Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Oh - and my friend has a great one. She went to a restaurant and because she's one of those people who doesn't like meat that tastes anything like anything, she always has to ask if it's chicken breast (yay, tasteless!) or like, thigh meat (boo, flavor and a reminder that this was once an animal!). So she says to the waitress, "Is this chicken in this white or dark meat?" And the waitress stares at her a second and says, "white." This cannot be good, I thought.

The food comes, and it's straight-up thigh meat. So she calls the waitress over and says, "Sorry to be a bother, but can I change my order? You said this was white meat, and it's not."

"It's white meat."

"Um... not to be difficult, but it's not."

"Yeah it is. It's CHICKEN. CHICKEN is white."

"Um..."

"Chicken's white, beef is red, and pork is brown."

Oh dear.

My sister-in-law turned down a nice juicy (deseeded!) slice of watermelon on a hot hot day. She claimed it would make her have to pee, and she had a five hour drive ahead of her. I looked at her, confused, as I watched her gulp down a super huge iced coffee. She replied--Surely you must know that there's a lot of WATER in watermelon. That is why they call it that--WATERMELON--it makes you pee...a lot! Can't have that! Over the years that one has been a source of never ending amusement...

I can't count the number of times I have heard people order Chicken Tikka Marsala.

My grandfather firmly believed you could not eat dairy in the same meal with steamed crabs. Ice cream was forbidden for dessert.

My husband's family has the same belief about drinking milk with spaghetti.

@bareneed - probably not the story I should have read considering that I still have half a jar of Marmite in the fridge...it may stay there for quite a while now:-)

@coolname - my MIL says that she is allergic to MSG on every possible occasion. However, she buys and uses things like onion soup mix, boil-in-bag rice with a seasoning packet (which she uses) and Knorr beef bouillon cubes on a regular basis, without any problem. We're not talking about naturally occurring glutamates here, this stuff is laden with MSG, but oddly enough, it doesn't seem to affect her one bit. I find this kind of selective allergy rather mysterious, but what do I know.

I have a friend who says that she "doesn't like sauce." ANY SAUCE at all. She also says she "doesn't like -------" about absolutely any food she hasn't tried before. (So basically, her food repertoire is limited to foods she tried as a child.) It's INFURIATING.

(Also, coolname - the natural glutamates in those foods aren't equivalent to the huge quantities of artificial MSG that is added to foods. It's completely realistic that someone could be sensitive to MSG while also being able to eat naturally savoury foods.)

I'm sittin in a diner eating breakfast with a friend of mine.....after I salted my breakfast,he said that all that salt was gonna kill me.....all the while he was sittin there smokin a cigarette....DUH !!

I'm an assistant meat manager at a large grocery store and it always makes me laugh when a customer asks me for "lean bacon".

my boyfriend will not eat cold food.

WITH MY HANDS! and I eat the crust too!

@asnet:

I'm stumped. Where can I find high-quality, crisp (non-foldable?), properly topped New York pizza? It's a myth, as far as I know, and I've searched high and low.

A foldable pizza is not a pizza, just as soft ice cream is not ice cream.
A pizza should be crisp enough to resist folding. A slice may be bent slightly at the larger end (by hand) to get at the eating end more easily.
A knife and fork is a last resort to handle pizza that is too hot, over-topped or runny. I am surprised that no one has mentioned that high-quality, crisp, properly topped New York pizza must be eaten with cold Coca-Cola, out of the can, with a straw. Finally, all pizza requires a wad of napkins opposite the eating hand to soak up the inevitable drops of oil that may drip from even the best pizza. So be it. I have spoken.

While vacationing in Spain, as I am wont to do, I happened to mention to my senora that the ideal pizza is covered in a lake of still-liquid cheese. To twirl this cheese up with a fork and shove it into my eagerly waiting mouth - this is ecstasy. This is luxury.

My dad used to eat his pizza with a fork and knife. But more to my point, my dad also used to wear cowboy boots with shorts. Now if that doesn't have you running from the fork and knife, I don't know what will.
Pizza needs to be loved and handled, not dissected, but each to their "cowboy boots and shorts wearing" own.
By the by, my wife calls the crust (her favorite part) the Pizza Bone.

Before visiting Italy, I would have laughed at this question? But, at a sidewalk café on Capri, right off Napoli, the birthplace of pizza, they actually served my quattro stagioni (four seasons) pizza on a china plate, complete with silverware!

(However, when we got pizza at a food court in a mall in Genoa, they served it on a paper plate without silverware, the way Americans do.)

But still, as a native of New Jersey and also a former resident of Manhattan, eating pizza with a knife and fork goes against my nature. The traditional way to eat a slice of New York pizza, especially from one of those windows that opens onto the sidewalk, where you eat your pizza standing up, is to 1) Grasp the slice near the outer crust, with ring finger and thumb under the crust, and index finger and middle finger on top of the crust, all fingers pointing toward the point. 2.) Exert downward pressure with the index and middle finger, and upward pressure with the thumb and ring finger, forcing the slice to fold in half, lengthwise, from point to rim. 3) Eat from the point towards the wide end. Notice that all this can be done with only one hand, leaving the other hand free to hold your drink, napkin, etc. This is an art equivalent to folding one's newspaper into narrow columns for reading on the subway! New Yorkers are masters of doing everything quickly, efficiently, and under trying circumstances. :)