How to Stop Being Picky

One woman's journey to becoming more open to a certain kind of experience: food

First, a bit of an update: My book is now available for pre-order! Grab a copy of Me, But Better at That Big Website or wherever you prefer to buy books. It’s out March 2025!

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Photo by Jakub Dziubak on Unsplash

To me, one of the most mysterious personality traits is openness to experience, which vaguely means creativity, a YOLO spirit, imaginativeness, and adventurousness. It entails yes-anding your way through life, preferably while covered in patchouli.

This might sound great to have—who doesn’t want to be up for anything?—but unfortunately, it’s also one of the traits that’s hardest to change. As Ted Schwaba, a psychologist at Michigan State University, put it to me, “So much of openness development is people becoming more who they are. People who aren’t open, they don’t want to be more open, and people who are really open want to increase more on that trait.” Any parent who has ever offered their toddler a slightly different dino-shaped chicken nugget knows this well.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I did find someone who managed to become more open in one big way: She went from eating barely anything to eating almost everything. And, perhaps more surprisingly, she did it when she was well out of the nuggets-and-fries phase. That is, she did it as an adult.

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I met Stephanie Lucianovic on a spring day at a tapas place in a Palo Alto shopping center. I had purposefully picked a restaurant with an exotic menu, and where we would each have to order several different dishes. My dreams came true when the first course arrived, and we attacked a big glob of ’nduja, a spreadable pork sausage made from the meat of a pig’s head. “It’s really good,” Stephanie said, smearing some on her bread. “I haven’t had it in a long time.” Next came raw salmon, octopus, and Brussels sprouts in some sort of foam.

I picked this place because earlier in life, Stephanie wouldn’t have eaten any of this. Until well into her 20s, she hated cooked vegetables, all fish, lots of meats, most casseroles, and certain sauces and mushy grains. But then she radically changed, opening herself up to the experience of food.

Growing up in Minnesota, Stephanie found cooked spinach “horrific,” and green beans too “beany.” Her parents had a “three bites” rule, and she devised elaborate ways of skirting it, like raising an empty fork to her mouth and pretending to chew. In her 2012 book, Suffering Succotash, Stephanie describes a long evening at a childhood friend’s house during which the friend’s mom forced her to eat an acorn squash. “I wasn’t being stubborn,” Stephanie writes. She thought she would literally throw it up.

Picky eating exemplifies how low openness can keep you safe, but also circumscribed. About two percent of adults eat such a limited diet that it affects their health, says Nancy Zucker, a Duke psychiatrist who researches extreme picky eating, which in clinical terms is called “Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder.” Vegetables tend to be the most objectionable, along with meats and “combination foods,” like soups or pasta dishes.

Though I’m an omnivore, I sympathized with Young Stephanie’s plight. I eat meat, but chunks of steak can feel too primal to me. The mouth is the final border between the body and the infinite, unknown world. Eating something unusual can feel less like an experience and more like an invasion.

As she got older, Stephanie worried about eating at friends’ houses, and about going to restaurants and not knowing whether there would be something she “could eat.” Then, as a young adult, she met the man who would become her husband. He was a true gourmand, who loved all food and ate boldly. He didn’t shame Stephanie about her diet, but she wanted to be adventurous like him. “I literally did it all for love,” she told me. “I didn't want him thinking less of me or judging me. I was like, ‘Okay, maybe I really should try new things.’”

One reason why so many kids start out as picky eaters and grow out of it, Zucker says, is that as we age, we find reasons to do hard things. Picky eaters find lots of foods disgusting, but adults do lots of disgusting tasks—like cleaning up baby poop and walking barefoot through the TSA line—in order to be with loved ones, take care of our children, or otherwise accomplish something important. Openness to experience relies on these small, brave gambles—understanding that something might be initially unpleasant, but that you’re going to charge ahead. Sometimes, kids who overcome their picky eating start to see themselves as brave in other ways, too.

When Stephanie went out with her husband, she would try bites off his plate, which felt less threatening than ordering an entire serving for herself. She would try her feared foods prepared in newer, better ways. Her mother-in-law once served her homemade poached peaches, and she was surprised by their silky texture—unlike the canned peaches of her childhood, these had been fresh, and poached in wine. When Stephanie tried roasting Brussels sprouts, rather than steaming them, they tasted like a whole new vegetable. She would mix small quantities of things she didn’t like into pasta, microdosing on the unusual flavor.

Gradually, Stephanie began to see food as less of a threat. “I doggedly chipped away at certain foods—tried them in things, tried them on things—until I liked them,” she writes. After each food turned out to be unexpectedly tasty, she thought to herself, what else am I missing out on?

In her late 20s, Stephanie was laid off from her job in publishing. She then took an unusual step for a picky eater: She put her severance pay toward the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts. Learning about food had given her a sense of control—and a sense of the possibilities. She planned to become a food writer. “When I suddenly had this wide world of foods that I could start cooking or trying,” she told me, “it just was so exciting and relieving to not hate so much anymore, but to actually really like it.”

New experiences, including those with food, can prompt our brains to update their perceptions of what we previously loathed. Throwing up after a night of drinking tequila can make you swear off margaritas for years. But this can happen with positive experiences, too: A sushi night with a hot date might make you think raw fish isn’t so gross, after all. I was reminded of how, as a nine-year-old, I came to like tuna-fish-and-alfalfa-sprout sandwiches after eating them with a beloved family friend at the fanciest restaurant in my hometown, a sit-down mall deli called Bless Your Heart. There was something so soothing about the paper doilies on the table and the skylight overhead, which bathed everything in the white Texas sun. I felt special being taken out to lunch as a little kid at an adult place. It made tuna, which I disliked in any other format, feel like an intrinsic part of the experience.

Over time, Stephanie has opened up to other experiences, too. When she was young, she thought she didn’t want kids, but a few years into her marriage, she and her husband thought, maybe we can do this. Today, she has two sons. She became a food blogger, which led to writing children’s books and a non-fiction book about picky eating—two forms of writing she initially wasn’t sure she could do. She dove into other challenges, like working the back kitchen of a shoot for Jacques Pepin, the legendary French T.V. chef.

Paradoxically, Stephanie credits her openness to food to her earlier-in-life picky eating. She took the choosiness and judgment with which she had always regarded food and rotated it, until it became discernment and curiosity. “If I had not been a picky eater, I would not be the foodie that I am today,” she told me. “I didn't grow up in a house with an Italian grandmother who was teaching me her meatball recipes at her apron strings.” To her, nothing helps you understand how amazing food can be than knowing how awful it can taste.

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Read more about Stephanie’s journey from picky to gourmand in Suffering Succotash.