When it comes to food, I am a picky person. There are many types of food I avoid and many others I actually don’t like. Beyond that, I use to eat almost at the same time every day. Breakfast at ten in the morning, lunch between one and two in the afternoon and dinner after eight at night. Almost the same kind of dishes, almost the same time of the day. Since I was a kid I have faced digestive problems, inflammation, allergies and this type of thing. And in order to deal with that condition I had to approach my eating habits in a different way, especially being very aware of what and when I eat.
The other day, my partner was watching a series named The Abbot and she called me to see a character just like me. Very picky. In the show he is a substitute teacher in an elementary school. And in the episode, he refused pizza from a colleague at lunch time. And everybody did a scene because of that. He told them he doesn’t like pizza. What a heresy. The series is from the USA. I immediately got it. I knew the actor that plays the role of that character. This is the actor Tylor James Williams from Everybody Hates Chris, a show which is very well known in Brazil. Turns out that Tyler really has an inflammatory disease. It’s close to my situation. So I guess the scene was inspired by his real life.
But there is a genre of food that I avoid for other reasons. That is sauce. Especially tomato sauce. Yeah, yeah. Because of that I am not a big fan of pasta. The colleagues of Tyler’s character would probably kill me - with their judgmental looks. I don’t like the taste and the texture of the tomato sauce. And I grew up thinking that it was just one of my collection of forbidden foods based on my digestion issues. I believed that until my mother tells me that I started to avoid tomato sauce when my sister had cancer. This is my older sister. She is one year older than me. She had a brain tumor when she was four. It was tough for my parents. She was just a little girl and had a severe tumor. Thanks God, she survived. But she lost her vision, and she is blind since then. According to my mother, she bled a lot through her nose during the treatment. No napkin was enough to contain all the bleeding. So she used towels and sheets in order to dry it. My mother told me that because I saw those quite frightening moments I gave up eating sauces. Especially tomato’s sauce.
Nowadays my sister is a grown woman, married and mother of three children. And I, besides the sauce thing, I learned to deal with my intolerance to nuts, seeds, dairies, and most of the varieties of fats. I discovered fruits. I love and eat all different fruits. And the fruits love me back, not causing me any harm.
