Vegetable incompatibility

So here's a weird one to consider. How important to you is it that the person you spend the rest of your life with shares the same tastes in foods as you do? Food allergies don't count. We're just throwing those right out. I'm talking about the president who won't eat broccoli or green beans. Would you marry someone who loved steak if you were a vegan? Probably not, but how far do you take it?

A few years ago I was visiting my sister while she was pregnant with my nephew and we decided to get pizza for lunch. She got really excited at the prospect of getting mushrooms on the pizza, a staple of pizza toppings in our home growing up. We ordered from a funky Austin pizza place and I was thrilled to be able to get artichoke hearts, spinach and roma tomatoes on the pizza, but my sister was just excited about the mushrooms. Why? Because my brother-in-law doesn't like mushrooms. Did you know this when you married him, I asked, believing that this would obviously have to be some horrible personality flaw that must have been kept hidden until it was too late to annul. But she did. In my confusing world of singleness, I couldn't quite understand how one could so calmly put aside their preference for pizza toppings and pasta sauces. I mean, seriously, isn't that one of the very early dating screeners ~ pizza preferences? You can put up with a lot for an otherwise perfect man, but someone who never lets you get your favorite pizza is really pushing it. I always thought it was rather serendipitous that my college boyfriend and I both really loved Hawaiian pizza. But then again, what do I know. Turns out, I'm allergic to pineapple.

And so I've been going along thinking my sister is the only one playing vegetable martyr (and she does play martyr well, I should add) when I'm having dinner over at a college friend's house and she announces that the reason she's cooked Mediterranean vegetable rissotto for me is because her husband hates peas. (He happens to be in Bucharest.) Now I could live a very happy life without peas. I like them, but my existence is in no way marred when they're missing from my routine. My friend, however, is apparently quite fond of them. Seeing a pattern?

This all gets me thinking, what would I give up? Hawaiian pizza is an easy one. No effort at all, in fact. But zucchini and spinach ~ not gonna give those up! Yes, I'm one of those freaks who puts zucchini in pasta sauce and lasagne and I've even been known to throw it in chili. There was even a burrito place where I went to grad school that had grilled zucchini burritos! Those babies rocked! And in Washington, there were spinach burritos, equally rocking! (Well, there was a spell following a lithium induced regurgitation of a spinach burrito that turned me off them for several years, but that's just not something worth dwelling on.) Prior to that and then many years later, when I returned to Burrito Brothers, the spinach burritos rocked!

So, I suppose, while I'm in the process of not looking (note the continuity of this blog) I will make a point of not looking for someone who is vegetably compatible.

And they say I'm too picky!!! Seriously...