How a childhood encounter with rotten tomatoes led to my food obsession
Is it a quirk or a disorder? Am I a ‘whiteatarian’? My own history of picky eating looks different now that everything has a label.
One recent Sunday the extended family got together in a local Chinese restaurant for yum cha, and I became hypnotised then horrified by a particular dish on our table’s lazy Susan.
This particular lazy Susan was a large, fake mahogany wheel that was soon laden with dishes and spinning about in the centre of the table, pecked at by chopsticks and forks as it eased clockwise.
At one point I had given it a nudge counterclockwise and was chastised and warned by my daughter, whose name is not Susan, that it was bad luck to move it in “reverse of its natural order”. I did not know lazy Susans had any sort of order, let alone a natural one. You learn something every day.
For the uninitiated, a lazy Susan is a small, round revolving table often the centrepiece of dining tables in largely Chinese restaurants, upon which bowls of food are placed. The lazy Susan can then be gently spun in a circular fashion by diners – a simple push of the fingertips will suffice – whereby the dish of their choice, via the revolving wheel, can arrive before them.
You then put on the brakes and bog in.
Beware. Lazy Susans do have in-built, unspoken rules of etiquette. You may wish to spin at the precise moment someone on the other side of Susan is extracting food from their favoured bowl. Or you might accidentally or on purpose hijack someone else’s spin in a race to polish off the last of the ribs in black bean sauce.
Nevertheless, the lazy Susan is perhaps the greatest instrument of gastronomic democracy in human history.
On this Sunday in our local Chinese eatery, I felt a pang of sorrow for all the Susans in the world who’d ever been unfairly maligned because of their name’s association with this contraption.
I have known many industrious Susans, hugely talented and hardworking Susans, some beautiful Susans, gregarious Susans, and Susans who wouldn’t dream of blowing their own trumpet. Yes, I have bumped into the occasional recalcitrant Susan, and even disagreeable Susans, but the world is filled with many different Susans and is richer for it.
Even Dean Martin tried to correct the record on Susans, seemingly to no avail, with his song, Susan. “Susan has got that certain air the boys call supersonic/ The barbers in the town are running out of tonic/ The local Romeos are at their Sunday best/ Struttin’ down the avenue buzzing like the bees around Susan.”
For Susans to be universally disparaged as lazy Susans is just one of those unfair wrinkles in life that can never be satisfactorily explained.
What horrified me, though, was this.
The conversation around our lazy Susan had drifted towards my sister’s grandchildren.
As we shovelled in prawn dumplings and salt-and-pepper calamari, my sister told us, with a slow shake of the head (a very lazy Susan-ish shake, I might add), that her youngest grandkiddie, aged five, was a very fussy eater.
So fussy, in fact, that he ate nothing but crustless bread, plain, unadorned pasta and peeled Granny Smith apples.
“He only eats white food,” declared my sister, tsking.
And that’s when my moment of horror set in. As she described this grandchild’s eating affliction, a large bowl of fluffy white rice eased by on the lazy Susan.
As a kid, I had been the same. Nothing but white food. Anything with colour totally rejected. I had been – to my deep shame – a food racist. Or a foodist.
Let’s make this very clear. This did not mean I was terrorising the neighbourhood dressed in a white sheet and a pointy hat with eyeholes, brandishing peeled bananas. (Even if I did grow up in Queensland in the ’70s.)
No, this was strictly food-related, and it may have had a singular point of origin, that being the toasted sandwich filled with rotted, semi-liquefied, possibly mouldy tomatoes a mate’s mother made for lunch one Saturday and who, despite my repeated gagging, oversaw that I ingested every morsel. Waste not, want not.
The moment gave birth to my lifelong fear and loathing of all things tomato and may have triggered the white food phase. (And while I now eat a veritable rainbow of foods, I have still, to this day, been unable to look at, let alone eat, a sliced tomato or, as it is scientifically known, the Solanum lycopersicum. Notice the partially embedded word “sicum”. My sentiments exactly.)
They have a newfangled name for these food racists now. They’re called whiteatarians.
The term was coined a few years ago by journalist Julie Kendrick in an article in the HuffPost.
She wrote: “Well, moms and dads, you already know that children are annoying for lots of reasons, including a tendency toward tantrums, a love of pre-dawn wake-up times and, of course, picky eating. Would it help if I told you that their eating preferences are pretty much hardwired into their sweet-smelling little noggins? The National Institutes of Health says infants have an ‘innate preference for sweet and salty tastes and tend to reject sour and bitter tastes’.”
“And, guess what, it gets worse. After the age of one, vegetables begin to taste very bitter to children,” Alisha Grogan, a pediatric occupational therapist who specialises in picky eating and sensory processing, told HuffPost. “When humans had to forage in the wild, children’s sensitive tastebuds prevented them from eating anything poisonous.”
Naturally in this day and age no quirk of human behaviour isn’t labelled or categorised as some sort of disorder or phobia.
Whiteatarianism can be confused with Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder or ARFID. The Ability Innovations website defines ARFID thus: “When a child has a sensory food aversion they will often gag or even vomit at the sight, touch, smell, or taste of certain foods. This is because their brain is over processing the sensations, which means that the child is intensely and negatively experiencing the smell, texture, or flavour of food.”
ARFID, too, could potentially be a subset of a greater childhood malady known as Sensory Processing Disorder, or kids with a problem digesting – no pun intended – sensory information.
To add to the confusion, there is such a thing as a “white diet” – milk, butter, eggs, rice, pasta, potatoes, chicken, white fish – that can be a prerequisite to a gastroscopy or colonoscopy.
All I know is that as a child I ate white food possibly because I’d faced the sheer yawning terror of decomposing tomato (I swear I can still hear it biologically deconstructing as I slowly put morsels into my mouth) in between the loud and regular yack of dry retching. Perhaps I was more an antitomatoarian than a whiteatarian.
And I’d be thinking of none of this – bilious and belching quietly as I am – if it hadn’t been for that bowl of white rice that cruised by on the lazy Susan during a lazy Sunday brunch.
Next time we’re going on a picnic.
