. This may be an Australian thing where we are sort of known for our cynicism regarding politicians / the upper classes, from the outside at least Americans seem to have more faith in their political process. On the food tip - if every time you eat out with friends, you find fault with the service, the decor, the wine, the food, whatever; you are a bad person and almost certainly terrible in the sack.
This is why I skip the mustard on burgers. Mustard overpowers most everything and can take away from the taste that are good combinations with burger, cheese, bacon, onions, ect. For me though mustard combines awesome with hotdogs/brats, I drown them shits in mustard.
I might have worded it badly, but a large and vocal segment of the American populace seems to be genuinely surprised when your politicians fail to deliver, whether it's Bush on tax cuts or Obama on social justice. Comparatively, we have our state newspaper trying to start a campaign to remove 'Honorable' from the titles of our MPs. This might be just a reflection of the news that makes it across to us though - 'Public unsurprised at politician's self-interest; life goes on' isn't exactly a compelling headline. Focus: 'Flirting', for lack of a better term. My experience, albeit limited, is that the biggest flirts are uninspiring in bed. The girl that is always talking up her latest sexual conquest, how much she loves giving head, etc, is almost invariably average - to - starfish. Or maybe that's just because much like my cooking, I offer them $15 to deliver it to me and get out in under 15 minutes.