In Praise of the Delights of Weird Food
Pickles with Peanut Butter. Liverwurst. Tofu. Pineapple on Pizza. Mayo. What do these foods all have in common? According to a lot of people, they are weird…or just plain gross. I would know, I was one of them.
Growing up and becoming your own person entails coming to terms with food in a way as inevitable as dealing with taxes. Learning how to feed yourself means learning how to cook, what tastes good to you, and what food is worth to you.
We need food, but there really is no right or wrong way to do it beyond if it gets you sick or if it doesn't taste good. And that’s what it really comes down to: taste. The world is your oyster…or cold pizza. But so often one’s taste isn’t simply found out through a process of experimentation and discovery, but is also filtered through the perceptions about food that we receive from our families and our culture. I grew up in a household that had to have meat with a meal, that relied on rice and potatoes and frozen veggies. This is all fine, and I still treasure the family recipes I grew up on. But tofu was despised, we never had liverwurst, peanut butter was for jelly and not much else.
Then there was all of the messaging I heard about what people thought was gross. Peanut butter and pickles was something that pregnant women wanted for cravings, mayo is disgusting, liverwurst is a food people stopped eating ages ago, and so on. I saw it on TV, in school, and from friends. What am I chop liver? After a while I started to hang on to these ideas too.
But then I went to college and had to start buying my own food. I’ve always been fascinated by other cultures and my degree was focused on intercultural studies, learning to embrace differences and that to be brave enough to try new things is how we understand ourselves and others better. One of the best ways to learn about a culture that isn’t yours is, of course, with food. Not only that, but having a limited budget means I had to get creative to eat well.
Once in a college budget-induced desperation, I took to Google to find meals to make with the ingredients that I had. I’d just gotten back from a particularly pinched grocery run to Grocery Outlet to shore up my typical college staples of rice and ramen, and ended up getting some peanut butter, a can of tuna salad, some eggs, bread, butter, two apples, and a jar of bread and butter pickles. I had no idea what kind of meals I could make with all of these ingredients and the manic calculations I’d made, basket in hand, in the store that made these decisions make sense evaporated on the bus ride back to my apartment.
A result popped up for the Peanut Butter and Pickle Sandwich. I was initially befuddled by this idea. Pickles belonged on burgers and in tuna salad. Peanut butter was basically for desserts. I think I shook my head and moved on to more normal food ideas.
But as the week wore on I increasingly worked my way through the groceries until I only had some bread, the leftover pickles and the trusty jar of peanut butter in my pantry. Looking it over I suddenly remembered that people eat Peanut Butter and Pickle Sandwiches. I was hungry and broke. I took two slices of bread, spreading them evenly with creamy peanut butter and placed about five pickle slices in it. I took a hesitant bite.
To my great surprise I realized that the flavor was actually really good! The sweet tang of the pickles shot through the creamy savoriness of the peanut butter, giving it a satisfying crunch to boot. Honestly, the closest thing I could compare it to when thinking about it was…Thai peanut sauce. Now, this wasn’t a life changing revelation where the skies parted and a pickled staircase from heaven came down. It was just a tasty sandwich.
But what it did do was allow me to realize that the idea of a lot of what we think of as weird or gross foods wasn’t from our own experiences of eating and trying them, but from our own received perceptions of them. Because I automatically associated peanut butter with jelly and sweets, I thought it was weird to have it in savory applications. Another piece to the equation is that so often what we think of as “weird” is really just unfamiliar.
From there I’ve made so many other discoveries, like peanut butter tastes great on burgers, plain yogurt is interchangeable for sour cream in a pinch, and you can add cheese to Cream of Wheat. Plus, being willing to try interesting food combinations and letting go of learned notions opens you up to a whole world: Japanese sweet red bean paste, steamed Chinese tofu bread, chocolate risotto, kimchi hot dogs.
(It’s probably no co-incidence that a lot of the foods we think are weird are “ethnic foods.”)
Just this past week, burning with curiosity after seeing it while buying lunch and reading an article about Norwegian matpakke, I stopped by the grocery store after work and grabbed a pack of liverwurst. I’d never had it before but it always seemed like one of those foods people always thought was weird or very outdated. On getting home, I toasted a slice of bread, spread it with mayo, added a slice of cheese and a slice of the liverwurst. Again, I was very pleasantly surprised — a savory, smooth, and salty bite that loves to be paired with fat and a touch of mustard.
I’m not saying that if you’ll try these foods and combinations you’ll like them, in fact it’s completely okay if you don’t — there are some that I’ve tried that I definitely did not like! But at least I know because I tried them.
When’s the last time you had liverwurst? Who knows, you might even like it.
