Fooooooooooooooood...

When I was little I didn't care about food, I just wanted to eat McDonald's or pizza, all the time, every meal, every day. It seems like all kids are like that. I disliked most vegetables, and avoided anything unfamiliar. Food got a little more interesting in high school and college, going out to a restaurant seemed mildly intriguing, finding new foods seemed like a worthwhile endeavor, but this new interest was under constant assault by the atrocities of The Dining Hall. Then I graduated from college and all of a sudden I loved everything, I wanted to taste everything, I wanted to cook everything, especially if it sounded weird or foreign or combined ingredients in some new way, in some towering structure with an asparagus stalk cantilevered out over the artful splash of cranberry and fig au jus.

Talk to people who are into food and it always sounds like this, nobody pays attention to what they eat when they're young but when they enter their twenties they discover this glorious universe of taste, and the urge to find new and more and different foods increases as they get older. Is this physiological? Do preteens and adolescents lack the necessary brain structures to identify taste and smell to the degree adults do? Is there some hormonal change that happens after puberty that eventually leads to a developed and discerning palate? I'm thinking it's more like when you're fifteen till you're twenty your brain only holds one thought - SEX and after you get into your twenties the brain expands to hold SEX and FOOD.

Now I'm hungry and horny, and neither good food nor good sex is readily available at this moment. Damn.