Keeping the Food On Our Plate Separate

And other childhood gastronomical idiosyncrasies

When I was a kid I had an eating idiosyncrasy that drove my mother nuts. As she plopped food down onto our plates at the dinner table I immediately went to work with my fork to move the food around on my plate so that no food was touching another food. Everything had to be separated.

“Will you stop doing that!” she would bark. “There’s no point to doing that. All the food just ends up in the same place anyway. Your stomach doesn’t separate the food. It all ends up mixed up down there.”

“By that logic you shouldn’t even bother serving the food separately. You should just put it in a big bowl and mix it all up together then serve it.”

“Now that’s just plain stupid!”

“Before our food arrives in our stomachs — and goes beyond — it first passes through our mouth. That is where we enjoy the taste of the food. We can’t enjoy the taste of a particular food if it is blended with another food. How can we enjoy corn when the juice from the nearby beets has leaked into it? How can we enjoy cole slaw when it has been inundated with mushroom gravy that has spilled into it? How can we enjoy the deliciousness of broccoli when cole slaw juice has run into it? Some foods are great mixed together and some foods are…