Can you cure picky eating?

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Do you guys want to introduce yourselves?

Absolutely.

My name is Manny.

I'm Noah.

And this is Devin.

And Search Engine listeners may remember you.

You guys were on the show previously.

Usually we answer people's questions.

You guys showed up with a question, which you then answered, which was,

Yeah, why are there so many chicken bones on the streets?

It was an investigation people honestly still email me about.

People, I think there are just Americans now who walk down the street, see a chicken bone, and think about these three unusual gentlemen from New York who answered this question.

I love to hear that.

We got an email last week about it.

Really?

Yeah.

Someone sent us a picture of a chicken bone.

They thought that the episode, like, we were still doing research for the episode, I think.

Since that first story, published a year ago, Manny, Noah, and Devin have started their own podcast.

They answer answer questions, something I was pretty sure we completely invented, but whatever.

I think the reason their show is so good is their excellent question choosing.

They pick questions that come out of their arguments, these three are always arguing, about stuff like, do audiobooks count as reading?

Do horses hate running?

Well, actually, today an episode came out called, Is it Okay to Wear Your Outside Clothes on Your Bed?

Oh, I've been

criticized for this quite a bit.

Yeah, so I'll ask you, do you think it's okay?

I mean, there's a lot of things I do that I don't think are okay.

But I go to bed like,

I don't know the people you're talking about, how disgusting they are, but I'm definitely worse than them.

Like, I will get in bed.

I will sleep in my jeans.

Oh, for sure.

For all mouths.

Yeah,

that's nasty.

Yeah, that's an extreme case.

That's pretty nasty.

It's disgusting.

I mean, why?

Because I don't like paying them all.

You have really comfortable jeans.

They're not.

These are like jeggings or

how are you sleeping?

Is there a jigging?

Like, they're not comfy.

They're broken in.

I'll just put it there.

They're very broken.

Just like by the end of the day, the exertion of literally,

sometimes I just don't have it.

Anyway, the reason the chicken bone squad was back here today was because once again, they had a question for our show, which they wanted to find the answer to.

A question we here at Search Engine found particularly delightful.

Today we have a problem and I'm grateful to be able to use this platform again to answer something so stupid.

But I'm a member of the picky eating community and that's

run into a lot of issues in this friend group.

It's run into a lot of issues in my relationship, specifically because my version of picky eating is an aversion to seafood.

Across the board, no seafood.

Yeah, pretty much across the board.

Yeah.

Can I ask like, are you a lifelong picky eater yeah and it's just has it been the same aversions since you were a kid or have you developed like as your palate has advanced has your pickiness also advanced yeah i think it's been lifelong especially with seafood um i am i'll just tell you i'll lay out a little bit about like my background so i'm eritrean american uh both my parents are from eritrea and In that cuisine, there's really no seafood at all.

Unless you are from one of the port towns on the Red Sea, you don't eat seafood.

So I didn't grow up with any seafood.

The only seafood exposure I had was like at elementary school or middle school where they would have like the fish Fridays or fried shrimp or whatever.

But so would you eat the fried shrimp when you were a kid?

I did, but I didn't know what it was.

Because it was just some fried thing.

It was a fried thing.

The fried is always carrying the weight on it.

Yeah, which is what struck me about this aversion because it wasn't the taste at the time.

Because it's knowing what it is is what made me.

I don't find pigginess in food consumption strange and like I like seafood but there was like

I had a couple years where shrimp all of a sudden I was like I'm not doing this and then it came back because they're like they they are like insects it's like you're eating this like weird fat worm that has like a visible line of poop in it sometimes

yeah yes and my family ends up being a good exam for this because although none of my siblings grew up eating fish they all love fish

they they like it now they're another group of people who I'm running into this issue with.

We cannot go out to eat and get what they want to get because I'm there.

And what are the conversations around this like?

They're like, stop being, yeah, I won't use the words.

Basically, I'm like being a child and like preventing them from getting what they want to get.

And I'll just say this, like.

For the picky eaters out there, I don't think you should change who you are.

But for me specifically, I'm running into this enough to where I'm curious about whether it's possible to cure your picky eating.

I want to know if, like, is there something I can do to make it so that I can tolerate fish enough to be able to be at a restaurant and not cause any issues when I'm ordering in a group or with my girlfriend?

And is the idea that you'll actually consume it?

Yeah, I think like the ultimately, like, it'd be great if I was just towing down on like any kind of fish, shrimp, tuna, whatever.

But mostly, I just want to be able to exist in this restaurant space and like not be a hindrance to people who, you know, in New York, it's a lot of money to go out to eat.

If you're paying that much money and you're not eating what you want to eat, I feel like

I don't want to be an obstacle to, you know, someone's desires.

Okay.

So that's the question that we came here to answer.

Like, is it possible to cure picky eating?

And

we started with Noah.

We had him kind of look into the history of picky eating and some of the stuff people have done to try and cure it.

Yeah, so what I found was the kind of idea of even just choosing what you eat is actually a pretty recent historical phenomenon.

I mean, you can imagine most people just had to eat whatever was given to them throughout history.

So I mean, like the term picky eating didn't even exist until the 70s or wasn't used until the 70s.

But there has been kind of this war between picky children and their parents for probably since like the 1800s.

So, I mean, for the past century or so, parents and doctors have been trying all sorts of ways to cure this modern affliction.

There's all sorts of cookbooks designed to help parents sneak healthy foods into recipes that kids might actually try.

Things like spinach and brownies.

Spinach and brownies?

Yeah, which is pretty perverse.

I feel like you would know it.

Yeah, there's probably some better ways to do it.

Hopefully, you know, maybe new technology is helping this.

I hope.

Hypnotherapy is actually a popular method.

That's for both children and adults, so maybe Manny can try that.

Yeah, I would love to.

But one of the most common and definitely the one I was most familiar with is what I'd call forced exposure.

So, all right, you hate some food, but if we just kind of force you to eat it or be around it, then maybe eventually you'll just kind of give in and accept that this is a decent food to eat.

And common because it's successful or common because it's just what every parent defaults to?

Yeah, I think it's just kind of an obvious thing to try.

It's also very popular on daytime TV.

Daytime TV.

Yeah, so shows like Mori.

I mean, you could find a lot of examples of this.

It makes for great TV fodder, you can imagine.

So I want to show you a clip, actually.

Okay.

This is Mariah.

She's 18 years old, and she is deathly afraid of pickles.

I mean,

the whole world eats pickles.

There's a woman who looks like she just found out she's dying.

She's shaking.

In school, she was called the pickle girl.

You know, one time.

At first, they called her pickle girl.

And then they're presenting her with trays and trays and trays of pickles.

This is what the sign of a pickle does to Mariah.

My name is Karia, and I hate pickles.

I hate everything about

pickles are destroyed in my life.

People make fun of me.

I feel ashamed that I'm actually.

Isn't it crazy how every idea you have has been done by someone in a dumber, meaner way?

We wanted to see firsthand the extent of Mariah's pickle phobia.

Oh, no.

So we sent her to the Patterson Pickle Factory.

Oh, no.

Where she would come face to face with thousands upon thousands of pickles.

Maury's a sadust.

Listen, if Mariah, the pickle girl, is out there, I would love to hear, you know, where you are now and kind of what your life has been like.

I have to say, it seems like being on Maury, being humiliated for having a very unusual psychological response to pickles is so much worse than the problem she was trying to solve.

Yeah, so like, needless to say, at the end of the segment, the pickle girl was still very much afraid of pickles.

And like the research says forced exposure therapy like that just doesn't actually work.

Right.

Just taking the thing people have a problem with in their face over and over again.

Scott's responses like good daytime TV.

Yeah, so we couldn't just take Mandy to some factory and hope it would go away.

But we tried to find a scientist who had studied this kind of stuff.

So we actually came across a professor at Duke University who was one of the first people to really hone in and look at picky eating in a comprehensive way.

We wanted to first just ask if you could say your name and what you do.

My name is Nancy Zucker, and I am a professor of psychiatry at Duke University, and I direct the Duke Center for Eating Disorders.

Great.

I'll tell you a little bit about my experience with this.

Yeah, I've been a picky eater my whole life.

I have a specific aversion to seafood and fish.

And so, what we're kind of planning to do with this episode is cure that as best as we can.

And so, you know, you did just mention that you worked at the Center for Eating Disorders.

I guess my first question is, do I have an eating disorder?

Yeah, you know, so the boundary in which being a picky eater is defined as a disorder is based on impairment.

And so if your aversion to fish, does it include seafood, like shrimp, scallops?

Yeah, all of it.

All of it.

The whole lot of it.

Right.

So like if you were,

I suppose, an aspiring New York chef and it was getting in your way of kind of designing the menu of your dreams, then it might be, you know, crossing over into impairment.

But if it doesn't get in your way, then it probably wouldn't cross the lines of a disorder.

Interesting.

So it's kind of the same way we're defining like depression or alcoholism, like whether a behavior rises to the level of disorder has to do with how well you're able to fit in society.

Exactly.

And how we draw the line between picky eating and disordered eating is like how much it's impairing your relationship to society,

which is funny because it's like, I'm not going to disagree with psychiatry, but like I can slightly slightly disagree with that where I'm like, but we kind of do know, like, there's a difference between like, oh, I have an aversion and like, oh, it's like a deep psychological pain.

Like, it feels like an insufficient way to describe the severity of the problem, but I'll, I'll, I'll allow it.

Yeah.

Manny's not so extreme as in like he goes out to eat with us and he can be in the presence of seafood.

Yeah.

But some people don't even want to be, you can't smell it.

You can't look at it.

Right.

Like,

but I am, I do feel disgusted by like fish, just like when they're alive, like they're slippery and squirmy and just singing and out in the world.

I'm not gonna throw up, but I'm like an alive fish, yeah, a beautiful school of fish that disturbs you.

There are some, I get it, you know, what he, I know what manner's talking about, I'll defend you against your friends.

Manny's talking about you're on the beach on vacation, you're standing, the water's up to like your thighs, and something like something rushes on your leg.

Crazy, something squirmy and black kind of squirms.

I'm with you.

Thank you.

Did you go to aquariums as a kid?

Yeah.

So you were just like, oh, this is just

giant fish are different.

Oh, you don't like small fish.

The little ones that are like scheming something.

I don't know.

Just like

the famous lots of fish.

Yeah.

But so you wouldn't, like, if you're out for dinner with your girlfriend and like a waiter walks by with a, you know, a plate full of like...

shrimp on a kebab, you don't care.

But if you were with your friends and they were being jerks and they like picked up a shrimp and dangled it in your face, you would feel disgusted.

Yeah, I'd be like,

get that out of my face.

Yeah.

So I asked Dr.

Zucker to explain to me like what's what's going on with this disgust factor.

Why is that happening?

So disgust is a really cool emotion in my opinion, right?

So it's designed to protect us from getting contaminated from pathogens, right?

So it has a very protective function.

And so when you think about how one becomes contaminated, we get contaminated when something crosses a body barrier.

We ingest it, we inhale it, we absorb it through our skin, it crosses some orifice.

And by the time it does that, you're contaminated and it's too late.

And so there should be these cues that people who are disgust sensitive pick up, like you mentioned, slimy, right?

These kind of things that just look to us like they're threatening and they could cause us to be contaminated.

And, you know, it's interesting that it's restricted to that one area.

I would guess that you're pretty detail

in other things.

Like that you notice like visual details of things, like texture.

Oh, yeah, I'm really observant.

Um, I'm a video producer, and so that's kind of like part of my whole thing.

It's a ruined movies for me, actually.

I can't watch movies like a normal person anymore.

Oh, isn't that so interesting, right?

So, I just think that that's like a cool adaptive trait that might not be as adaptive to the modern environment, but like if you were a cave dweller back in the day, perhaps you would have outlasted your peers.

It's interesting, Manny.

It's like you have a brain that is suited for being a cave dweller, where it's like, avoid unfamiliar foods at all costs because they could be poison.

And it's like sending you the right signals.

But the problem is we're in a world where everything we want to do is just fit in socially.

And the fact that your poison avoiding brain is telling you not to eat fish is causing you like 3% social friction, which is the worst thing that could happen in modern society at all.

Yeah.

And I think, yeah, I think my ex once described me as someone who had a brain suited to be a cave dweller.

That's not the first time I've heard that comment, actually.

But I was interested in why Devin and Noah don't have the same problem that I do.

So that's interesting in terms of my experience, but Devin and Noah here love fish.

Why isn't their body telling them to avoid fish?

Well, because it's pretty adaptive to eat fish, right?

Like not everything's contaminated.

So there needs to be this kind of balance of like people that have kind of a low bar for trying out things and adventuring and testing things out and seeing if it's okay.

So there should be variation in the population about kind of one's sensitivity to these different features.

So you got some people taking risks, like your friends, and, you know, you who is kind of holding back and saying, like, you guys try it first.

So what's interesting is that Dr.

Zucker actually did a study a few years ago with 20,000 self-described picky eaters.

Oh, wow.

And part of what they were trying to figure out with the study, especially with her work with kids, is like, what are the things that your parents did that helped with your picky eating?

And what are some of the things that they did that like really fucked you up?

Yeah.

But she said the things that are helpful are like creating positive experiences with your kids, involving them in prepping the food.

Like one example they had is like introducing cultures with food as a way to introduce new foods to kids.

Oh, like the culture from which the food comes out.

Exactly.

Like giving some background on it.

Making it feel more like an experience.

Yeah.

Versus, here's this thing in front of you.

Eat it now.

So it sounds like basically since we were kids,

it's like the

picky eating literature has progressed.

Like the feel of getting kids to eat things that might be unfamiliar or weird.

Like people, because I don't think like, like

my parents or most people's parents were reading books that were like, sit your kid at the table with a plate and broccoli tell everyone's crying.

But like that's what their parents have done.

So that's what they were doing.

And it's like people have actually thought about this and like psychiatry has approached this and like we have ideas about what to do.

Exactly.

Interesting.

But honestly, the coolest thing about Dr.

Zucker and her team, they take all this data, all this information that they gather, and then they apply it to individual plans for individual people.

So we asked her, hey, we're putting together a plan for Manny.

Can you help us sort of shape what that plan looks like?

So, this is very simplistic, but like I have a grid where it's like, you know, sweet and salty is let's say on the X axis and like chewy and crunchy is on the Y axis.

And so, like, Manny, if you were to like plot the foods that you currently prefer and eat, you know, on this, you can get the picture, right?

Like, you know, is there kind of a pattern in terms of the textures and tastes that you prefer?

So basically, her advice was like, try to introduce fish in a format that Manny might already like.

So maybe like a fish dish that's crunchy and salty, you know, that sort of thing.

You know, like parents will often start with like fish sticks, for example, you know, like things like that, or like really, really crispy shrimp because there's more breading to fish.

You know, you guys get the picture.

She basically said, like, start with fried foods or put it in a sandwich.

Like she said, just put it in a sandwich.

Just like because I'm already used to eating sandwiches and i like sandwiches like maybe if you do a fish sandwich this is like a very entry level way yeah things that can help mask the fishiness yeah okay or fried foods could do some fried fish fish and chips yeah fried fish makes more sense to me than fish sandwich maybe she didn't say sandwich maybe that was my addition

the doctor could take that up and you'd leave

um

And she also said, like, you should be realistic about what you're going to do, right?

Like, first step shouldn't be like, like, I'm going to eat 100 bites of this fish.

Yeah.

She's like, take it one bite at a time, small bites.

Like, take the cues that your body is giving you as well.

You know, like, I would really do this, like, I would be gentle with yourself.

Think about like how many bites I want to kind of manage.

Do I want to just get over that initial gag and call it a day?

She's like, you should have a chaser.

I would absolutely have a chaser.

Oh, yeah, like a shot of whiskey or something.

Or like another, a bite of food.

Oh,

I work with five-year-olds, for gosh sakes.

It's like chocolate chips, you know.

My fear is that this like ends with you guys at like an all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant and you're just hammered, like vomiting and tagging.

Yeah, you can drink your way through a lot of things, but

it's not, not, no, no.

This, the purpose of this whiskey is to clear the taste out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not so much as kind of reset.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now to feel good.

So she gave us a few tips that were, you know, smart and reasonable.

But what I really wanted to know before diving in was, you know, as a doctor, did she think this experiment could work?

Do I have a real shot at curing this?

I think that the odds are in your favor.

And I'll tell you why.

One is because it is restricted to this one domain.

You're able to tolerate the look and smell of it and be around it, right?

So that's another kind of clue that it's not as severe as it could be.

You're highly motivated to work on this, which means that you're going to go into it with your threat kind of perception down and be more kind of just curious about it.

And you're doing it for your girlfriend, which is just lovely.

And so, there's like all the things that would be rooting for you to be able to get through this are on your side.

After a short break, a series of trials and experiments, will Manny be able to cure his picky eating.

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Welcome back to the show.

So, after talking to Dr.

Zucker, you know, I felt a little bit more confident about our goals here.

I was still a little skeptical, but like, we have a plan now.

We have this experiment.

And so, Noah, Devin, and I thought it's finally time to do this thing.

Which is right.

Which was three steps of fishy meals in increasing fishiness.

All right, this is Manny.

I've just sat down with the first of three increasingly fishy meals.

I recorded everything along the way.

We just jumped straight into step one, which, you know, I found myself sitting in my apartment with some takeout.

There is a restaurant by me in my neighborhood that's kind of moderately popular.

And it's a seafood restaurant, and I've ordered their fried fish sandwich.

It's a spicy fried fish sandwich.

So you were thinking fried fish sandwich because, again, fried is a dominant flavor.

Yes.

And sandwich also.

Also the sandwich.

This is like a double damage.

You eat a lot of sandwiches.

It's in a vehicle that I know and love.

You're mainly eating like fish-inflected bread.

That's what I would like to hope.

Okay.

Yeah.

So I'm sitting there examining this sandwich.

I am touching it.

I'm smelling it.

I'm assessing it generally.

My first kind of thought is that it looks exactly like a fried chicken sandwich.

And for that reason, I think all of the receptors in my brain are saying, wow, this looks really good and it smells good as well.

Crucially, though, we're going to try to see if it tastes good or tastes good specifically to me.

And so, yeah, let's take this first bite.

And the first bite is great because there's no fish in it.

You're just at the fried part.

I just got the fried part.

Then I'm like, oh, wait until I look at the sandwich.

I'm like, oh, there's the fish.

They're definitely fish.

I can already tell my jaw is like slowing down.

Like my brain does not want me to continue chewing this, but I'm going to fight through it.

Did you gag?

I didn't gag.

I think because the spices in the fried part are so, like, they were so savory and they were so, um, what's the word?

They smelled really good.

And I didn't, I don't know.

I think it just masked the fishiness.

I kind of like barely taste the fish in this, but I still do taste the fish.

And so that is my body's just kind of like

it is not enjoying that part of this the fish so it tasted gross but it was kind of a success in that you were able to like like people eat food they don't like all the time that's that's different than having a disgust reaction yeah and so i ate a few more bites i think i mean if if you guys looked at the sandwich you'd be like you didn't touch this thing

But for someone who has an aversion, I ate a lot of the sandwich.

Yeah, I think if we weren't with Manny when he ate the sandwich.

I think if we were there, we probably would have forced a a few more bites, which is probably against the wisdom of the doctor.

That was like parenting in the 1980s.

Yeah, I'm old school.

So if a sandwich were like a moon, like what phase of moon would it be?

Like there's full moon, there's crescent moon.

Oh, we're talking pretty close to full.

Werewolf's about to come in.

Very bright.

It's very bright.

Yeah, maybe the night before full moon, you know?

Okay.

I'm seeing.

The night before.

No, but I think what I took to be a success was that I even ate part of a thing that was touching fish.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So step one we could generously call a success.

So we wanted to up the difficulty level a bit for step two.

We decided to do a home-cooked meal.

Yeah, we're outside.

Oh, I'm opening the door.

Welcome.

Please come in.

So Devin and I were going to cook, so we got some ingredients and went to Mandy's place.

There they are.

Hey, man.

How's it going?

It's our picky eater.

And Devin and I had googled a few different fish recipes to consider.

Do you remember the search terms we used?

Yeah, I mean, like

fish for babies,

like easy, easy fish recipes for kids, things like that.

Just insulting.

Yeah.

But yeah, a lot of it was pretty simple, kind of either white fish or salmon roasted in butter and kind of covered in garlic or other things.

Yeah.

Fish tacos, sheet pan fish and chips.

But we wanted something that wasn't super fried.

We wanted to kind of step it up a little bit so we'd actually kind of see if he can take this next step or if we're kind of still stuck at the fried fish stage.

And we landed on a recipe that I've made several times before from the New York Times: roasted salmon glazed with brown sugar and mustard.

Sam had that by Sam Sift and it's a very popular one.

It's really good.

And it's super easy.

It's like you don't even need the recipe, really.

Yeah.

And what was good was you could dial in the kind of sweetness of the sauce and how much there is.

Yeah, so it's brown sugar and Dijon mustard.

It's kind of like barbecue sauce on a chicken.

So let's see, this one on the left is going to be the one for Manny.

So I'm going to make sure that one's extra sauce.

All right, thank you.

We added way more glaze than probably I would ever make it.

Noah hadn't tasted the glaze and I was like, we're going to need more.

More.

So yeah, it was pretty covered.

We made sauteed green beans as a palate cleanser and he had whiskey on the rocks

as his other palate cleanser.

All right, I'm here with my whiskey that i'm probably gonna need after this um

this looks gross but i'm going in

so then i ate some of it and

the glaze was really good

and i remember kind of being like

this is the first time i could see why someone would like this really

it's it's like This tastes good.

I don't want to say that it doesn't taste good.

It's more of the mental factor of trying to get past what it is.

But I will say this: I'm having an easier time eating this than the fish sandwich.

Really?

I was taken aback by the feeling of like, oh, I kind of get it.

I get this.

It's like the feeling you get with an unfamiliar genre.

Like, the first time you hear a country song you like, you're like, oh.

Yeah.

Okay.

It might not be for me.

Yeah.

The guy singing about his rent is too high or whatever.

Wait, my rent's too high.

That is pretty much the feeling I had eating this salmon.

Okay, so phase two, relatively successful.

Yeah.

Can I just observe that,

I don't know, if like if like picky eating is mainly just a social problem, like it's not like you have some food deficiency from not eating fish or whatever.

You just,

I understand that you guys are trying to solve this problem partly because like you have a podcast to make and you have a question for the podcast and whatever.

You also just have very nice friends.

Like the lengths that you guys are willing to go

to make this work is very sweet and unusual.

No, I thought about that.

And it's in stark contrast to how our usual dynamic is.

And so I was struck by that at some point during this experiment.

You mean because they weren't just like teasing you?

Yeah.

I mean, Noah looking up a recipe, making me a meal.

I know.

It's kind of wild.

Yeah.

So now that takes us to the real test, which is step three, going to an actual restaurant to see how big of a pain in the ass is a many gonna be

and honestly i didn't know how this was gonna go step one two i thought went fine but i was curious how many was going to perform at an actual restaurant with some actual fish dishes

so where do you guys go we went to a restaurant called swoonies in brooklyn it's just like a neighborhood spot oh i like swoonies they they have some weird cool fish dishes there

i believe that's their fish that's like their main fish entree.

I've never, I don't know.

I've had that.

Yeah, I've never heard of that before.

Do either of you know what crudeau is?

Yeah, they were a bunch of fish dishes that we had never heard of, but we ended up choosing three of them, and the first one was the tuna crude.

Here's the thing about this dish.

So tuna crudeau, sculpt.

It's raw, like cubed tuna, but it's in kind of like a salad with like avocado and what is that?

Cilantro.

But the main part that I liked was that it's served with this bread that is incredibly buttery and so what we were doing we put all this stuff onto the bread and then eating it it's kind of your sandwich theory yeah

no one no one wants to acknowledge the sandwich theory it's a valid theory

and the one thing I remember is not tasting the tuna at all like I just didn't taste the tuna

First reaction, like, gosh, there's definitely a little bit of the texture you're getting in there, but it's really good.

Like, the whole thing's really good.

I'm taking a second bite.

It's kind of rare for me.

A second bite.

I was shocked because he went in and immediately was just like, oh, I like this.

I was kind of like, oh, well, we can just go now.

I mean,

we did it.

I'm shocked by what I'm seeing.

Not only does he like it, he's actively going back for more bites.

I think we might need to order another entree here.

This is crazy.

So then after the crudo came the lobster orzo, which was another appetizer.

And it's, I mean, orzo, if people don't don't know what it is, like, it's pasta kind of, but it's like thicker rice, I guess.

And it's got, this one's more of a red sauce, um, and it's, it's really creamy and, and delicious.

But the thing that I thought helped a lot with our experiment here is that you couldn't really see the lobster inside.

It was like hiding spinach in a brownie.

Yes, exactly.

You're kind of like micro-dosing seafood.

But you were finding that your micro-dosing seafood experience was like, not just that you were tolerating it, but enjoying enjoying it.

Yeah.

Okay.

So I'm having a

really good and, in my view, successful experience at Smoonies, but I do imagine if we went to like a lobster shop or something and it was just straight up lobster, fork and knife,

I'd still have some struggle.

Or if you went to like a Portuguese restaurant where sometimes they'll serve you like a whole fish with the eye looking at you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I mean, like, I don't really like, like, every time somebody puts a full fish in front of me, I'm like, this doesn't feel right.

Like, I'm more on your side of it.

We're like, fish can be an ingredient.

Fish can be an ingredient.

And I feel like if the progress you've made is fish can be an ingredient, that's progress.

Yeah, honestly, it did feel like progress.

Like, I was actually eating the stuff that they were putting down on the table.

But then the final dish came out and it didn't look like the other ones.

Like, it actually just looked like, you know, out here, I'll just show you a photo.

This is the Dorado.

This is the Dorade.

Oh, that's just a fish.

Which I was describing as it's a fish.

I think I was calling it Dorade without knowing.

But this, you know, this is just literally a fish without the head, I think.

Yeah, and without the tail.

Yeah, and this was the final test.

This is like the final boss, right?

I took a forkful, I examined it, and then I went for it.

What can I say?

It's really good.

The char, the charredness of the skin on the top, this tastes like a steak.

So, I don't know.

This is really good.

But to wait, you fully enjoyed an actual filet of fish.

That was really good to me.

Not fried.

Not fried.

And there was very few kind of hang-ups about it.

Five times the charm.

Yeah.

It's funny, though, you know, the process you're describing, because I feel like you have answered this question, like, can you cure picky eating?

Like, I think you have.

Yeah.

And I think, like, most people, if there's like a kind of cuisine or a kind of food that they're a little bit averse to because it's unfamiliar, this is kind of like how they walk in.

Like, the first time you try it, maybe it's fried, maybe it's an ingredient in something else.

Maybe you go to a place that prepares it really well.

And like, you just slowly get used to something unfamiliar until you discover the pleasure in it.

And then one day you turn around and you've just like changed.

Yeah.

I really didn't have any hopes for myself

in any of these experiments.

I really was like, okay, this is kind of a lost cause.

There is something so,

I mean, this sounds obvious now, but just like the repetition of doing it over and over again until you get used to it

just like helps a lot.

The texture of these fish, the fish that I've had in these past couple of months, I'm used to it now.

Okay, so this is a two-month process.

The argument you guys were having, the question you were trying to answer is, can you cure picky eating?

What do you believe now?

I think you,

at least in my case, you can kind of cure it because I'm not going to eat fish that's just sitting there.

That's not presented in any kind of way.

But depending on like the flavors around it, depending on the vehicle it's served in, there are ways you can tolerate it.

For my purposes as a bystander, the answer is yes.

Because I was shocked when he was taking bites of this raw tuna and enjoying it.

And I was like, this is good enough for me.

And do you feel, like,

I don't want to make too big a deal out of this, but like, do you like picky eater is like a trait?

Like, it's like one of the aspects of your personality.

Do you feel differently now on the other side of this experience?

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely

all the corny stuff that it's taught me, like how much I can personally affect in my life.

But there's also other foods that I have picky eating aversions to that I want to try now.

What do you want to try?

Like corn, for example.

I just corn?

I hate corn.

Corn?

Yeah.

What's your issue with corn?

You know what?

It is kind of similar to fish in a way, that it's slimy and like the texture is weird.

It's okay if it's like sprinkled in a salad or something like that, but just like eating it right off of the ear is tough, really tough for me.

Popcorn.

Right up's fine.

Cornbread.

Cornbread's great.

Okay, you're going to be fine.

And how do you guys feel?

Good, I'm overjoyed.

Oh, yeah, it was nice to see everyone thinking

of you.

Manny, Noah, and and Devin.

Their podcast is called No Such Thing.

If you like our show, we think you'll really love theirs.

Some episodes to check out that we really liked.

Are suburban dogs happier than city dogs?

I hope not.

And Should Men Sit When They Pee?

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No Such Thing.

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