Something embarrassing was about to happen. I knew because I’d suffered through this gastronomic showdown a million times, from Paris to Paducah, and it always ends the same way. I turn down food I don’t want to eat. At best I offend somebody. At worst I make a new un-friend.
The crab pusher came at me last summer at a beach party in Gustavus, Alaska, a little town on the fringes of Glacier Bay National Park. An easy scene to visualize: Golden sun shining off the water. Friendly locals. Cans of Rainier on ice. Alaskan king crab pulled from the frigid Pacific just hours earlier, now boiling in a giant kettle. A big-hearted fisherman rattling his tongs in the pot, working through the steam, pulling out my prize.
“Have a claw!”
After my third refusal, the cheery offer started to sound more like a prison warden’s order to get back in line. The fisherman’s expression said, I am the executor of your once-in-a-lifetime experience. So take the goddamn claw and we’ll both walk away happy.
Now here it was, the inevitable moment when the personal capital I’d accrued was about to get squandered with a single confession: I don’t eat crab. I don’t care how much butter and garlic you soak it in, that sea spider’s gnarled clamper is not coming anywhere near my mouth.
“Don’t eat crab?” His mariner eyes narrowed. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“Any seafood, actually,” I said. “I don’t eat fish. Period.”
Being a picky eater is more than a simple nuisance or emasculating badge of shame. For someone like me, who has spent most of his adult life as an international traveler in search of adventure and work, it’s a flaw that has ruined dinner parties, derailed relationships, and led to countless hungry nights.
by Chuck Thompson, Outside | Read more:
Image: Grant Cornett
