other people's food quirks

I am home sick for the first part of the day so I figure I can fill in some of my waking time with a blog. I will be returning to bed to hibernate until I have to work at 6 o'clock. Hopefully the extra rest will have whatever it is that I have to pass over relatively quickly.

To go along with my previous post about my food quirks, I've decided to blog about the food quirks I've noticed in some of my beloved friends and families. Instead of naming names, I will just number the quirks and you can guess who the quirk belongs to.

1) Tomatoes in various forms
I have a friend who does not eat raw tomatoes, but eats bruschetta, salsa, tomato sauce, and ketchup. I understand that raw tomatoes are very different from tomato sauce and ketchup, but the tomatoes in bruschetta are raw too.

2) Stop touching!!
Another friend habitually separates her food so the items on her plate are not touching. I believe this is due to her having a mild case of OCD. Ideally, she would like her food served on separate plates thus ensuring that nothing would touch. She pushes the meat, the starch, and the veg away from each other so there's a small defined space between all the items on her plate.

3) Why aren't you touching?!?!
The same friend also wants ALL of her food touching, if it's meant to be touching i.e. pad thai. If a dish should be mixed thoroughly and it's not, she will take a minute to stir all of her food together.

4) Smaller pieces, please!
Another friend has the compulsion to cut up her food into little pieces all at once, much like a parent would do for a small child at the beginning of a meal. She does thing when dining in the company of people who know her well and have come to expect this. She has told me that she does not do this when she is out eating with people she doesn't know very well and when she's out at a fancier restaurant.

5) Guinness and girly drinks
I have a male friend that used to drink pints upon pints of Guinness. To give you an idea of this man's physical size, he could probably kill me with two or three good swings. I actually started drinking Guinness because this friend insisted that it was so delicious and I eventually forced myself to like it. While he would be drinking a pint of Guinness, I would sometimes order a girly cocktail. He would then take a sip of it and steal it from me claiming it as his own. He would never order himself a girly drink, but would happily rip them out of my girly hands.

6) Starch, veg, then meat
I have a friend that would eat all of the starch, then all of the veg, and then start working on the meat. I always found it odd because he is the only person I know that eats that way. Most people I know, regardless of their other food quirks, would eat things somewhat evenly. I don't know if he still eats his meals like this, but I always thought it was weird.

These are all of the quirks I can think of right now. Time to head back to bed.