Picky Eaters

The Bastyr Fair this weekend got me thinking about picky eaters. We had one woman who asked us to pick the beets out of her mixed vegetables, and grew indignant when we refused. Another guy wanted a whole quesadilla with half of it vegan (we charge $6 for a whole and $4 for a half) but couldn't understand why we wouldn't just charge him $6 and cook the two halves separately, so no cheese would touch the vegan sections.

I understand making a choice to not eat a particular food. I don't understand refusing to eat anything that touched anything that touched that food, like the vegans who get upset that we cook cheese on the same grill as their vegan food, or because there's a tiny bit of cheese on their tamale's corn husk, even though you unwrap the tamale and don't eat the husk. It reminds me of the kids who burst into tears when a vegetable touches their cheese quesadilla.

I think that rejecting particular foods very often becomes a way to create divisions between people. I grew up in a kosher household, with separate sets of dishes for meat and dairy. Some Orthodox Jews even refuse to eat in the company of non-Jews. I do see how the kosher laws were an important factor in enabling us to maintain our cultural identity during two thousand years of diaspora, but I can't help wondering whether the separation that they mark also played a part in our history of religious persecution. Nobody likes someone who goes out of their way to say, "I'm not like you."