Cosmopolitan Toastmasters

  ........the Renick version?

Confessions of a Picky Eater.  by Sam Charchian

Do you consider yourself a gourmet?

Do you eat your eggplant, beets and liver?

Do you wish you were a proud vegetarian?

Culinary experts tell us that any food, which is fresh and properly prepared, has an excellent chance of being delicious.  So what is it that sets certain foods apart from others?  What makes them controversial and therefore more loved or hated?

Why is corn OUT, but asparagus IN?

Frankly, vegetables can be interesting, but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.

Okay, big deal, so I'm a Picky Eater.  All my life I have dined under a cloud of gastrointestinal disapproval from relatives, peers, and even fellow Toastmasters.

You challenge my judgment, my worldliness, and yes, my very masculinity - when I refuse to eat ?brandied eel?.

You burp condescendingly and say,

"If you're not adventurous about food, you must lack sensitivity about life and love and good personal hygiene".

Lets get this straight.  Because I pass on your breaded moth, doesn't mean there?s no place in my life for women or soap.

I've had it up to my moribund taste buds with your culinary carping.  Like anti-smokers and marathon runners, it makes you feel superior, thinking you are explorers and adventurers as you sneer through your "spinach-quiche" stained teeth.

You shout insults at me like, "How can you eat the same thing" every day?

Come on now!  I know (to you) I am a catsup stain on the great white napkin of life, so why are you so concerned with what I eat when I couldn't care less about your diet of animal brains, fish eggs and amphibian legs.  You snobby foragers call these sick anatomical amputations delicacies.

When I was a teenager, I tried an olive.  I hated it.  Since then I've led an oliveless life, yet I have managed to secure an income, father children and avoid institutionalization.

Being a picky eater is tough.  I'm the Rodney Dangerfield of the dining room.  Being invited t someone's home for dinner is sheer agony.  People (like you) think you impress me by appeasing your pedantic palates with rabbit cacciatore, sautéed in anchovy juice.  I am dying here!

There should be a word for you non-picky eaters. You like gourmet, I like "goat".  You, much like human garbage disposals, will eat anything.

Optional:

Being a picky eater has also stained my marriage greatly.  Determined to raise our kids as goats, my wife serves hemlock salads and strange fish dishes.  She feels that in order to support her epicurean efforts, I not only must ingest this stuff, but also then show the kids that I like it.  Do you know how hard it is to say "yum, yum" through curdled lips.

I dislike eating fish greatly.  The idea of sushi really makes me sick.

Can you imagine catching a cow and killing it by suffocation?  Put a plastic bag over its head and watch its bulging eyes?

That what you "goats" do when you catch fish, and suffocate it in the air.  No wonder Mark Twain once said: "Angling is an innocent cruelty".  You gotta be sadistic to eat suffocated fish.

I just can't understand you people who like fish.  Recently at dinner a friend said, "Boy, this is great fish".  I asked why the fish was particularly savory.  He said, "Because it doesn't taste like fishy".  That is a curious remark.

Did you ever hear anyone say, "I really like this hamburger, because it doesn't take cowy?"

Speaking of hamburgers, what do some of the great thinkers say about picky eaters?

Ray Kroc of McDonalds said,

"It requires a certain kind of mind to see beauty in a hamburger bun.  Yet, Is it any more unusual to find grace in the texture and softly curved silhouette of a bun than to reflect lovingly on the arrangement of textures and colors in a butterfly's wing?"

Optional:

Woody Allen once said,

"Why does a man kill?  He kills for food.  And not only food, frequently there must be a beverage.?   It makes you think, doesn't it"

Arrogant dinner party gourmets are usually vegetarians, who can?t have fried foods or bread, are on a salt free diet, can only drink bottled water and are allergic to eating utensils. Some want to see the FDA labels on everything they are eating.  And they call me the "Picky Eater".

After all, like Morris the Cat, I know what I like, not like you goats - who sit in restaurants for ½ hour trying to figure out which entrée to order.  I can order almost instantly.

You dinning room dilettantes assume your smug mastication, brands you as a connoisseur, a brand you guard like a sacred cow.  Well, in the words of the immortal General George Custer, "Sacred Cows make Great Hamburgers."

Maybe you were conned by parents who told you that eating succotash, tapioca pudding and kidneys would make you big and strong.  Did they tell you about the one million children in Argentina waiting in line for their Brussels sprouts?

Here is the truth by U.S. author, Herman Melville.

"The food of thy soul is light and space; feed it then on light and space. But the food of thy body is meat and potatoes; feed it then on meat and Potatoes; and so shall it merit a joyful resurrection."