Chronicles of a Formerly Picky Eater

I used to be a very picky eater. I went into college a vegetarian, although I (somewhat painfully) transitioned out of that before my trip to Tanzania. I didn't eat pizza until my junior year of college, or tomatoes. I didn't like (non-cheddar) cheese until I went to France sophomore year. (This is hard for me to imagine right now). However, this really only scraps the surface of my limited palette. Before college, my diet consisted mainly of yogurt, cereal, green apples, chick peas, grapes, carrots and ceasar salad. I don't know how my parents put up with me. When people invited us over for dinner, I politely asked if they had cereal.

I think I first discovered the joys of real food (read: cheese and nutella) when in Paris with my friend Eleuthera on spring break. Life without cheese seems pretty unpalatable now. The beginning of the end was probably the summer after my sophomore year, when I worked a lot with African refugee families and decided it was just plain rude not to eat the food they offered me. When I went after to Tanzania the next summer, we were frequently served nyama, an all-encompassing term that means "animal," and although we never learned to love it, we became able to eat a polite amount without wincing. As for ndizi (banana) cooked with tomatoes? Bring it on! We also discovered the wonders of Ethiopian food and I truly enjoyed meat for the first time.

In the past few weeks, I've discovered just how necessary my devolution from selectivity was. In Greece, I rarely got to choose my own food. When we went out to eat with Theo and Aliki, Theo inevitably ordered our food with input from Aliki. In some ways, this felt very old world-- I can't really imagine men routinely ordering for women in the U.S. On the other hand, it made sense because Rachel, Michelle, and I couldn't speak or read Greek. I came to trust that they would pick 'something good.' There's a small list of foods I still dislike-- like zucchini-- but I learned even zucchini is good if you put enough lemon on it.

I don't have a fridge in my apartment yet in Japan, so I often go to the convenience store ("Family Mart") to pick out healthy, cheap, ready made food. One of my favorites is onigiri, triangle-shaped rice balls with different fillings wrapped in seaweed. Luckily, they are color-coded so I can tell what's in them. The blue ones are my favorite-- they are filled with tuna, a food I thought I hated a week ago.

In general, though, my food shopping is hit or miss. Not only can I not read Japanese, but a lot of the food doesn't look like anything I've experienced before. I'm kind of intimidated by the heads of fish, but other than that, I'm never sure what I'm eating until I bite into it. I can't even reliably predict whether things are sweet or not. The other day, I accidentally bought sippable sweetened aloe vera yogurt for breakfast. At least now I know how to avoid it.

I know how to ask several helpful questions in Japanese: What is this thing near me? What is this thing closer to you? What is that distant thing? I imagine these could prove helpful at some future date. At this point, I could ask, but wouldn't understand the answers.

The only part of the food label I can read is the numerical part of the nutrition facts. Thus, I know my onigiri has 187 kcal, 5.5 g something and 3.1 g something else. My meal shopping is sort of like a mathematical scavenger hunt: find 600 calories. Go!

Another challenge is that what seems to be fairly extreme dieting here is so common that a lot of 'healthy' foods are insubstantial. I'm looking for a salad that has more than 54 calories to go with my onigiri after a long run, thanks. The solution is definitely mochi, a warm dumpling filled with delicious sweet red bean jelly.

The final grocery shopping challenge begins when I order mochi at the counter, where they are in a heater. "Mochi, I request," I say in terrible Japanese. Then I point to the pink one. This doesn't always work and there is a lot of confusion. "Sorry," I say. "I don't understand Japanese. Thank you." The cashier then has a lot of things to tell me about my food or its cost or the transaction in general. I'm not sure if these are expressions of surprise ("That is a very strange meal." "Thank you."), warnings about the food, ("The onigiri is no good today. It might make you sick." "Sorry.") or friendly conversation, ("Are you from America?" "Thank you" again.) but I stick to my stock phrases. Right now my favorite word in Japanese is ho-ten-ni, which means totally/very, but I haven't figured out a way to work that into my grocery shopping. I do totally request mochi, but I don't know which part of the sentence the adverb belongs in.