Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of a "trackback" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+trackback" bit from the end of the URL.
Restaurants
I don't eat take-out food when I'm at home, and I rarely eat at restaurants. I think that in the past year, other than when I have been travelling, I have eaten take-out 4 or 5 times at user group meetings and other meetings at the office, and probaby about the same in sit-down restaurants: just a few special occasions. Let's see, there was a dinner with Nanette at an Indian place before a concert, and my birthday dinner, a dinner with my friend David at a German restaurant, and a couple of lunches with Nanette, one at a Mexivan place near her office and one at Casa Alvarez. I may be forgetting one meal, but probably not two.
The Farmers' Market is a special case: the food from the food court there is not standard restaurant food, and it mostly comes in reasonable portions. And I think spending hours on my feet and working (especially during squash season) pretty well balances those calories.
When I'm travelling and living in hotels, my eating patterns are very different from when I am at home. Living in corporate housing in 2005 was another pattern: I ate lunches from my customer's cafeteria (mmm, noodle bowls on Tuesdays and Thursdays) and cooked my own dinners. This actually worked out pretty well: my weight stayed pretty stable. I think the lunches I had been packing in previous corp housing episodes contributed to the weight gain in those years.
I have two or three problems with restaurant food. One big problem is portion size: I was raised strictly to clean my plate, and that is a habit which is very had to break. Restaurant portions in this country are not human-sized. Village-sized, maybe.
Aside from the calories involved, I've noticed that one of the times I'm at risk for swallowing problems is at the end of a meal, when I am getting full, which gives me some incentive for portion control.
Subway sandwich places are good: their food is in reasonable portions and not all fried, and you can control the ingredients. Applebee's WeightWatcher's menu also has human-sized portions and at least a little variety.
Another minor problem with restaurants is that they are really not intended for solitary eaters. Restaurant meals are really very boring when you are alone. And my budget (and expense accounts) don't usually run to the kind of restaurants where the food can be the total focus of attention. Subway and Applebee's both have take-out options so I can eat in my hotel room with the TV on. Wrap-and-smoothie places are good for that, too.
But one of my biggest problems with restaurants is finding things to eat. That sounds weird, but I have a strange mix of food sensitivities, even aside from the swallowing problems that make me a little paranoid about eating in public. (Big chunks of red meat, like steaks, are pretty hopeless unless I want to spend my meal time in the ladies' room trying to unlock my esophagus).
Dairy: I think I started going dairy-intolerant in high-school or before. I say dairy-intolerant rather than lactose-intolerant because dairy fat seems to be more of a problem for me than the dairy itself: non-fat or low-fat dairy hits me a lot less hard than full-fat stuff. Actually, I can't remember ever really liking whipped cream on things just for the sake of having whipped cream. But it wasn't until college, when I controlled my own food and drink choices, that I stopped drinking milk with my meals.I don't drink milk by itself, and I need to watch my total dairy intake or pay the price, but except for selecting desserts -- and avoiding really rich cream sauces -- the dairy thing isn't a big problem in restaurants.
My youngest brother wasn't so lucky. He had duodenal ulcers as a child and learned to live on huge amounts of dairy (which is what they prescribed in those days). Then in college he ended up in the emergency room because his ability to process lactose shut down. He thought the initial discomfort was the ulcer kicking up and increased his dairy intake, which turned out to be the wrong thing to do.
Penicillin: I have been told that I nearly died when I was a year old, probably because I was given penicillin for whatever it was that I actually had. You wouldn't think of a penicillin allergy as a dietary restraint, but one way I know that I really am allergic to penicillin is that I had my tongue start swelling up once when I ate a baked stuffed tomato that had blue cheese in the stuffing. The blue in blue cheese is a strain of penicillin mold. So -- no blue cheese for me. No brie or Camembert either: I haven't tried them, but the white molds are penicillin varieties, too, and it would be stupid to take the risk.So... limited dairy other than aged cheese and yogurt, and, for most purposes, no French cheeses. French cuisine is pretty much out for me.
Peanuts: I never liked peanut-butter, or peanut-butter flavored anything when I was a child. My Mom made me jelly sandwiches when she made PB&Js for the other kids. I don't think we actually realized I might be allergic. I could and did eat small amounts of fresh roasted peanuts with apparent problems.I suspect I'm actually sensitive to a break-down product, which why the fresh peanuts used to be less of a problem. I've avoided even the fresh peanuts for the past 10 years or so: I started getting the tongue-swelling thing from some of them. I eat cashews and pistachios instead (very reasonably priced at Costco).
The peanut problem is one reason I avoid fried fast food: I once got the tongue-swelling thing from some fried food at a mall food-court, and I suspect it was due to breakdown products in the peanut oil they were using for frying. Either that or they were being all trendy and using cold-pressed oil or something.
So: paranoid about restaurant fried foods and I've never acquired a taste for Vietnamese cuisine (the rule of thumb for Vietnamese dishes seems to be: when in doubt, add peanuts). I'm carefull about Chinese food too: I've never challenged the allergy enough for the small amounts of peanut oil used in stir-frying to be really dangerous, but I don't order anything where the menu mentions peanuts.
Raw Lettuce: This is a weird one. So weird that it was only a few years ago that I really understood it was a problem. For years, salads gave me heartburn, but I always blamed it on something in the dressings, even though changing dressings didn't seem to make much difference. Given a choice of soup or salad with a meal, I just always chose the soup -- unless it was something I really couldn't stand. And I always had an odd habit of eating sandwich makings (not including lettuce) loose instead of making them into a sandwich.Then, on a business trip, I got hot sandwich with some lettuce in it at a Subway and then got stuck on a phone call in my hotel room so the sandwich got cold before I could eat it. I nuked the sandwich in the room's microwave, cooking the lettuce. That was the first sandwich I'd had in years that didn't give me heartburn.
Since then, I have been avoiding lettuce. I've been doing it much more carefully as my swallowing problems progressed: the irritation of lettuce in my esophageal lining seems to make swallowing problems more likely later in the meal.
I haven't quite figured out whether it is a sensitivity to raw lettuce, or to raw greens in general. Lettuce is about the only green where raw is usually the only option. I don't eat raw greens. And even cooked, I prefer chard to spinach, but I think that is a different problem (see below).
It's a little ironic that lettuce is one of our major products at the farmers' market.m People ask me how the lettuce is, and I can't answer.
Eating at Mexican restaurants (especially cheaper meals) without eating lettuce can be ... odd. But both Mexican and Greek places will leave out the lettuce they use as filler if you ask.
Supertaster: I'm not completely certain that I am a supertaster. But my list of food aversons is a suspiciously good match for parts of the supertaster list. Coffee, grapefruit juice, cabbage and its relatives, spinach... Green tea, olives, soy products and chili peppers are all acquired tastes, as are broccoli and cauliflower.Bitter anything mostly sends me in the opposite direction. And I have to admit, even after all of my years in Colorado and selling chillies at the farmer's market, I still lean to the gringo end of the Mexican food spectrum.
I also seem to be one of the people who genetically find cilantro to taste like soap
In any case, when I eat out, even aside from finding food in sane quantities, it can be a challenge to find food that tastes good and is safe for me to eat. On the other hand, aside from the fact that I tend to live on bread, fruit and cheese, my preferred diet is fairly healthy.
Actually, based on my experience with the lettuce, I should probably get tested for food sensitivities. There may be something else unexpected that is setting off some of the swallowing problems. I have some suspicions about wheat bran... or maybe it's a breakdown product in the whole wheat flour. I should try keeping it in the fridge as is often recommended.
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