1) Eat the food put in front of you.
2) Don’t eat it.
For my dear readers who like to play the role of my little inedible dancing monkey pets that I know some of you are, at this very moment, puttering and sputtering and trying to formulate a coherent sentence to try to tell me that my list is restrictive and ignores man’s capacity for freedom, flexibility, and adaptation. While you “chew” on that, the rest of us are going to proceed with an earnest discussion of why people who make fussy food requests at a meal that someone else prepared are societal bottom-feeders who should only ever be served gluten free dry bread and filtered tap water.
There are two main dynamics that get me hotter than a bottle of Sriracha. The first, coincidentally is the subset of the population that likes to compensate for their physical inadequacies by incessantly requesting hot sauce (or really any random condiment) when they’re out dining at restaurants (using that term loosely enough to cover McDonald’s). “Excuse me, waiter, this filet mignon is delicious but I’m still anxious about my inability to satisfy my wife. Can you please bring me a bottle of hot sauce so that I can prove to her that I’m a man capable of tending to her needs?” You know what comes next. “Mmmmm, (sniffle, choke) this red meat is delicious. And the lethal serving of Texas Pete’s brings out all of the red-blooded goodness (tears streaming down his face).” I’m not even going to address the cruel irony of being at once both pretentious (asking for some special ingredient) and classless (ruining a perfectly good meal with said ingredient that would have the chef rolling over in his grave…if he were dead). The focus of this discussion, and really life, is how the manner in which you eat your meal affects me. Of course we have the general awkwardness of not knowing whether we can eat our piping hot and well-prepared meals while you wait for the waiter (irony number 2) to run down the street to the grocery store and buy a bottle of whatever random thing that restaurant would never even keep in the kitchen because it’s so disgusting, or we should hurl dinner rolls at you so hard that you pass out and then we can eat our food in peace. Either way, we need a mechanism to force you to internalize the social discomfort you inflict on others. Fair warning, my preference is for plan B. The other big problem (here comes irony number 3) is that if you have such a sophisticated palette, why are we not at your house eating your food? My hypothesis is that someone at the table thinks your food tastes like dog chow…drenched in hot sauce. In fact, you may even think your food takes like dog chow drenched in hot sauce. In which case, you should just sit there, ashamed at your ham-fistedness in the kitchen and quietly enjoy your edible human meal so we do not have to spend the evening reliving the night you gave us all dry heaves.
On to the second course. If you have ever tried selecting from the in-flight meal options on an airline website these days (I know, airline food, right?), you know already exactly what I’m talking about. There is a stunning variety of the number of different kinds of –tarians who will only eat food grown in hermetically sealed hydroponic gardens by Austrian nuns in a Leper colony. I struggle to convey how precisely this situation captures the self-important, self-indulgent absurdity that has seized our communities. No one expects airline food to be tasty. In fact, I’ll bet that every mother on the plane has a stash of something she knows her kids will eat in case they wind up with the kind of fare that this woe-begotten traveler, uh, gotten: http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/dailyloaf/2009/01/28/dear-richard-branson-best-complaint-about-airline-food-or-anything-ever/. But simply not eating a terrible meal is not sufficient for our fussy foodies. No indeed. They must have the opportunity to turn their noses up at precisely the combination of ingredients and degrees of dead flesh (don’t even get me started on the delusional hypocrisy of being pescatarian) that they prefer, under threat of unmeritorious nuisance suit. Apart from the selfishness of trying to turn every food experience into a made-to-order nutritional regimen, there is the much more important matter of cost. Every time you insist on special food accommodations, you increase the cost to the rest of us who would happily pay $100 less for a plane ticket and eat our rubber chicken in peace. A brief lesson in economics: chefs get paid for their time, the price of food incorporates the cost of the chef’s time, the cost of the ingredients, and the degree of WASTE. You are the only one who wants wheatgrass and kale puree next to your oat-burger and yet we all pay for the cost of throwing away everything that you don’t eat (because, of course, no one else wants to eat it).
My solution is as simple as it is implementable. If someone serves you something that you can’t or won’t eat, then don’t eat it. This will have the salutary side effect of making it easier for you to keep your yap shut. Problem. Solved.
