TAKE IT LIKE A PRAWNSTAR
WORDS BY THOMAS LINKINS
Thomas Linkins knows what it’s like to be a picky eater. But what happens when you embrace the scary and vomit-inducing foods you once swore off? Thomas details his culinary journey from side eyeing sausages and seafood to becoming the ‘I’ll-eat-anything friend’.
It’s 2003 and I’m six years old, throwing myself to the floor in a rage against brown foods. I don’t know it yet, but this is a watershed moment in my sensory career.
I won’t eat it. You can’t make me put that brown stuff in my mouth. It’s dog food, it’s prison chowder, how could you do this to your only second-born child?
The brown food in question: sausages and gravy. My mortal enemy. No, I hadn’t tried it yet. Why should I? The way it sneers up from its plate at me, dismembered and pre-cut by my parents, bathing in a muddy puddle of nondescript, glutinous brown. It’s dying for me to make a Housewives worthy scene, to push my chair back and lunge across the table at its throat, You beast!
One bite, Tucker, and it’ll all be over.
Un-bloody-likely.
Prompted by some cynical six-year-old urge to watch my parents’ faces as I die right before their eyes from asphyxiating on this brown poison, I decide to raise the white flag, and with it, a forkful of slop.
My tiny mind. Is. Blown. Straight off its hinges.
For the first time in my six years, I understand the true meaning of mouthwatering. God bless sad British pubs and their sad, carby side dishes! I have tunnel vision for sausages and gravy, and I mop up every last morsel of brown between the residual sobs of my tantrum, ignoring my parents’ gratuitous told you so smiles.
Eating things that I hate quickly became a strange delight. While I could go on romanticising my relationship with sausages and gravy for another 850 words, I’m in my twenties now, and I’ve come a long way since the Sausage Incident of ‘03. From broiled deer and cabbage, to red onion and contraction-triggering spicy foods, I have moulded myself into the easy-breezy, dietary-requirement-less, I’ll-eat-anything friend. I am a versatile superstar. Coriander? Love her. Bleeding steak? She’s my best friend. Spicy? My stomach might hear about it tomorrow, but I can cop it. Seafood? Let me get back to you on that one.
It’s something I’ve wanted to conquer for the longest time. Seafood. There’s a certain glamour about it, like tennis and Nancy Meyers movies. Plus, I grew up on H2O: Just Add Water, and knowing how disappointed Cleo’s dad would be in me truly spurs me forward.
Like anyone with ambition and an unfounded sense of egomania, I went straight for the head of the beast. The briniest, slimiest, seafoodiest seafood known to land-creatures: the oyster. You’re thinking I bit off more than I could chew (or slurp), right? That I spat those salty suckers out faster than you can say ‘the world’s my oyster, I’m her pearl’. That I asked for a refund because those oysters Kilpatrick were worse than brown food before I gave brown food a chance. But if you were sat there in that Bahamas-inspired restaurant, bearing witness to my first time, you would have seen a boy hoover a half-dozen oysters Kilpatrick, followed by a full dozen, followed by a full dozen of OG, non-Kilpatrick, fresh from the ocean, come-as-you are oysters. Is this kid trying to see a shellfish about a libido problem? you would have said to the waiter.
I’m not trying to paint an oil picture of success; it hasn’t been easy. Learning to love things you hate never is—ask the people who raised me. Take it one gob-full at a time.
‘The secret to being an easy eater, I’ve learned, is in biting down and shutting up about whether or not you like it. Enjoy it, even if you don’t.’
My latest challenge presented itself last December, at a friend’s beach house (it was more of a charming shack) in northern Queensland. I’d been mentally preparing myself for the final feast of the trip for the whole six days. I cook it for everyone when they come up, he said, Woke up at three to catch it for yas. Whiting beer‐battered in his own special home- brew. Whiting was what my mother had always used to trick me into getting my dose of omega-3, It's chicken, you love chicken! They say it’s the gateway fish into liking seafood, and though I frothed an oyster, eating a whole fish—and putting on a show of loving it—was a very different beast to the twelve luxurious seconds of slurping back my beloved aphrodisiac. But who was I to challenge the long standing traditions of my dear host? All I could do was make a palate cleansing salad to shovel between mouthfuls of fish battered in basement-brewed beer.
My fork hovered before my mouth, the stench of dead fish filled my nostrils, and I thought of an old friend’s sentiments on turning it on for the men she was paid to sleep with: You find the one thing about them you can stand. Their eyes, their sense of humour, their fragrance. Zero in on it. Construct the whole experience around that one sensory pleasure.
The secret to being an easy eater, I’ve learned, is in biting down and shutting up about whether or not you like it. Enjoy it, even if you don’t. Work with the parts of it that you do like. Focus on them, let that pleasure expand and enfold the sensations around it. Yes, you are eating a dead, slimy sea creature, but how good does it taste when it’s been crumbed, deep-fried and dipped in spice? Hold that feeling. Marr it with the underlying taste of cooked fish meat.
