The Kid Is All Right: In Defense of Picky Eating
October 22, 2025 at 11:28PMFor Serious Eats, Irina Dumitrescu remembers being a picky eater in childhood in 1980s Romania, a country brutalized by Nicolae Ceaușescu’s austerity policies. Under his regime, Romania’s best produce was sold abroad while citizens subsisted on what little was left. In this incisive piece, she considers raising a son with a discriminating palate and what she lost as a result of her own mealtime refusals, which included missing out on the joy of meals shared with cherished elders. “It was probably his first and last lobster,” she writes of her maternal grandfather tucking into a celebratory crustacean. “And I chose not to share it with him.”
Looking back now, I understand all the things I said no to when I turned down a meal. I refused nourishment—especially protein-rich dairy and meat—in a country where consuming enough calories to thrive was a challenge for anyone not connected to a farm or to the Communist party. I refused a culture, too, one that practiced nose-to-tail eating long after mainstream American cooking had moved away from offal. I declined to join in on my parents’ pleasure, a long “no” that I kept repeating even after we had left Romania for Israel, then Canada. I still remember their glee when they made piftie, how the project of boiling up pig parts took up the entire kitchen and dining room, how the odor of garlicky gelatin wafted throughout the house, delighting them, revolting me. Even my nose preferred not to.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/10/22/i-was-a-picky-eater/
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