How can you not like that, it’s great?

Is there a type of food you hate? Perhaps vegetables or strawberry soda? I personally would be considered a “fussy eater” or as my father would call it: an “asshole”. I don’t like cheese, eggs, rice, beans or fruit. There’s other stuff too but we’ll just work with this group and how the world seemed geared against anyone who don’t like those item.

Starting with eggs. Try going to any restaurant to get breakfast; you’ll find dozens of breakfast combos at various prices as long as you liked eggs. If you didn’t, you could get a stack of pancakes. There are no combos that don’t involve eggs. Restaurants must think that if you don’t want eggs then you must not want sausage, bacon, hash browns or anything else. You have to order your pancakes and then side orders of anything else and you end up spending a lot more. Or you could simply order a combo meal that has pancakes hash browns and sausage and when they ask you how you want your eggs you tell them to put them on someone else’s plate.

Now on to cheese, the food that everyone is expected to eat. It used to be that you could add cheese to items for a small cost but now you have to order items without cheese… but they don’t lower the cost. You order a Jumbo Jack they ask you if you want cheese and charge you a quarter more. But if you order the Sourdough bacon burger hold the cheese they don’t drop the price a quarter… why? And try to get a soft taco at Taco Bell without cheese, what you end up with is a tortilla filled with lettuce. I guess there is a weight that these tacos are supposed to be and without the cheese they have to fill it some how and heaven forbid they give you more meat.

Rice and Beans fall into the same category, an ethnic staple. Tell a the waiter at a Chinese restaurant, a real one not a fast food one, that you don’t want rice and they literally stare at you for a while. They don’t know what to do. Everyone gets rice. Usually what happens is they offer you a different type of rice… you turn down fried rice they offer you steamed rice. I usually ask: “Is that still rice? Then I don’t want it.” You get the same look from a waiter at a Mexican restaurant. The plates at a Mexican restaurant are planned out for their display and if you don’t want the beans then the plate is off balance and they don’t know how to fix it… and leaving it empty doesn’t seem to be an option. They also like to cover their beans in cheese and put rice on the plate. I usually end up with a small little soft taco just filled with chicken on a giant oval plate.

And now my personal favorite dislike: fruit. If I didn’t like vegetables I don’t think anyone would have a problem with it. My brother hates vegetables and people just nod knowingly. But tell someone you don’t like fruit and it’s very different. This is the conversation I end up having every time:

FRIEND: YOU WANT AN APPLE?

DAN: NO THANKS. I DON’T LIKE FRUIT.

FRIEND: YOU DON’T LIKE FRUIT?

DAN: NOPE.

FRIEND: NO FRUIT AT ALL?

DAN: NOPE, NONE AT ALL.

FRIEND: NOT EVEN BANANAS?

DAN: NOPE… NOT BANANAS.

FRIEND: WHAT ABOUT ORANGES?

DAN: NOPE, NOT ORANGES.

FRIEND: GRAPES?

DAN: NOPE.

FRIEND: HOW ABOUT…

DAN: DID YOU MISS THE PART WHERE I SAID ALL FRUIT?

FRIEND: HOW ABOUT STRAWBERRIES? YOU CAN’T HATE STRAWBERRIES.

DAN: I CAN AND I DO.

FRIEND: BUT FRUIT IS GREAT.

DAN: I’M GOING HOME NOW.

FRIEND: NO, WAIT. HOW ABOUT SOME CHEESE? I CAN SCRAMBLE YOU UP AN EGG.

SFX: DOOR SLAMS.

I’d like to say I’m joking, but literally every time I tell someone I don’t like fruit they proceed to list off every kind of fruit they can think of. It must be inconceivable to them that someone could not like any fruit so I must have forgotten about some that I really do like. What they fail to realize is my first job was at a fruit stand and I got a chance to try just about every type of fruit you could think of and guess what… I don’t like any of it.