My food OCD

So there are some strange things about me. One of them is my food aversions. I am incredibly picky about what I eat. It's basically OCD.

Imagine if you will, your favorite food. Lets say for the sake of argument it is homemade bread. (Which happens to be one of my all time faves.) So you love homemade bread. LOVE it.

There you are watching an expert baker prepare your bread. They are throwing in all the ingredients; yeast, wheat flour, salt, water, sugar, etc... Then they begin to carefully knead the dough. But just as they are pressing their fingers and hands into the dough, they pick their nose. A big juicy you know what comes out. Then they get back to work kneading that beautiful dough. Without washing their hands. Does that yummy wheat bread seem all that appetizing to you now? Not me! I would never eat it. Even if I was dying of hunger probably.

That is the feeling I get about a lot of foods when I see or hear or read about something in the food preparation that bothers me.

Examples include but are not limited to: Kids with undoubtedly yucky hands touching my food (I consider my kids just as unclean as all of yours btw), or coughing on it, cooking in an unclean kitchen, cooking with unclean cooking utensils, cooks who don't wash their hands with soap, and so on. It's a curse of mine. I just have a really hard time with it. Really hard time. This unfortunate problem has gradually developed over the course of several years. It started when I took a food handling class years ago.

A few years back I stumbled across some websites that were probably written by some total animal rights activists that were way over the top. I came across the websites when I was watching movie previews of all things. Kind of like those poor people who against their will get porn pop-ups on their computers. So the info I was reading came from some big time animal rights activists I think. You know the kind of people who feel like a family should be kicked out of their home of 30 years because a kangaroo rat may possibly be living on the premises. Get my drift?

So this particular website went into great detail about the entire meat packing process. Believe me, it was truly disturbing to me. Not because I think that eating meat is evil, but because it grossed me out worse than the thought of someone peeing in my lemonade. Really. I wont tell you the awful things I read because I think you are better off not knowing. It's really nasty. So I gave up red meat immediately. It wasn't hard for me at all. I haven't eaten red meat once since. I hadn't at the time come across anything bad about poultry or fish or pigs. But later did find out a few yucky things about those too despite myself. I've decided I would rather stay in the dark about most things now or I would starve to death. Shortly after giving up cows,

I gave up pigs

and sheep too.

If you look at these animals it seems strange to me to even think they would be appetizing anyhow. I mean really...

Now I will eat a little chicken and turkey and occasionally some seafood. But it's not my favorite thing by any means. I have never liked Mexican food, the authentic kind, because it really does look like diarrhea.

Do you deny? This was some Mexican beans I saw online. Nothing unusual here as far as Mexican dishes go.

With that in mind, you will be surprised to know that I have now overcome my aversion to beetles. I used to not eat yogurt because many of them (the ones that are red or pink mostly) have some beetles in them. But I'm over that now.

If you look at the end of the ingredient list where it says "colored with carmine" you'll see it. Carmine is called many names on labels. Everything but what it really is: crushed up or boiled beetles.

Here's a snip from Wikepedia:

Carmine, also called Crimson Lake, Cochineal, Natural Red 4, C.I. 75470, or E120, is a pigment of a bright red color obtained from the carminic acid produced by some scale insects, such as the cochineal and the Polish cochineal, and is used as a general term for a particularly deep red color. Carmine is used in the manufacture of artificial flowers, paints, rouge, yogurt, cosmetics, food additives, and crimson ink.

Yeah, it's in this kind of yogurt as well as many other kinds. Like just plain old strawberry flavored ones.

Do you also know that these are the only kinds of eggs I buy?

Notice the "Always Cage Free" statement.

And this statement on every carton too:

Yep, I want the eggs I eat to come from the best chickens. You know the ones with enough class to be able to preen and socialize and roam free with all of their other high class chicken friends.
It's important to me.

Wanna know what turned me off to normal eggs? You'll think this is even stranger, but I admitted to the OCD already above and OCD is the perfect excuse for many other strange human behaviors. It's almost a fad.

So it was the scene in Napoleon Dynamite where Napoleon is shoving chickens into these itty bitty cages on that farm. Then he proceeds to be served a drink of mixed up raw eggs. Yummy. That was it for me.