Eating Cure

Are food phobias getting the best of you? Find out how to ditch them.

By Annie Murphy Paul, published on March 01, 1998 - last reviewed on October 31, 2007

It was the pasta salad that made me realize I needed help. My favorite take-out is full of delicious things: bowtie pasta, mushrooms, cucumber, with a sesame-peanut dressing. It's also full of peas. I hate peas. I hate them so much that I pick out each and every one and place them in a little green pile at the far end of my take out container. The source of my deep revulsion is what a friend and fellow pea-hater calls the "pop-squish" phenomenon: the unpleasant sensation of teeth piercing the peas' thin skin, spilling their vile inner mush.

An assignment for PT held out some hope: I was to get over my food phobias with the help of an experienced counselor, a sort of gastronomic psychotherapy. "Annie," my editor said gravely, "this is something you've got to do—if not for yourself, then for all of us who have to watch you eat lunch."

Peas are just the beginning, you see. There's raw oysters. Beets. Animal parts of all kinds. And aspic: confronted with a quivering, translucent mass, I revert to the sensible and probably adaptive belief that food should stop moving before you eat it.

My guide to gastronomy's dark side was to be Jeffrey Steingarten, omnivore, food critic for Vogue, and author of The Man Who Ate Everything (Knopf, 1997). In his book, Steingarten calls food dislikes "the most serious of all personal limitations," and describes how he taught himself to relish everything edible: "No smells or tastes are innately repulsive," he writes, "and what's learned can be forgotten."

Steingarten overcame his aversions (to okra, anchovies, and desserts in Indian restaurants) through an effort of sheer will. I needed a bit more coddling, so Steingarten asked Daniel, revered chef of the New York restaurant Daniel, to prepare all the foods I hate in the most appetizing way possible.

Once seated on Daniel's long banquette, we began with what is surely an unorthodox therapeutic technique: downing a glass of very good red wine. Thus fortified, I faced my first course, a ceviche of Maine sea scallops and oysters with horseradish, lime, and caviar, in chilled oyster water and aspic. Having tendencies, I naturally ate the caviar, intense and salty-sweet, and the smooth, snowy-white scallops first.

Taking a deep breath, I lifted a slippery, slimy oyster in its shell, trying to ignore its jiggling—and slurped. After a momentary panic that the thing was in my mouth, I allowed it to slide down my throat, and surprised myself and Steingarten by exclaiming, "That wasn't so bad!" I tried another, and noticed with pleasure this time that the oyster tasted exactly like the sea.

Excited by this therapeutic breakthrough, I conveniently forgot about the aspic, still quivering at the bottom of the bowl. Bring on your innards, your entrails! I crowed inwardly. Give me your bottom feeders, the food chain's last links!

Daniel obliged, preparing for my next course "a salad of crispy calf's brain and tongue with red and gold beets" (it sounds much better in French). The dish was set before me with a flourish, a pile of pink mush topped with a brown blob.

I felt regression setting in. I like my meat in smooth, featureless slabs, I explained to Steingarten. I don't like to know where it came from or what function it once served. In other words, said my sage adviser, you're unable to form honest, intimate bonds with your food. He was right; this dish and I were to remain strangers. When the veal tongue met my tongue, both recoiled, and alarming messages from my brain got in the way of enjoying the calf's. The beets were ambrosia by comparison—one phobia conquered, at least.

Finally, my greatest challenge, a feast of meats that we Americans reserve for hot dogs and cat food: squab (that's pigeon to you and me), sweetbreads (chefs' cunning euphemism for the thymus gland), pig's trotter, and squab liver. The only mercy Daniel showed me was the lack of promised peas.

Before tackling this cliff cult assignment, Steingarten tried to probe my admitted fear of dark meat, insisting that it must have deep roots in my childhood. But I resisted. Sometimes a drumstick is just a drumstick, I told him, foregoing depth psychology for a cognitive-behavioral approach. In other words, I ate it. It was just as awful as I thought it would be—greasy, mushy, and gristly all at once. Fortunately, my considerable powers of repression have taken care of the rest of this particular memory.

At dessert, I demonstrated perfect psychological health: there is no sweet I don't like.

Though far from omnivorous, at least I had tried everything, and Steingarten declared himself pleased with my progress. Still, I have no compulsion to repeat the experience: I'll take my pasta salad, thank you. Hold the peas.