I've posted before, I'm a picky eater. I dislike foods for a variety of reasons, smell, texture, and taste.

My mother is actually a great cook (she's done catering, in fact), my father isn't a bad one, and when we were little, we were exposed to a wide variety of foods from different cultures - my parents are both adventurous omnivores. My siblings and I weren't catered to or spoiled as far as what was served or what we were to eat. Neither of them are picky eaters, in fact quite the opposite. I'm the only one who found many foods didn't taste good and now, I choose not to eat them.

I'll try anything once and most things more than once. If I'm served something at someone's home, I'll take at least partial servings of most things and say things like "it smells/looks so wonderful, unfortunately I had a heavy lunch, but I must have at least a bit of this delicious __________." I will then get it down, drink a lot of water, and have something else later.

At restaurants, I'll tend to be unadventurous because I don't like wasting food and I don't like wasting money. I know that I'm picky and I know that I can generally find at least one thing to eat at most places, so if someone says "We're going to __________," I'll go. I don't comment on anyone's else's food. I may order the most boring thing on the menu, but that's because I don't want to take 3 bites of it and then push the rest around my plate for an hour. That's a waste of perfectly good food, the chef's time, and my cash. Since the chances of my not liking something are so high, I'd rather order something that I know I will like or at least not mind.

One thing that no one has mentioned, there are also certain foods that I don't like in combination. As an analogy, I like Mozart, I like the sound of birds chirping, I like 50s rock, I like pop music, and I love showtunes. However, if you play them all together at the same time, it's just headache inducing noise. To me, a lot of food combinations taste like that sounds - I assume this isn't true for other people, because I see them enjoying foods put together in ways that I do not tend to like.

As I said earlier, I really will try almost anything. But I'm not going to keep making and feeding myself something I don't like in the hopes that it becomes something I do. That seems ridiculous.