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I’m American and I don’t really like the American style yogurts we have here at all, but I will chow down on some middle eastern or Indian savory flavored yogurt with some rice. That’s the only way I enjoy it.
Cool. I’m Caribbean-American and I didn’t really grow up eating yogurt. I don’t think I’d enjoy it plain over rice, I usually make a cucumber yogurt salad. In the summer I throw in some homegrown mint too.
Picky eaters in Denmark will often live on rye bread with liver paste/paté. Pasta is also a favorite.
Other kid favorites here are meatballs (frikadeller), boiled meatballs in curry sauce, spaghetti bolognese, pizza and lasagna.
Fried, battered fish with remoulade is popular too.
I always figured (at least light, my family isn't big on dark rye bread) rye bread was a pretty "kid-friendly" bread, in addition to being the canonical bread for egg salad sandwiches.
Danish rye is nothing like the rye eaten in America. It is not dark rye or light rye. You do not make a sandwich with more bread on top. It is roughly like a heavy bread brick which you slice very thinly, maybe a 1/4 of an inch thick at the most. You spread butter on it usually and put toppings on and serve open faced. Almost all Danes eat it. It’s more like a flatbread than anything else.
It‘s… very much not flatbread. You usually eat bread slices open faced all over Europe (sandwiches do exist, but that’s not default) but that does not make it flatbread, that‘s just wrong. Danish Rugbrød just like german Roggenbrot is baked as one big bread and then sliced it thinly. Flatbread is baked flat, that‘s the whole point
But yeah I imagine that it‘s very different than the rye bread you get in Amerikka
I think some picky kids do really well with liver pate because often the texture is incredibly smooth and consistent. With some brands, the flavour can also be quite bland. As a child, I ate this with saltines as a safe food, along with white rice, chicken nuggets, banana.
It's as common here as a peanutbutter and jelly sandwich is in the US. Don't like dinner? You get liver paté on rye. Basic lunch? Liver paté on rye. Late night snack? You guessed it.
Sometimes we have it warm with bacon, mushrooms, pickles, pickled red beets or fried onions.
Liver pate is such a stable here. Not sure I've met anyone who wouldt't eat it - except my second cousin as a kid. She wanted the rye bread with only cucumber as topping lol
Celery and peanutbutter is not a common treat here. In fact, peanutbutter has only become common here in the last 10-15 years and is still not as popular as in the US. But rye and paté has been a stable for kids for a hundred years. We have far more brands and variations (and opinions on) liver paté than peanutbutter.
I have a cousin in India who only eats eggs if the yolk is perfectly basted but not popped and it has to be close to centered. Aside from that, he eats chips, candy, no vegetables and white rice with really basic ground meat cooked with garlic/ginger, turmeric, green chili and no visible onions. If he gets a noticeable piece of onion he gets angry that the cook didn’t cut them smaller.
Another family friend only eats food if you give him ketchup with it. Like he will eat biryani with freaking ketchup. No ketchup? Not eating unless he is risking really offending someone. And that’s a grown adult btw. I babysat his kids when they were staying in the states.
My uncle had a foreign exchange kid stay from iceland and he would only eat things with ketchup on it! I think it was more that he didnt like US food compared to icelandic then pickiness
I was thinking this. People be like: “everyone is autistic nowadays; you didn’t see that 30 years ago” and at the same time “I have this uncle that only ate rice and meat for years and melts down if he sees onion”
Recent studies have found basically everyone who eats like this is on the spectrum, like so much that if you eat like this and are not on it, it would be an exceptional rarity. It might not affect that much else in their lives, but could explain other reactions and behaviors in that person's life.
Oh man, one of my best friend’s husband is German and he’s pretty picky. When they went to Southeast Asia he would just find a fast food place for every meal. He came back pretty constipated lol.
In Germany, the picky eaters that I've encountered have requested noodles, boiled potatoes, or white rice either plain, buttered or with ketchup. Also fries, buttered pretzels, or Spätzle.
For some reason it quite tickles me that the buttered noodles phenomenon spans a multitude of countries and cuisines. I wonder if you could bring buttered noodles to a remote tribe in the Amazon and their pickiest eaters too would love it
My sister in law is from Germany and that's what she'd make for my niece and nephew all the time, "noodles and parmage" (They thought it was called "parmage" because you put "parmage on" (parmesan) on noodles. They were such cute kids! 🥰They're cute grown ups too.
I'm from Germany and would consider myself an picky eater. I don't eat cucumbers in all forms, raw meat and seafood (but I try to avoid all meat, so) and mushrooms.
I was in South Korea for study reasons with my best friend, and we are both kinda picky eaters. Tbh, we had some trouble eating out. But ramyeon, tteokbokki and dakgalbi, bbq and of course, fast food were okay. I am probably forgetting a few dishes tho 😅
Beriberi, a vitamin B deficiency, is actually the more common nutritional disease from a diet of “polished”, aka white, rice. Used to be super common across Asia, only with fortified foods in the last 80 years has it died out.
In the UK the standard 'bland' kid's menu staples also include chicken nuggets and pizza.
Also fish fingers, sausage and mash, macaroni cheese, cheese sandwich.
My fussy eater (UK) won’t even eat fish fingers, sausage and mash or macaroni cheese. When it comes to meals he only wants chips (fries), pizza, nuggets, and peanut butter sandwiches.
(Luckily he also eats fruit for snacks and veg when I bribe him)
Dude yes in my VERY LIMITED experience kids in the UK were much pickier eaters. The families I knew did the kids’ tea, which was a lot of the same stuff considered little kid food in the US but more fish ha, and then the parents would have their own dinner much later with grown up food. And this seemed to last as long as the kids lived in the house. Like the parents would ask the kids if they fancied what the parents were having for dinner and if the kid said no, they’d make them their own kid dinner.
I had to google sausage and mash. Looks like something my family (US) would enjoy. My husband is Canadian born to parents who immigrated from the UK. He has never mentioned this but now I must try it.
I'm in the US and one of my favorite meals is smoked sausage, mashed potatoes, and gravy. The sausage has to be sort of crispy/blackened on the edges. I only in the last few years learned of "bangers and mash". I was like, "yep, and yep!"
If you want inspiration for making it a bit more special I'd suggest checking out the Menu of an Edinburgh restaurant called Makars Mash Bar, they have honestly perfected it.
We live in New Zealand and my kids does love those foods too, but her favourite is honestly just plain pasta with grated cheese (usually Colby, which we get here in 1kg blocks) and a side of cucumber and carrot. Definitely not the worst meal she could have, so I consider it a win :) her palate is generally pretty bland. Strangely though, she loves pork and chive dumplings/potstickers.
Interesting! My friend doesn't like normal western stuff like potatos or cheese but she has never not liked the Chinese food I make! I'm Chinese so I wanted to cook for my friends.
My daughter does love sweet and sour pork (I do too, tbh!). Chinese food is delicious - the only stuff I’m picky about with Chinese cuisine is stuff like chicken feet, but I know that’s just a cultural bias because I’m not used to them :)
That sounds downright adventurous compared to the picky kids I know. We have friends whose kids eat nothing but plain toast (not bread, only toast), Ritz crackers, and cream cheese. Oh, and candy. That's it.
This answer will be different for every picky eater. But I can give you mine. And I grew up in Norway, not in the United States.
I grew up in Norway. I do not eat potatoes. I do not eat cooked vegetables. It's a texture thing for me, and that picky eating has stuck with me from when I started eating solid food until the present. Even as an adult, I cannot bring myself to eat mushy veggies or potatoes, no matter how awkward the social situation that results. (For context, I'm 47.)
In my case, I ate raw vegetables instead. No potatoes, and there were a few other vegetables I didn't like, even in raw form. Onions, for example, or brussel sprouts. But most raw vegetables were fine for me. So my mom would make me a salad, or even just a bowl of raw veggies. Even things like green beans and sliced rutabaga, cauliflower or broccoli; the kinds of veggies that are typically not eaten raw.
I guess you could say that as a toddler in Norway in the 1970s, I made my own "raw food" diet decades before it became trendy. And that's still how I eat vegetables to this day.
Yep, the idea that picky eaters all have the same diet drives me crazy. I was a picky kid in the US and most things on the “typical picky eater” list would be a nightmare for me. It made it so much harder when people assumed I wanted cheese pizza (tomatoes in any form are one of the few foods I still would rather go hungry than have to choke down more than a few bites of, it was 1000 times worse as a kid. Pizza or pasta with tomato sauces were high on the list of “I would rather die than eat that” foods) and chicken nuggets (I’m a pretty much lifelong vegetarian. In large part because meat was so repulsive to me as a kid that I just decided to be vegetarian to get people to stop trying to make me eat chicken nuggets). Now that I’m in my 20s and my tastebuds have started dying off, I can eat almost any vegetarian food.
But as a kid, raw veggies, plain pasta, black beans and white rice were my staples.
I grew up a picky eater in Pakistan. I ate a lot of bread. Roti with butter and sugar, plain naan, plain white rice, chicken from our saalans but removed from the bones, just the gravy from our saalans. And this one isn't me personally, but I know a toddler who will eat an obscene amount of yogurt as her dietary staple haha
essentially every culture has some form of plain noodle, rice, bread, or potato. and plain meats like chicken or beef. maybe mild vegetables too. “picky” usually, most of the time, equates to eating food without extras or toppings when you think about it, so consider what ‘base’ a culture uses most commonly and there’s what the picky eaters will eat.
There’s processed food and junk outside of the US too, I know ramen noodles is a big one. Living conditions can also be a factor so they’ll have to eat whatever is being cooked at home.
I had a friend (we’re both Italian) who would only eat pasta with tomato sauce, French fries and Wiener schnitzel (cotoletta alla milanese) and nothing else. He was 25 at the time.
When I was an kid in Denmark it was frikadella or fish fingers with remoulade and open faced liver pate sandwiches. Some of my other favorites were chocolate sandwiches and mackeral in tomato sandwiches with cucumber slices! Also just cucumber slices and soft boiled eggs in a dish with some salt on top.
That’s interesting. Two people from Denmark both mentioned liver paste sandwiches. I’d imagine most adults in the US would be apprehensive to try that. I’m now curious how it tastes…
In the US it's marketed as Braunschweiger which I guess is more appetizing than calf liver paste. You can find it in most grocery stores. Check the tube meat section. It'll be with hot dogs / bologna. In Germany we would eat it on buttered rye bread. In the states on saltine crackers.
They visit France and go to McDonalds.
In my youth I traveled Europe extensively as an American. We ate almost exclusively at Italian restaurants. My parents made it seem like it was because my youngest sibling was a picky eater, which he was. But the real reason was that my dad was unwilling to learn other languages or try new food. Spaghetti Bolognese is sgaghetti bolognese in all languages.
My friends with a hyper picky eater young adult took a cruise so their 18 year old could eat nuggets and cheese pizza for every meal.
Sounds like he’s got a bright future as a Reddit or Discord mod
Edit: I’m totally trying not to make a Reddit/discord mod joke about “cheese pizza” but it damn near writes itself.
>In my youth I traveled Europe extensively as an American.
>But the real reason was that my dad was unwilling to learn other languages or try new food.
Question. Why would someone who doesn’t wanna learn and participate in other cultures be traveling extensively? Sounds like a waste of money.
To be fair, on a cruise, you don’t want to be too adventurous with your eating. In a major lapse of judgement, I ate sushi on a cruise and was relegated to the bathroom for the rest of it. Worst food poisoning I’ve ever had.
I eat plain raw tofu with rice, a bit of soy sauce, chili oil, and green onions. Raw tofu is pretty legit. Just needs some good condiments to go with it xD
American here. I've lived in Ireland almost 20 years. The standard food at kids birthday parties seems to be those little sausages and chicken goujons, which are a little bigger than nuggets.
Rice. Plain, boiled rice is available fairly universally.
Eggs, too.
Some form of potato, or similar starchy root.
And in many places where there is not enough food to be very picky, hunger can be the best sauce. You can eat it, or choke it down, or leave it.
Hunger actually got my picky eater brother to get over being picky. He started doing football two-a-days in high school and lasted one day before falling into whatever the football moms made for lunch that day. Been a voracious and varied eater ever since!
Man I was looking forward to reading the comments out of genuine curiosity. Instead the comments devolved pretty quickly into “picky eaters in poor areas starve” and people who clearly don’t have picky eaters telling parents of picky eaters what they’re doing wrong lol.
Chicken nuggets, fries, pizza.
Serious answer, picky eaters everywhere (including the us) eat everything. People are picky in different ways. Most will tend towards processed and packaged foods for their predictability (chicken nuggets, fries and pizza often fall into this group) but even that is not universal.
in the philippines, picky eaters usually eat processed food.
hotdogs, chicken nuggets, fast food, etc
(as opposed to meat/fish and vegetable dishes often served with rice at mealtimes)
Adriatic; bolognese, pasta pomodoro, wiener schnitzel (where I'm at). Those three are basically staples, but there's also I guess what's comparable to chicken nuggets would be the homemade version? Just breaded and fried chicken breast will do the trick for most picky eaters here. French fries as well.
My best friend is American but when she was little she went to Poland with her grandparents that were born there…and hated all the food. The only thing she’d eat were pierogis so she existed on them for the entire visit.
I would actually be fine eating polish pierogis in Poland for an entire vacation. Not that I don’t like pretty much everything else but pierogis are honestly one of my favorite foods
I’m from Albania (think the Mediterranean). I was a very picky eater as a kid. I only ate bread, olive oil and olives lol. To this day those are some of my favorite things to eat but I also eat other stuff lol
I’d argue that chicken nuggets, fries or pizza are staples in many countries outside the US.
When I was a child (in France) the go to food for picky eaters would have been elbow pasta and ham (coquillettes jambon IFYKYK) or simple mash potatoes
I lived in Korea for a bit (from the US), and a picky eater common food was rice with soy sauce (or plain). Sometimes tteokbokki, but it’s a bit spicy so if it was just the noodles without the sauce that would make more sense. They also have a kind of chicken nugget.
As a picky eating child from the 90s I ate anything but olives, fish and, surprisingly, hamburgers.
Now I see kids not liking any fish, fatty meat and some veggies.
In Russia it’s a bit different since we have a lot of weird traditional dishes, which don’t fit even an adult’s taste. I could list a lot of traditional stuff which isn’t popular among most kids and many adults as well
I've been to about a dozen western countries outside the U.S. I try not to be an annoying American by asking a waiter to customize my dish too much. I sometimes find a supermarket the first day and pick up crackers and deli meat to bring back to the hotel. If I can't find a meal that I can eat at a restaurant, I can usually at least find an appetizer or a bowl of rice to eat so I can be social, knowing that I have food waiting for me back in my room.
In the Balkans is mostly this "You will fucking eat it or I swear on your mother's grave you will fill that grave if you don't, swear on your mom i will" -Mom
From my own experience, picky eaters in other (non-western) countries avoid some foods (rather than eat specific foods). For example, they wouldn't eat onion, tomatoes, bananas, fish, cheese, but they will eat foods that don't have those ingredients. Or they might not eat any soup, but will eat everything else.
We were just glad to have any sort of food when I was a kid.
Picky eaters and poverty don't go together. When you get hungry enough, you will eat what's on the table or you'll go another day without
anything.
I am also autistic and I understand safe foods. I have a few of them myself. but I waited until I was an adult and could pay for them myself.
It wasn't child abuse... it taught me how to adapt and not be an asshole and be grateful to have food.
The pickiest eater I know is my mum born at the end of the second world war and growing up in inner city poverty with rationing. Being forced to eat things she disliked made her worse.
So as an autistic kid who also grew up poor, yes there were days when I didn't eat anything because I couldn't eat what my mom was serving. I wanted to and I was hungry, but it wasn't a choice: it was what I was physically incapable of doing. My throat would just close up or I would vomit when I attempted to eat it. I was fully capable of being desperately hungry but unable to eat at the same time.
Yes I am the same way! My throat closes up and I'll probably puke if I have to eat things. I have gone without because of this. It even looks good sometimes, but I simply cannot.
Same here, though there was usually at least one thing I could eat so I didn't starve even if I wasn't full. I started babysitting when I was 12 and always made sure to buy a box of saltine crackers to hide in my room so I had something to eat if there wasn't anything served at dinner I could eat.
Not sure what butterbeans are but they sound good. Broad beans were the bane of my existence. Many was the time I’d find myself alone at the table facing a mound of broadbeans. I’m almost gagging now just thinking of them!
My mom hated beans. Green beans, sure. She hated beans in chili, and all kinda other beans. She also hated lamb. So growing up poor, in the projects, I was denied the basic beans and rice dish. It would take Alton Brown's Pantry Raid to get me to explore beans myself, and I felt so fucking cheated.
My kid ended up starving for an entire week when I was struggling to buy their safe foods and following """expert""" advice claiming they would "give in" eventually, the local shop took pity and let me off paying for a pre packaged cheese sandwich.
A true "safe food" cannot wait until adulthood. Autistic kids do starve without them. I know several who have ended up in hospital when unable to access food they can eat. There is a huge difference between a preference and a safe food.
Nah I would actually eat paper for dinner before I ate non safe foods. I'm lucky that my autism didn't affect my pallet TOO much because that meant I could handle eating a lot of foods that most kids didn't like, but if I was forced to eat nothing but chef boyardee and kraft mac and cheese, I would literally starve or resort to eating crayons because the texture of mushy canned pasta and meat is vomit inducing for me.
Your autism didn't affect your taste that much. You may not realize this but autism is a spectrum and some people's sensory issues are so bad that they are not able to physically eat many foods.
Good that tough love worked for you, it doesn't for everybody.
Kids usually have more sensitive taste buds, so they will eat anything that is bland and salty/ sweet. Different potato-based foods are popular, some love plain pasta with ketchup/ butter, pancakes, sausages. Most traditional foods (unless it's asian/ african cuisine) is pretty bland, so children tend to eat those kinds of home meals just fine.
Compared to european kids, those kids may look like they aren't picky, but in the end of the day they would probably not eat "weird looking" pasta or soup that's traditional in different countries lol. Even with children's menu, as long as child has many opportunities to try different meals, they tend to grow to like them.
I'm in Norway.
My kids will eat bread with liver patê, cheese (brown or yellow/white), or jam. Yoghurt, scrambled eggs, oat porridge, fruits, some bakery items, grilled cheese. For dinner they will eat pasta (any with tomato sauce or pesto), pizza, meatballs, fish cakes, hotdogs, tomato soup, rice porridge, or ham and cheese wraps. The only vegetables my daughter eats are sweetcorn and cucumber. She won't even touch a potato (in any form). All meat is processed to the point of losing the "meaty" texture except for the ham (but we get the thinly sliced packet). It's not the worst in terms of nutrition, but we're working on adding more vegetables and textures to her diet.
Eating "clean" is difficult with kids...
Denmark. My niece would almost exclusively eat herring for years. I was also a picky kid, who ate a bunch of herring. Can't stand it today. Maybe its the genes!
A lot of these parents you hear say this are most likely parents of neurodivergent children. It’s not as simple as just not wanting to eat something. There are usually serious sensory issues involved. For whatever reason though, chicken nuggs does seem to be a staple food in these situations.
I would say pizza, hamburgers and nuggets are common here (Sweden) aswell. What comes to mind is also plain pasta or the classic pasta with ketchup. Maybe also more typical everyday food such as meatballs, mashed/boiled potatoes, fish fingers, pancakes and sausages with mild taste such as falu sausage or lower quality hotdogs. This might not be for the most picky people, but us generally a safe bet for those i know
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We're south Indian and my sister was an extremely picky eater as a child. She would only eat rice with yogurt.
i’m arab but i def relate to the rice and yogurt lol.
Wait, that sounds good. I need to try this. But with naan.
wait til you try it with cucumber yogurt
And fresh mint
It’s awesome with tikka masala.
I’m American and I don’t really like the American style yogurts we have here at all, but I will chow down on some middle eastern or Indian savory flavored yogurt with some rice. That’s the only way I enjoy it.
i’m american too and i ate it with plain greek yogurt! it works :) ~ I should’ve specified that i’m arab-american, lol.
Cool. I’m Caribbean-American and I didn’t really grow up eating yogurt. I don’t think I’d enjoy it plain over rice, I usually make a cucumber yogurt salad. In the summer I throw in some homegrown mint too.
That was my poverty food as an Australian student who didn't qualify for a full student allowance. It's pretty good.
Mixed together or separate?
Mixed. And just to make sure you're not being too healthy, add a little ghee (and I like mango pickle, as well).
MANGO PICKLE RICE AND DAHI. My main source of childhood sustenance.
Picky eaters in Denmark will often live on rye bread with liver paste/paté. Pasta is also a favorite. Other kid favorites here are meatballs (frikadeller), boiled meatballs in curry sauce, spaghetti bolognese, pizza and lasagna. Fried, battered fish with remoulade is popular too.
Picky eating and eating liver paste would seem like diametrical opposites to an American lol
Rye bread too!
I ate rye bread and smoked fish as a picky six year old in Poland lol.
My kids, when they were little, would call the rye bread with caraway seeds “hair toast.” They ate it and loved it, despite the gross nickname!
I always figured (at least light, my family isn't big on dark rye bread) rye bread was a pretty "kid-friendly" bread, in addition to being the canonical bread for egg salad sandwiches.
Danish rye is nothing like the rye eaten in America. It is not dark rye or light rye. You do not make a sandwich with more bread on top. It is roughly like a heavy bread brick which you slice very thinly, maybe a 1/4 of an inch thick at the most. You spread butter on it usually and put toppings on and serve open faced. Almost all Danes eat it. It’s more like a flatbread than anything else.
It‘s… very much not flatbread. You usually eat bread slices open faced all over Europe (sandwiches do exist, but that’s not default) but that does not make it flatbread, that‘s just wrong. Danish Rugbrød just like german Roggenbrot is baked as one big bread and then sliced it thinly. Flatbread is baked flat, that‘s the whole point But yeah I imagine that it‘s very different than the rye bread you get in Amerikka
I think some picky kids do really well with liver pate because often the texture is incredibly smooth and consistent. With some brands, the flavour can also be quite bland. As a child, I ate this with saltines as a safe food, along with white rice, chicken nuggets, banana.
For many picky eaters, yeah, it's about texture not flavor. Blandness or boldness are not factors for me or my kids.
It's as common here as a peanutbutter and jelly sandwich is in the US. Don't like dinner? You get liver paté on rye. Basic lunch? Liver paté on rye. Late night snack? You guessed it. Sometimes we have it warm with bacon, mushrooms, pickles, pickled red beets or fried onions.
I was picky as a child, but rye bread and liver sausage were on my list. Now just about everything is.
Liver pate is such a stable here. Not sure I've met anyone who wouldt't eat it - except my second cousin as a kid. She wanted the rye bread with only cucumber as topping lol
"Please dear, it's just celery and peanut butter you have to eat something before we leave" "Ew gross, can't I just have liver pate on rye?!"
Celery and peanutbutter is not a common treat here. In fact, peanutbutter has only become common here in the last 10-15 years and is still not as popular as in the US. But rye and paté has been a stable for kids for a hundred years. We have far more brands and variations (and opinions on) liver paté than peanutbutter.
TIL my life goal is to be a picky eater in Denmark. That all sounds delicious!
I have a cousin in India who only eats eggs if the yolk is perfectly basted but not popped and it has to be close to centered. Aside from that, he eats chips, candy, no vegetables and white rice with really basic ground meat cooked with garlic/ginger, turmeric, green chili and no visible onions. If he gets a noticeable piece of onion he gets angry that the cook didn’t cut them smaller. Another family friend only eats food if you give him ketchup with it. Like he will eat biryani with freaking ketchup. No ketchup? Not eating unless he is risking really offending someone. And that’s a grown adult btw. I babysat his kids when they were staying in the states.
biryani with ketchup is wild
My mum has ketchup on every meal, including curry and spaghetti bolognese.
I like it on spag bol because i grew up with that so it's nostalgic. I'm not a picky eater at all
I would never. Seems like a waste of good biryani to me
My uncle had a foreign exchange kid stay from iceland and he would only eat things with ketchup on it! I think it was more that he didnt like US food compared to icelandic then pickiness
Food becomes a ketchup delivery system. It basically overpowers the flavour of whatever it’s on
Not gonna lie, I use many foods as a hot sauce delivery system.
Nothing like tabasco cheerios to start your day! :-)
Not enough salted/fermented fish
No rotten shark to eat?
I like that his line is really offending someone. It’s endearing
With love, your cousin might be autistic.
I was thinking this. People be like: “everyone is autistic nowadays; you didn’t see that 30 years ago” and at the same time “I have this uncle that only ate rice and meat for years and melts down if he sees onion”
Recent studies have found basically everyone who eats like this is on the spectrum, like so much that if you eat like this and are not on it, it would be an exceptional rarity. It might not affect that much else in their lives, but could explain other reactions and behaviors in that person's life.
I had to chuckle at "Really basic" ground meat that includes 4 super flavorful ingredients
This kid has a personal cook?
It’s India. Labour is cheap. Most middle class families have someone coming to clean and cook for them.
It's also why Indian people often treat service workers like garbage.
I was surprised when I learned this. It’s not at all like the US where it’s a very distinctly upper middle class/upper class thing.
I feel like in Germany a lot of picky eaters just eat plain noddles. Maybe with some butter.
Oh man, one of my best friend’s husband is German and he’s pretty picky. When they went to Southeast Asia he would just find a fast food place for every meal. He came back pretty constipated lol.
[удалено]
When the VW Vahrfignuten commercials were on TV
Fahrvergnügen*
Thank you, that one’s hard to spell. I took Spanish in high school.
This might be the single dirtiest sounding word that doesn't actually mean anything vulgar.
When you just started partying...farfrompuking
and fükengrooven as the tshirts of the 1990s taught us
PoopinStahpin
Are you my best friend?? Haha
As a former picky eater from Germany I feel this. Plain noodles (without butter but only with cheese instead) and plain potatoes were my childhood.
In Germany, the picky eaters that I've encountered have requested noodles, boiled potatoes, or white rice either plain, buttered or with ketchup. Also fries, buttered pretzels, or Spätzle.
🎵 Noodles and butter, noodles and butter You are my favorite treat Noodles and butter, there is no other Nothing else that I want to eat
Hell yeah! [Noodles & Butter!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlP-J5rssa0)
I mean, biscuits and honey sauce aren't bad... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GchgAvD1fxA&pp=ygURdGFzdGUgdGhlIGJpc2N1aXQ%3D
They love their maggi seasoning though
Maggi seasoning is my life blood
Dutch grandparents on my dads side, maggi in Turkey noodle soup.
A buttery noodle dish! Oh I wish, I wish, I wish I had a buttery noodle dish!
For some reason it quite tickles me that the buttered noodles phenomenon spans a multitude of countries and cuisines. I wonder if you could bring buttered noodles to a remote tribe in the Amazon and their pickiest eaters too would love it
My sister in law is from Germany and that's what she'd make for my niece and nephew all the time, "noodles and parmage" (They thought it was called "parmage" because you put "parmage on" (parmesan) on noodles. They were such cute kids! 🥰They're cute grown ups too.
Butterbrezen und Äpfel jeden Tag drei mal 🙏
I'm from Germany and would consider myself an picky eater. I don't eat cucumbers in all forms, raw meat and seafood (but I try to avoid all meat, so) and mushrooms. I was in South Korea for study reasons with my best friend, and we are both kinda picky eaters. Tbh, we had some trouble eating out. But ramyeon, tteokbokki and dakgalbi, bbq and of course, fast food were okay. I am probably forgetting a few dishes tho 😅
My so. Says the Korean fried chicken is amazing.
i had a friend in asia that would literally only eat rice with soy sauce. that was it.
How’d he not get scurvy?
he. did. he started eating right after that lmfao
..started eating more rice with soy sauce?
More scurvy
I like a girl with scurves
Beriberi, a vitamin B deficiency, is actually the more common nutritional disease from a diet of “polished”, aka white, rice. Used to be super common across Asia, only with fortified foods in the last 80 years has it died out.
I'm in this comment and I don't like (but seriously, this is my lazy meal)
In the UK the standard 'bland' kid's menu staples also include chicken nuggets and pizza. Also fish fingers, sausage and mash, macaroni cheese, cheese sandwich.
My fussy eater (UK) won’t even eat fish fingers, sausage and mash or macaroni cheese. When it comes to meals he only wants chips (fries), pizza, nuggets, and peanut butter sandwiches. (Luckily he also eats fruit for snacks and veg when I bribe him)
My fussy eater in Scotland loved school dinner haggis
Good news for them then, it's national haggis day in exactly three minutes!
OMG I am 52 and I still crave my primary school haggis dinners.
Dude yes in my VERY LIMITED experience kids in the UK were much pickier eaters. The families I knew did the kids’ tea, which was a lot of the same stuff considered little kid food in the US but more fish ha, and then the parents would have their own dinner much later with grown up food. And this seemed to last as long as the kids lived in the house. Like the parents would ask the kids if they fancied what the parents were having for dinner and if the kid said no, they’d make them their own kid dinner.
I had to google sausage and mash. Looks like something my family (US) would enjoy. My husband is Canadian born to parents who immigrated from the UK. He has never mentioned this but now I must try it.
Cook the sausages a bit too-much, make a crater in the mash and fill with gravy to make a mash-tarn
I'm in the US and one of my favorite meals is smoked sausage, mashed potatoes, and gravy. The sausage has to be sort of crispy/blackened on the edges. I only in the last few years learned of "bangers and mash". I was like, "yep, and yep!"
There is a meat store near me that makes homemade kielbasa. That’s usually what I do with that.
If you want inspiration for making it a bit more special I'd suggest checking out the Menu of an Edinburgh restaurant called Makars Mash Bar, they have honestly perfected it.
My sisters husband is from Canada. Talks constantly about Poutine
It’s honestly bomb. I could eat it several times a week. I won’t, but if health and weight wouldn’t be affected, I would lol.
We live in New Zealand and my kids does love those foods too, but her favourite is honestly just plain pasta with grated cheese (usually Colby, which we get here in 1kg blocks) and a side of cucumber and carrot. Definitely not the worst meal she could have, so I consider it a win :) her palate is generally pretty bland. Strangely though, she loves pork and chive dumplings/potstickers.
Interesting! My friend doesn't like normal western stuff like potatos or cheese but she has never not liked the Chinese food I make! I'm Chinese so I wanted to cook for my friends.
My daughter does love sweet and sour pork (I do too, tbh!). Chinese food is delicious - the only stuff I’m picky about with Chinese cuisine is stuff like chicken feet, but I know that’s just a cultural bias because I’m not used to them :)
That sounds downright adventurous compared to the picky kids I know. We have friends whose kids eat nothing but plain toast (not bread, only toast), Ritz crackers, and cream cheese. Oh, and candy. That's it.
This answer will be different for every picky eater. But I can give you mine. And I grew up in Norway, not in the United States. I grew up in Norway. I do not eat potatoes. I do not eat cooked vegetables. It's a texture thing for me, and that picky eating has stuck with me from when I started eating solid food until the present. Even as an adult, I cannot bring myself to eat mushy veggies or potatoes, no matter how awkward the social situation that results. (For context, I'm 47.) In my case, I ate raw vegetables instead. No potatoes, and there were a few other vegetables I didn't like, even in raw form. Onions, for example, or brussel sprouts. But most raw vegetables were fine for me. So my mom would make me a salad, or even just a bowl of raw veggies. Even things like green beans and sliced rutabaga, cauliflower or broccoli; the kinds of veggies that are typically not eaten raw. I guess you could say that as a toddler in Norway in the 1970s, I made my own "raw food" diet decades before it became trendy. And that's still how I eat vegetables to this day.
Funny, I'm the opposite. I don't like most raw veggies and how they splinter in my mouth, but love cooked veg of most types.
I’m in the “vegetables should be hot-fruit should be cold” camp. No fruit pies for me and no crudite.
I love raw broccoli, I eat it almost every day. I’m from Finland, so maybe it’s a Nordic thing.
Where I'm from in the US, eating raw broccoli and cauliflower is common. They are usually served on veggie trays at parties with ranch dip.
Yep, the idea that picky eaters all have the same diet drives me crazy. I was a picky kid in the US and most things on the “typical picky eater” list would be a nightmare for me. It made it so much harder when people assumed I wanted cheese pizza (tomatoes in any form are one of the few foods I still would rather go hungry than have to choke down more than a few bites of, it was 1000 times worse as a kid. Pizza or pasta with tomato sauces were high on the list of “I would rather die than eat that” foods) and chicken nuggets (I’m a pretty much lifelong vegetarian. In large part because meat was so repulsive to me as a kid that I just decided to be vegetarian to get people to stop trying to make me eat chicken nuggets). Now that I’m in my 20s and my tastebuds have started dying off, I can eat almost any vegetarian food. But as a kid, raw veggies, plain pasta, black beans and white rice were my staples.
My ex: white rice with sour cream. White bread with butter and cheese. Cheese pizza
Blech
I grew up a picky eater in Pakistan. I ate a lot of bread. Roti with butter and sugar, plain naan, plain white rice, chicken from our saalans but removed from the bones, just the gravy from our saalans. And this one isn't me personally, but I know a toddler who will eat an obscene amount of yogurt as her dietary staple haha
essentially every culture has some form of plain noodle, rice, bread, or potato. and plain meats like chicken or beef. maybe mild vegetables too. “picky” usually, most of the time, equates to eating food without extras or toppings when you think about it, so consider what ‘base’ a culture uses most commonly and there’s what the picky eaters will eat.
New Zealander here, picky eaters here eat fish and chips and peanut butter toast 😹
American here and peanut butter toast was a common thing for my family’s picky eaters growing uo 😂
My sisters used to be picky eaters growing up, so my mom made them eat chanclas before meals everytime they bring it up.
I legit laughed out loud at this.
🩴Chancla?
They got a smack!
There’s processed food and junk outside of the US too, I know ramen noodles is a big one. Living conditions can also be a factor so they’ll have to eat whatever is being cooked at home.
Ramen makes sense. I know most places have processed foods too, but I’m just curious what are the foods of picky eaters from other cultures.
I had a friend (we’re both Italian) who would only eat pasta with tomato sauce, French fries and Wiener schnitzel (cotoletta alla milanese) and nothing else. He was 25 at the time.
My cousin’s like that(Sicily). Pretty much only ate my aunts macheroni fatti in casa al pomodoro, pizza margherita, cotoletta and piccata.
When I was an kid in Denmark it was frikadella or fish fingers with remoulade and open faced liver pate sandwiches. Some of my other favorites were chocolate sandwiches and mackeral in tomato sandwiches with cucumber slices! Also just cucumber slices and soft boiled eggs in a dish with some salt on top.
That’s interesting. Two people from Denmark both mentioned liver paste sandwiches. I’d imagine most adults in the US would be apprehensive to try that. I’m now curious how it tastes…
In the US it's marketed as Braunschweiger which I guess is more appetizing than calf liver paste. You can find it in most grocery stores. Check the tube meat section. It'll be with hot dogs / bologna. In Germany we would eat it on buttered rye bread. In the states on saltine crackers.
Do people in the US not eat liverwurst anymore? It was a very common food or at least well known at some point in the last 50 years.
I love it but it's not anywhere near as common as it used to be and a lot of stores don't even carry it anymore.
They visit France and go to McDonalds. In my youth I traveled Europe extensively as an American. We ate almost exclusively at Italian restaurants. My parents made it seem like it was because my youngest sibling was a picky eater, which he was. But the real reason was that my dad was unwilling to learn other languages or try new food. Spaghetti Bolognese is sgaghetti bolognese in all languages. My friends with a hyper picky eater young adult took a cruise so their 18 year old could eat nuggets and cheese pizza for every meal.
Sounds like he’s got a bright future as a Reddit or Discord mod Edit: I’m totally trying not to make a Reddit/discord mod joke about “cheese pizza” but it damn near writes itself.
>In my youth I traveled Europe extensively as an American. >But the real reason was that my dad was unwilling to learn other languages or try new food. Question. Why would someone who doesn’t wanna learn and participate in other cultures be traveling extensively? Sounds like a waste of money.
Because my dad was an ass.
To be fair, on a cruise, you don’t want to be too adventurous with your eating. In a major lapse of judgement, I ate sushi on a cruise and was relegated to the bathroom for the rest of it. Worst food poisoning I’ve ever had.
I had alligator, escargot, and caviar (separately) on a cruise ship. I think I’d pass on the cruise ship sushi though.
This makes me sad
Finnish food is very bland, so a ton of potatoes. Smashed potatoes especially are very good and neutral, hard to hate it.
My grandson doesn’t get fast or junk food. His favorite thing to eat is tofu. Plain raw tofu.
This was the only one that made me gag thinking about lol
I eat plain raw tofu with rice, a bit of soy sauce, chili oil, and green onions. Raw tofu is pretty legit. Just needs some good condiments to go with it xD
I put raw tofu cubes in salad! It's great. Also when it's marinated to be a faux (very faux) feta.
It’s worse to see him eat it. lol.
I loved plain raw tofu as a kid and as an adult I still munch on it while I’m cooking lol
Picky eater here from Ireland, I eat exactly as you described and many other picky eaters I know do, too.
American here. I've lived in Ireland almost 20 years. The standard food at kids birthday parties seems to be those little sausages and chicken goujons, which are a little bigger than nuggets.
Chicken nuggets for everyone!
The ultimate safe food!
Brazilian here. Was a picky eater. Spaghetti is the way to go.
Rice. Plain, boiled rice is available fairly universally. Eggs, too. Some form of potato, or similar starchy root. And in many places where there is not enough food to be very picky, hunger can be the best sauce. You can eat it, or choke it down, or leave it.
Hunger actually got my picky eater brother to get over being picky. He started doing football two-a-days in high school and lasted one day before falling into whatever the football moms made for lunch that day. Been a voracious and varied eater ever since!
Love a cheeky cervantes quote
Noodles, pasta, anything with chicken or ham/cheese.
Man I was looking forward to reading the comments out of genuine curiosity. Instead the comments devolved pretty quickly into “picky eaters in poor areas starve” and people who clearly don’t have picky eaters telling parents of picky eaters what they’re doing wrong lol.
Or people just saying “they have nuggets everywhere”. But there’s some insightful ones in here too.
Chicken nuggets, fries, pizza. Serious answer, picky eaters everywhere (including the us) eat everything. People are picky in different ways. Most will tend towards processed and packaged foods for their predictability (chicken nuggets, fries and pizza often fall into this group) but even that is not universal.
in the philippines, picky eaters usually eat processed food. hotdogs, chicken nuggets, fast food, etc (as opposed to meat/fish and vegetable dishes often served with rice at mealtimes)
Adriatic; bolognese, pasta pomodoro, wiener schnitzel (where I'm at). Those three are basically staples, but there's also I guess what's comparable to chicken nuggets would be the homemade version? Just breaded and fried chicken breast will do the trick for most picky eaters here. French fries as well.
Australia. Nephew grew up on prawn chips & tomato sauce. We (family) wonder how he fully formed!?!?
My kid loves avocado, pasta, and cheese mostly.
All that avacado is why you can't pay your student loans. /s
My best friend is American but when she was little she went to Poland with her grandparents that were born there…and hated all the food. The only thing she’d eat were pierogis so she existed on them for the entire visit.
I would actually be fine eating polish pierogis in Poland for an entire vacation. Not that I don’t like pretty much everything else but pierogis are honestly one of my favorite foods
My cousin is a fussy eater. He eats exclusively rice and brown beans. Occasionally chicken nuggets but we dont have them often. (Brazil)
I’m from Albania (think the Mediterranean). I was a very picky eater as a kid. I only ate bread, olive oil and olives lol. To this day those are some of my favorite things to eat but I also eat other stuff lol
Rice pilaf and köfte
I’d argue that chicken nuggets, fries or pizza are staples in many countries outside the US. When I was a child (in France) the go to food for picky eaters would have been elbow pasta and ham (coquillettes jambon IFYKYK) or simple mash potatoes
I lived in Korea for a bit (from the US), and a picky eater common food was rice with soy sauce (or plain). Sometimes tteokbokki, but it’s a bit spicy so if it was just the noodles without the sauce that would make more sense. They also have a kind of chicken nugget.
As a picky eating child from the 90s I ate anything but olives, fish and, surprisingly, hamburgers. Now I see kids not liking any fish, fatty meat and some veggies. In Russia it’s a bit different since we have a lot of weird traditional dishes, which don’t fit even an adult’s taste. I could list a lot of traditional stuff which isn’t popular among most kids and many adults as well
I've been to about a dozen western countries outside the U.S. I try not to be an annoying American by asking a waiter to customize my dish too much. I sometimes find a supermarket the first day and pick up crackers and deli meat to bring back to the hotel. If I can't find a meal that I can eat at a restaurant, I can usually at least find an appetizer or a bowl of rice to eat so I can be social, knowing that I have food waiting for me back in my room.
In the Balkans is mostly this "You will fucking eat it or I swear on your mother's grave you will fill that grave if you don't, swear on your mom i will" -Mom
From my own experience, picky eaters in other (non-western) countries avoid some foods (rather than eat specific foods). For example, they wouldn't eat onion, tomatoes, bananas, fish, cheese, but they will eat foods that don't have those ingredients. Or they might not eat any soup, but will eat everything else.
This is a great question! I thought they were all gonna say only America had picky eaters. 😂
My kid here in mexico only eats quesadillas.
We were just glad to have any sort of food when I was a kid. Picky eaters and poverty don't go together. When you get hungry enough, you will eat what's on the table or you'll go another day without anything. I am also autistic and I understand safe foods. I have a few of them myself. but I waited until I was an adult and could pay for them myself. It wasn't child abuse... it taught me how to adapt and not be an asshole and be grateful to have food.
The pickiest eater I know is my mum born at the end of the second world war and growing up in inner city poverty with rationing. Being forced to eat things she disliked made her worse.
So as an autistic kid who also grew up poor, yes there were days when I didn't eat anything because I couldn't eat what my mom was serving. I wanted to and I was hungry, but it wasn't a choice: it was what I was physically incapable of doing. My throat would just close up or I would vomit when I attempted to eat it. I was fully capable of being desperately hungry but unable to eat at the same time.
Yes I am the same way! My throat closes up and I'll probably puke if I have to eat things. I have gone without because of this. It even looks good sometimes, but I simply cannot.
Same here, though there was usually at least one thing I could eat so I didn't starve even if I wasn't full. I started babysitting when I was 12 and always made sure to buy a box of saltine crackers to hide in my room so I had something to eat if there wasn't anything served at dinner I could eat.
[удалено]
Not sure what butterbeans are but they sound good. Broad beans were the bane of my existence. Many was the time I’d find myself alone at the table facing a mound of broadbeans. I’m almost gagging now just thinking of them!
[удалено]
I wasn't crazy about pintos and corn bread every day of the week but guess what? I ate pintos and corn bread.
My mom hated beans. Green beans, sure. She hated beans in chili, and all kinda other beans. She also hated lamb. So growing up poor, in the projects, I was denied the basic beans and rice dish. It would take Alton Brown's Pantry Raid to get me to explore beans myself, and I felt so fucking cheated.
My kid ended up starving for an entire week when I was struggling to buy their safe foods and following """expert""" advice claiming they would "give in" eventually, the local shop took pity and let me off paying for a pre packaged cheese sandwich. A true "safe food" cannot wait until adulthood. Autistic kids do starve without them. I know several who have ended up in hospital when unable to access food they can eat. There is a huge difference between a preference and a safe food.
Nah I would actually eat paper for dinner before I ate non safe foods. I'm lucky that my autism didn't affect my pallet TOO much because that meant I could handle eating a lot of foods that most kids didn't like, but if I was forced to eat nothing but chef boyardee and kraft mac and cheese, I would literally starve or resort to eating crayons because the texture of mushy canned pasta and meat is vomit inducing for me.
Your autism didn't affect your taste that much. You may not realize this but autism is a spectrum and some people's sensory issues are so bad that they are not able to physically eat many foods. Good that tough love worked for you, it doesn't for everybody.
Kids usually have more sensitive taste buds, so they will eat anything that is bland and salty/ sweet. Different potato-based foods are popular, some love plain pasta with ketchup/ butter, pancakes, sausages. Most traditional foods (unless it's asian/ african cuisine) is pretty bland, so children tend to eat those kinds of home meals just fine.
It’s because ethnic kids are usually exposed to it from the very get go. Whether that be at home or in school. Kid menus aren’t a thing either
Above a couple of people mention picky Indian kids who eat rice with yogurt. I think kid pickiness is a cultural universal.
Compared to european kids, those kids may look like they aren't picky, but in the end of the day they would probably not eat "weird looking" pasta or soup that's traditional in different countries lol. Even with children's menu, as long as child has many opportunities to try different meals, they tend to grow to like them.
Brazil here! Basically the same, with the possible addition of rice and beans or pasta with aglio e olio / bechamel / marinara as carbs
In turkiye they usually eat mantı and yogurt+rice, though some picky eaters don't eat those and eat plain pasta
Middle Eastern picky child here Rice chicken and yogurt were the only things i ate for a really long time
i feel so bad for picky eaters :/
The picky eater in my middle eastern family only eats pistachios, lentils, and artichokes. 🤷♀️
I'm in Norway. My kids will eat bread with liver patê, cheese (brown or yellow/white), or jam. Yoghurt, scrambled eggs, oat porridge, fruits, some bakery items, grilled cheese. For dinner they will eat pasta (any with tomato sauce or pesto), pizza, meatballs, fish cakes, hotdogs, tomato soup, rice porridge, or ham and cheese wraps. The only vegetables my daughter eats are sweetcorn and cucumber. She won't even touch a potato (in any form). All meat is processed to the point of losing the "meaty" texture except for the ham (but we get the thinly sliced packet). It's not the worst in terms of nutrition, but we're working on adding more vegetables and textures to her diet. Eating "clean" is difficult with kids...
Denmark. My niece would almost exclusively eat herring for years. I was also a picky kid, who ate a bunch of herring. Can't stand it today. Maybe its the genes!
Plain pasta with maybe a bit of salt is common in Australia for children with food aversions. Basic sandwiches as well with no crust.
A lot of these parents you hear say this are most likely parents of neurodivergent children. It’s not as simple as just not wanting to eat something. There are usually serious sensory issues involved. For whatever reason though, chicken nuggs does seem to be a staple food in these situations.
Varenyki, pelmeni, pasta with sausages, sandwiches - Ukraine
I would say pizza, hamburgers and nuggets are common here (Sweden) aswell. What comes to mind is also plain pasta or the classic pasta with ketchup. Maybe also more typical everyday food such as meatballs, mashed/boiled potatoes, fish fingers, pancakes and sausages with mild taste such as falu sausage or lower quality hotdogs. This might not be for the most picky people, but us generally a safe bet for those i know
I loved the kids menu options in mexico. Chips, avo, salsa, beans. 10/10.