Chinese Chicken Salad, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Overcome the Beige Diet

Emma Gase  

It was the night of my 18th birthday. My palms prickled with moisture as I saw the waiter slowly moving to our table, palms up in the perfect waiter-ly 90-degree angle. I nervously thrummed my fingers on the leather booth, trying to ignore my growing apprehension. The waiter set down my plate in front of me. It wasn’t on a silver platter, but it may as well have been. There it was, in all of its pyramid-shaped, peanut-sprinkled, fried-won-ton topped magnificence: my very first salad.

I know what you’re thinking. Do Chinese chicken salads even count as salads? Just kidding, because of course they do. They have lettuce. The more shocking thing you were probably wondering was why in the heck it took me eighteen long years to order a salad. Am I some sort of freak? The answer is…yep, actually. I’ll elaborate.

I grew up on what my mother has dubbed “The Beige Diet.” To be fair, I would say the colors also ranged from yellow to white to plain brown, but you get the gist. Mine was a diet of chicken fingers, of French fries, of grilled cheese and goldfish crackers, of waffles, peanut butter, and cheeseburgers. Cheese, bread, bread and cheese, and most of all, meat of indiscernible origin fried into cute, bite-size shapes. And let’s not forget potatoes of all varieties—except for sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes contain detectable traces of something resembling actual nutrition, and were therefore blacklisted from my diet.

Though I’m sure I technically fell into the broad category of the plain-buttered-noodle eating crowd labeled as “picky eaters,” I really don’t think “picky” is an accurate enough word to describe my former eating habits. My tastes were a different animal. For the sake of clarity, let’s call my former self an “uninformed, unimaginative, stubborn, and slightly deranged eater.”

Looking back, my tastes came from some dark place that defied logic, and, well…taste. I inexplicably found all fruit unappetizing and mildly grotesque. I scorned the very idea of vegetables, and would only choke down some broccoli at dinner in order to get dessert. I was so offended by the color green in my food, I can’t even count the laborious and painstaking minutes I dedicated to picking out the dried green parsley bits in Top Ramen.

Like the majority of stubborn and close-minded people, my unfortunate habits stemmed from one dangerously common root: fear. I was afraid to take a risk and try something new, certain in my misguided, youthful convictions that something earth-shatteringly terrible would happen should I try a salad (or any non-beige food) and like it. While I can no longer recall exactly what I expected would transpire should I ingest radically exotic cuisine stuffs such as bananas or mushrooms, I can tell you I was not interested in finding out. Just a cheeseburger for me, well done, no lettuce, tomatoes or mayo—and lots and lots o’ ketchup, thankyouverymuch.

For years, I endured pestering parents, relatives and friends prodding me to try this, try that, you might like it, you’ll never know if you don’t try it, you might like it, tomatoes are basically ketchup, just try it! Just try it. Try, try, try. This was the mantra that haunted me for years. It was easy enough to ignore in elementary and middle school, when a hot dog or grilled cheese was never too far out of reach. But in high school, things started changing. It began to bother me that I only ordered cheeseburgers at restaurants, that I endured a constant reaming from my friends and family, that I hated going to nice restaurants because there was food plain enough for me to order. I began to feel jealous of my friends who tried new things, who ordered meals that couldn’t be classified as Kid’s Menu fare, or just another form of chicken fingers.

My discontent grew. And grew and grew. Until one night, my friends took me out for a meal on my birthday and everything I knew changed. I remember looking at the menu, and feeling seized with a strange, immutable urge—an urge to pass over the burger section, and order a foreign item. So I did.

Though I may have been the only person to experience a cathartic moment in that particular Claim Jumper in Wheeling, Illinois that particular night, I am not exaggerating when I say my life changed after that. I’m not just a different kind of eater than I was when I was 18; I’m a different kind of person. In the last three years, I have expanded my culinary tastes in a more accelerated and concentrated amount than anyone else I know. This is the story of my sojourn from a Beige Diet to a Try Everything diet—and it was all thanks to a Chinese chicken salad.