The White of the Orange: Confessions of a Weird Eater

I had another one of those stress days, where the weight of everything I have to do started pressing down on me, where the semester's end and THREE 25-page, publication-quality-or-very-near-to-it papers loom...But. I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk instead about what I will nickname, affectionately, WFT's...Weird Food Things.

I am inspired to talk about WTFs because I took the Squidge Bean over to my parents' house today so I could have my arms free to do some homework for awhile, and also so I could give my mom a break from trekking up here. When I walked in, there was a gigantic bag (I'm talking 20 pounds) of birdseed sitting open by my dad's armchair. Now, the presence of this bag was nothing unusual--he and my mom enjoy watching the birds in their yard, and my dad makes these birdseed cake things to hang from the trees. What was unusual was the location. In a flash, I turned to my mom and asked, "Has Dad been EATING that?" She burst out laughing and said yes, he likes raw seeds, and how on earth did I suspect?

Well, I suspected because my Dad is prone to WTFs. He is famous for eating the tails from tail-on shrimp--no, not the meaty part, the silicate shell part that normal people tug free and abandon on the rim of their plates. When we go to Thai food, he will swipe those suckers off your plate and pop them into his mouth like peanuts. Nothing really deters him in the way of normal food cleanliness or appropriateness (my husband shares this flaw. He claims old food is still edible even when it has practically started its own hair band in the cheese drawer. When we were traveling in Thailand, he once ate a grub). My dad is an avid red meat eater and recently, to make a point (to me of course, because I got aggravated that he was dripping raw meat juice on the cutting board where I was chopping veggies for a salad) he carved off a chunk of raw tri-tip and chowed it down. Raw. Fresh from the plastic.

Now, I have no WFT's with meat. I'm a white-meat-and-fish-only girl since 1997, when the revolting quality of college dorm cafeteria meat finally iced the cake of years and years where rare meat from animals whose dead heads hung on the wall was my only dinner option. But I do have my share of other oddities. I am a rather nutty eater of fruit. I scrape the white of the orange out with my teeth, and even stranger, I like to eat the skin off of orange seeds. Indeed, I enjoy rinds in general. And the skin of seeds in general. Yes, it's weird. That's why I call them WTFs.

I also confess a fetish for spoon foods. Particularly custard-y varieties of spoon foods like, well, custard, and tapioca, and flan, and rice pudding. In fact I get aggravated when people serve a spoon-friendly dish (like hot brownies topped with ice cream) with a fork. People, come on. It is just unfair to let all of that goodness escape through the tines. Forks are SO not pleasurable to eat with.

And, at the risk of sounding eating-disorder-esque, I can put away a whole bag of candy like there's no tomorrow. Lately I have a particular adoration for Twizzlers. Did anyone get that forward that's going around about how margarine is only one molecule away from plastic? Well, my husband says Twizzlers are probably ZERO molecules away. Honestly, they taste totally synthetic. When I consider them objectively, I don't even actually like them. But for some reason they call me and I buy them all the time and hide them in the pocket behind the driver's seat of the Rav and eat them unmercifully.

There are more...many more...but I can't think of them right now. So...anyone else want to confess a WFT?