I Have Issues

I know I'm not the only person with this problem but I have serious food touching issues. It started as a young adult and has progressively gotten worse over the past few years. I just can't stand to have my food touching each other. My reasoning is simple and logical: I want to taste whatever I'm putting in my mouth and nothing else. If I'm digging into a serving of mashed potatoes I want to taste mashed potatoes, not corn or the juice running off of my green beans. It just creeps me out. And as my obsession got worse I developed a system for what's allowed to touch and what isn't.

For example, if you cook peas in a pot and carrots in a pot, they can't touch on the plate. But if you cook them in the same pot then obviously they can touch on the plate because they were cooked together, as one dish. But the foods that are cooked/served together have to "naturally" go together in order for the food-touching to be okay. You like putting pears or apples in with your salad? No thank you! I'd rather have a salad and then eat a pear. It's just not natural to me to have the two in my mouth at the same time. Things like peanut butter and jelly are okay because to me, it's "natural" for them to go together. But my husband, who likes mac and cheese with hot dogs mixed in, is a freak of nature (look at the pot calling the kettle black!). And let's not talk about those KFC bowls or those bags of Dorito's with two flavors of chips in the same bag. Barf.

One of the exceptions is foreign food. In Peru I didn't really have any issues with food touching because 1) if I didn't eat it I went hungry and 2) I didn't really know whether it was supposed to touch or not, because I didn't know what it was. One dish, lomo saltado, did bother me a bit but turned out to be one of my favorite foods. It's like beef stir fry with french fries. Weird, but pretty good. So I hope that Ireland will be the same and I'll stop being a picky eater for those two weeks.

But not today. You see, today I went to Subway for dinner because Brandon had to work late. And the March $5 footlong special was Meatball Pepperoni. Now I like pepperoni, and I almost always get a meatball sub when I go to Subway but I just didn't feel comfortable with those two foods touching. So I asked the Subway guy to please put my pepperoni on the side. He went one step further and put it in a little bag for me, all without batting an eyelash. Now I'm eating my sub and later I'll have my pepperoni slices.

My obsession knows no bounds.