Eat Up. You値l Be Happier.
MY father-in-law, an anthropologist, likes to talk about the time he ate dog penis. He was visiting a remote town in South Korea, and the mayor invited him to lunch. Once they’d finished the dog soup (not a big deal), a waitress carried out the boiled penis on a silver plate. The mayor cut it lengthwise with scissors, then served half to each of them.
“It tasted exactly like tripe — intestine,” my father-in-law recalls. “You’re always supposed to say, ‘like chicken,’ but it didn’t taste at all like chicken.”
Anthropologists are at the extreme end of what used to be a universal rule of hospitality: When a host offers you food, you eat it. It’s a show of trust, and a sign of belonging. Refuse his meal and you’re effectively rejecting him.
But as anyone who has recently tried to host a birthday party or a dinner in the English-speaking world knows, this rule no longer matters. Forget about dog penis; try offering visitors lasagna (it’s not vegan, not gluten-free, and it couldn’t have been cooked by a caveman).
Our increasingly choosy food habits are the subject of a French collection of academic essays, “Selective Eating: The Rise, Meaning and Sense of Personal Dietary Requirements,” which will be published in English next week. The editor, Claude Fischler, a social anthropologist, chose the topic after discovering that even anthropologists aren’t exempt: An Australian colleague said she had asked her Aboriginal subjects to accommodate her gluten-free diet, followed by choice, not by medical necessity.
Having lived in America and France, I’ve been on both sides of the picky-eating divide. I know it’s tiresome to hear about the paradoxically fabulous French eating habits. But it’s no accident that Unesco made the French gastronomic meal part of the “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.” It’s worth looking at how they cope with picky eaters. . .
It turns out that the best part of going with the food flow isn’t the health benefits or the cuisine, it’s the conversation. You can finally talk about something else.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/23/opinion/eat-up-youll-be-happier.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region
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i love pate, but other offal kinda freaks me out but i would at least try it if offered by my host. i remember an old episode of no reservations (somewhere in the bush) and his dinner was basically boar rectum cooked in the ashes of the fire and he ate it like a champ. i don't know that i could go that far. cat would be problematic for me, too.
i try to eat a variety of foods, but sometimes have a hard time with that moderation thing 
