My instinctive interest in eating became apparent the first day of my life, as it is with everyone, and expanded from there, on into an active lifelong attraction. Although, it has taken me a little longer than some to determine exactly what kind of foods I like the most, there eventually arrived a time in my life I needed to become a connoisseur of the edibility distinctions.

It started quite innocently when I was about three years old. We had moved from our in-town location, where the milk supply appeared regularly in bottled form on the front porch, to a farm where a cow was to provide the milk for my daily bowl of puffed wheat cereal. 

However, the cow soon developed a problem with her end of the job: her baby arrived. 

  So my mother, thinking she’d found the solution -- a canned product labeled “condensed milk” -- purchased it from the grocery store.

Bottled milk delivery to rural households was an unheard-of idea in the long-ago days of the early 1930s. Really!

It took me but a quick taste to determine I definitely did not like milk from a can. That was my first entry into a life-long trend of evaluating what food should be like to be accepted according to my standards.

As foreboding as all this may seem upon my listing some current examples, they really aren’t as gross as they sound, or maybe they are to you.

Anyway, here you go: 

To this day I don’t like the ‘skin’ that forms on the top of milk being heated (it makes me shudder to remove it), nor do I trust the little abnormal-looking blemishes on fruit and vegetables as edible parts of the object being chosen to consume (I once ate half a worm and suffered an epic period of recovery).  I still question the little dark-colored stringy things (looking much like bloody veins—they aren’t, are they?) clinging to the shreds of meat simmering in the cooking pot; also, the other dark streaky parts therein. Those things have to be separated and discarded – yuck (please do).

  If you are now contemplating a need to judge me as being a little too “picky,” that’s okay; I don’t mind.

I learned it from my mother and her habit of always sniffing everything before eating it. She came from a family of 16 children where, as she repeatedly explained, “It was always a good idea to sniff everything first”. My daddy disliked her habit, but she never changed. I didn’t mind and willingly followed her lead.

And, while we are discussing my posted need to check the back stories on foods, consider this: How come your solidly formed foods invariably set up like you want them to? It’s the gelatin content. And where does the gelatin come from? 

ARE YOU READY FOR THIS? From the amassed skins and bones and tissues of rendered animals. Just thought you should know!

Read the labels.