The Man Who Ate Everything - 11 views
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CHAPTER ONE
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cmyles17 on 12 Sep 16This is a reply
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jrisles5 on 13 Sep 16I find this essay very interesting and descriptive as he goes into detail what he would and would not eat in the story. For example, if he was deserted on a island, he would eat everything except insects.
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Everything
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By closing ourselves off from the bounties of nature, we become failed omnivores. We let down the omnivore team.
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Nations are like people. Some are good at cooking while others have a talent for music or baseball or manufacturing memory chips.
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intense food preferences, whether phobias or cravings, struck me as the most serious of all personal limitations
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Kimchi, the national pickle of Korea. Cabbage, ginger, garlic, and red peppers--I love them all, but not when they are fermented together for many months to become kimchi
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Nations are like people. Some are good at cooking while others have a talent for music or baseball or manufacturing memory chips
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We come into the world with a yen for sweets (newborns can even distinguish among glucose, fructose, lactose, and sucrose) and a weak aversion to bitterness, and after four months develop a fondness for salt.
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by the age of twelve, we all suffer from a haphazard collection of food aversions ranging from revulsion to indifference
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Just one bad stomach ache or attack of nausea after dinner is enough to form a potent aversio
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people who habitually avoid certifiably delicious foods are at least as troubled as people who avoid sex, or take no pleasure from it, except that the latter will probably seek psychiatric help
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People rid their diet of salt (and their food of flavor) to avoid high blood pressure and countless imagined ills.
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Fear and suspicion of food have become the norm
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any food tastes better the hungrier you are
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Did you know that babies who are breast-fed will later have less trouble with novel foods than those who are given formula?
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The variety of flavors that make their way into breast milk from the mother's diet prepares the infant for the culinary surprises that lie ahead
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My plan was simplicity itself: every day for the next six months I would eat at least one food that I detested.
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Later that evening, my lovely wife was kept up by an upset stomach, and I was kept up by my wife. She swore never to eat Greek food again
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And then I would sit back and complacently listen to her neurotic jumble of excuses and explanations: advice from a personal trainer, intolerance to wheat gluten, a pathetic faith in Dean Ornish, the exquisite--even painful--sensitivity of her taste buds, hints of childhood abuse. And then I would tell her the truth.
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most serious of all personal limitations
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a precarious balance between neophilia and neophobia
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Lard. The very word causes my throat to constrict and beads of sweat to appear on my forehead.
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urants, until 1989, the year that I, th
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My phobia crumpled when I understood that the anchovies living in American pizza parlors bear no relation to the sweet, tender anchovies of Spain and Italy, cured in dry sea salt and a bit of pepper
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The rest, most of it simply grilled with lemon and olive oil, was delicious, and as an added bonus I was launched on what still feels like an endless journey toward the acceptance of okra.
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Many cultures find insects highly nutritious and love their crunchy texture
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Anything featuring dill. What could be more benign than dill?