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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2640 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 27, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'm in Germany with the family. Visiting family and doing touristy stuff. This is the first time we've traveled with all the children. It's challenging when one of the four only eats french fries. Many museums and other attractions have family pricing that admits two adults and 4 children, though typically not places the children would choose to go.

It's also strange being back somewhere you've not really been in ~20 years. There's been plenty of culture war topic noticing. Some of this is seeing all the change at once that was paced over years for everyone else.

There are still many things Germany does better. The ubiquitous availability of beer, still being one. Food quality and price being another.

I really, really enjoyed German traffic culture and the laws that follow from it. I didn't even realize that Traffic Culture was a thing until I went there. The idea that you can lose your license for being a bad driver, not necessarily a dangerous one but one that thoughtlessly ruins the flow of traffic for dozens of other people, was incredibly impressive to me. The focus on maintaining vehicle-lengths between cars to prevent "accordion-ing" of traffic is incredible. Returning to the US felt like a third world country (in traffic) by comparison.

The ubiquitous availability of beer

Say more? Only been to Germany once for short weekend in Berlin years ago. Have seen comfortable attitudes to alcohol in Europe (wine with meals France and Italy, small beer at 9am on a sunny day in France, gorgeous and strange beers in Belgium). Wondering what the situation is in Germany. I love beer but I hate drunks, and attitudes with and towards drink is off the charts in places like UK where the objective seems way more about getting pissed than actually enjoying oneself maturely.

Lego Land, Play Mobil Fun Park, the local trampoline park all serving beer in the food court / canteen. Most museum cafes too. Unlike the USA when you do find beer at these sorts of places it will be something mass market and expensive for a .33 l can, here it tends to be something local and cheap in a .5 l bottle.

The UK is just a very poor and depressing place outside of London and its extended suburbs (the South East) and a few other pockets (and the wealthy countryside, but very few people live there anymore). Drink is one of the only things they have. In Germany wealth is more distributed and outside the former DDR there are many good jobs supporting functioning and prosperous communities.

When I visited the UK I stayed in a little hamlet in Gloucestershire, about halfway between Bristol and Gloucester. I visited Bristol, Bath, Gloucester, Cardiff, and Salisbury. None of these places (with the exception of a particular section of Bristol) struck me as “depressingly poor”, although that might just be because I wasn’t living there everyday, or because things that seemed “quaint” to me were actually just signs of poverty. I’m sure things in the Midlands and up North are probably worse, but at least in the parts of the UK I saw, not much depressed me except for the demographics in Cardiff and the piss-poor adaptation of The Magic Flute I saw in Bristol. Maybe I just haven’t seen the high life in London so I don’t know what to compare things to.

Bath is probably not a great example as it is high-net worth. Cardiff, you need to look around a bit. It at one point was considered the drug capital of Wales, so you don't really have to look far.

It's challenging when one of the four only eats french fries.

I'm always curious how kids wind up being this sort of extreme picky eaters. At what age and how did the tendency start? Is it just that you don't normally see it as enough of a problem to force it out of it, or would the kid literally starve itself to death if you refused to make french fries available?

Father of a 15-year-old daughter. Our staple diet, and staple diet of everyone we know, is potatoes. At least 5 days a week, at least once a day – potatoes. Daughter spat them out the first time she tried them at six months old and has never got a single one down in all the years since. She can’t seem to eat cooked potatoes in any form. She’s picky, and has always been, and it just seems to be something in her DNA. Who knows.

Since beginning food. He'd refuse to eat and demand milk. He's 9 now.

He's unpleasant (more than usual) when he's not eaten, though so are many people. Longest he's gone recently is 36 hours or so, when he finally ate some toast. He's specific about the french fries too, no ketchup, only salt.

He's also complained and avoided the Fanta here in Germany saying it tastes different. Sprite has been less ubiquitous and he's not liked the alternative lemon / citrus soft drinks. Doesn't like the UHT milk.

Our other kids have not had any trouble finding things they like on menus or trying new things.

Sample of four kids, they tend to eat everything when they are under 2.5, then start to balk at things that they liked previously.

I have one kid who will skip every meal except breakfast if we don't offer at least a serving of bread/crackers/tortilla that has not been contaminated with anything.

For every other kid, I have one rule that works. Everything the grownups are eating goes on their plate. They have to smell the food at the least. It they want seconds on a food they like, they have to take one bite of the food they are avoiding.

For the kid this doesn't work with, she has a higher than average aversion to lots of things. Every floating object is a bee, every thing that touches her unexpectedly is slimey and disgusting, finger paints are a reason to screech.

I’ve heard from multiple people and personally seen one example where the following is true:

It’s basically just overly low risk tolerance around food safety, built in on an evolutionary level. The solution is having the whole family eat the same thing repeatedly (for like a week straight) and nothing else. That food will then be added to their ‘safe food’ registry and they’ll be fine with it forever. Rinse and repeat with each food.

It's probably a little difficult to eat e.g. spinach only for a week.

True. It was always unclear to me whether this worked for the whole food or included each component. I assumed the former (in the sense that after applied to spinach casserole, they will be fine with spinach casserole, but not with spinach by itself.) It’s not really applicable to when a kid just doesn’t like a particular food (in the case of spinach they might just have have really high taste sensitivity to bitterness) but specifically for the “will literally just eat one food and nothing else, potentially up to starvation if they don’t get french fries” type of kid

Also I understand not wanting to do this. Most people don’t like eating the same things repeatedly. I am not one of those people (my desire to eat a food grows ~linearly with the number of times in a row I’ve consumed it) but I wouldn’t blame anyone for not applying this info.

would the kid literally starve itself to death

For my one cousin, yes. Or at least to the point of fainting. IIRC, it started when she started eating food, and lasted pretty much to adulthood. I'm not sure if she even qualifies as "picky" anymore, given her improvement over the deacdes.

I have a "just so" evo explanation for that. It's that age at which kids are no longer constantly supervised or in safe areas but are still dumb as fuck. If they were eager and willing to try new things, they would've eaten some mushroom or berry and died.

Better than where?

USA

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