Just thinking about the Spicy Food aversion that many of us have, and the tendency to avoid many “foreign” cuisine foods, I can’t help wondering what picky eating people from “spicy food” countries or more exotic locations than here do, or how they experience picky eating, or indeed, whether such places actually have any picky eating adults.
Certainly, those of you who have posted here seem to be predominantly from “Western”-type countries, the UK, the USA, Canada and Australia. Yahoo Picky Eaters overwhelmingly displays the same pattern, in keeping with it too being an English-speaking web-site, though I do notice they have one member from Africa, and one from Asia.
I don’t think I could ever go to places like India, China or Japan for the simple reason that unless I restricted my stay to a Western-type hotel (in which case what would be the point?), I don’t think I’d find very much there that I could eat, and even then there’d be no guarantee.
So I guess the question I’m toying with is, if there are picky eaters in these places, is the pickiness manifest in the same way as, say, my picky eating (no fruit, veg, rice, spice etc), or is it applied to a separate set of foods? We here, and at Yahoo Picky Eaters, have noticed certain broad similiarites in the foods we avoid, and I guess I’m wondering whether Picky Eating (whatever it is) is loosely food-specific, or whether the similarities observed are culturally determined.
If Picky Eating is food-type specific, then heaven help the Indian and Asian populations of picky eaters, for whom the basic staple foods are no-go. I would be somewhat amazed if this were the case, however – my guess would be that picky eating is more of a food neo-phobia than a fruit/veg phobia. What do other people think?
Of course all of this idle speculation is kind of premised on the assumption that picky eating happens at all in non-western cultures. Would be interesting to find out either way.
NB. Apologies for the grossly uk-centric way in which these thoughts have been expressed. It’s a combination of laziness and ignorance, rather than any actual disrespect to other cultures.
