With extra time on my hands, I finally got around to setting things straight before I could embarrass myself any further. You will find the spiritually rewarding results below. Enjoy.

But that was then. Sometime around my fifth birthday my entire digestive system rebelled, and I found myself suddenly unable to ingest cheese, tomatoes, or fish. This complete change in my diet stunned my family and confused the neighbors. From that point on I didn't eat a single thing containing these three evil ingredients, nor any food that they inadvertantly touched. In extreme cases, I didn't eat foods that had even the potential of containing these horrid components.

As you can imagine, this pleased my mother to no end. Now she had to either change the entire family's dinner to cater to my picky eating habits, or create a special separate entre exclusively for me, free of the items on my culinary blacklist. It was no picnic for me, either. I had to withstand the horrible insults from my peers when I refused to eat the pizza served at every damn birthday party I attended.

During high school, it seemed impossible for any gathering of thirty of more kids to occur without dozens of pizza pies magically appearing on the scene. At every after-school function, jazz band post-show get-together, and long tech-week theatre rehearsal the pizza would come, the masses would dig in, and I'd be standing there feeling like a dork.

At once such feeding my conscience cried out, "You're starving, you idiot! Aren't you tired of being an outcast? Just eat a slice! It won't kill you!" Before I had a chance to disagree with myself I lunged for a piece and wedged it into my mouth. My tongue woke up screaming, and quickly notified my stomach about the awful contents in my mouth. My stomach then ordered my esophagus to stop allowing any food to get past my throat.

Great. I continued to chew on this mushy ball of cheeze, tomatoes, and oily dough. As it got more and more digested I wedged chunks of it into corners of my mouth between my cheek and gum. All the while I tried to act like a seasoned pizza-eater, proudly holding the remainder of my slice up in the air and attempting to maintain a conversion with friends about life. Eventually I fled the room and spat all my mouth's contents into a napkin. Yuck.

Upon entering college I discovered a wealth of other foods I hadn't been exposed to during my youth, and I feared them all. Mushrooms, for instance. While growing up my family avoided these like the plague. I've since come to respect the mass appeal of edible fungus, but personally I still find them difficult to consume. In the best case scenario I find them to taste like stale peanut shells. Hearing endless streams of urban myths about liver transpants due to accidental ingestion of "bad" mushrooms doesn't help the cause, either.

Then there's eggplant. I've never been good with squashy things, because they're usually slimy, somewhat tasteless, and make my stomach feel funny. Eggplant ranks high on all three accounts. To me, dining on eggplant is not unlike dining on adipocere, except eggplant has a more sickening texture, and is not as flavorful. On the other hand, if you grind it up with other crap and put it in a curry sauce, I probably wouldn't notice. But that always begs the question: why bother?

Anyway, I somehow survived four long years of useless undergraduate education with nary a bite of pizza entering my digestive tract. I'm serious. This may seem impossible to many of you ex-college kids who thrived on the stuff. What is it about pizza that makes it so popular amongst young academic types? I guess there's a hip aesthetic appeal to sitting around a dorm room, watching prime time dramas, and munching blankly on Domino's. To be fair, I do know the answer: Pizza is widely acclaimed because it is inexpensive, filling, and incredibly easy to have delivered to your door. It's the perfect instant-gratification comestible for young American types.

Despite all my bitching and moaning, I really wanted to learn to like pizza, honest. I liked the crusts, and gladly noshed on those which my friends and siblings would toss back into the box after having eaten the contaminated parts. I also loved the smell of olive oil, which almost masks the scent of cheeze that's been baked nearly beyond recognition. But all attempts to actually eat pizza led to me coughing out half-chewed wads of it, throwing the rest of the slice away, and then searching frantically for something to help wash the horrible taste out of my mouth.

When I was 22 years old, starving, unemployed, and living in Berkeley, I got a one-day temp job up at Tower Records on Telegraph Avenue. I accepted this job without realizing my housemate borrowed my car, so I had to bike a couple miles uphill in the rain to get there. I hadn't eaten breakfast, and due to both my low blood sugar level and the sudden influx of exercise I nearly passed out during the trek. Upon arrival, I actually saw spots before my eyes.

I managed to make it through to lunch, during which the Tower management treated the entire crew to - you guessed it - four pizza pies. At this point my ravenous hunger caused me to be considerably less than human, and my base instincts led me to lunge for a pepperoni/sausage slice which I gulped down in an instant.

Regaining my senses, I thought, "that wasn't so bad.." Proud of my new-found ability to actually ingest the stuff, I had another slice, washed it down with some Pepsi, and felt like a normal person for once in my life.

To this day I still have extreme difficulties with both tomatoes and cheese, but with given hunger, peer pressure, and alcohol, it's not impossible for me to stomach some pizza, as long as there's at least pepperoni or some other topping that helps cover up its usual sharp taste. My current pizza-eating rate is about 2 slices a year. I still can't and won't stand for cheeseburgers, tomatoes in any form outside of tomato sauce, or any kind of cream cheese shmear, though.

But let's not forget fish. That's a whole other story, and I'll get right to the bottom line: If it came from the ocean, I don't eat it. Case goddamn closed. The smell of fish makes me so nauseous that sometimes the odor makes me violently gag or nearly go into shock. This includes lobster, shrimp, and seaweed. They come from the ocean, don't they?

People always seemed stunned that I don't like lobster, despite the fact I clearly state I don't like fish. I smell a lobster, and it smells like fish. I look at a lobster, and it looks like a giant spider from outer space. I would never eat a spider, so why would I eat a giant spider from outer space, and especially one that smells like fish? Then they seemed even more confused I don't like shrimp, even though it also smells like fish, and looks like a giant tick from outer space.

Then there are the sushi aficianados who figure I would at least like vegetarian sushi, but even that has seaweed wrapping. To me, seaweed smells and tastes like the Jersey shore. I just can't deal with it. I imagine if you like fish, sushi would be a dream come true. I don't, so it isn't.

If you made it this far, you may be asking yourself, "what is wrong with this guy?" Well, I wish I knew the answer. It's probably a combination of various problems, all of which I'll tell you right now.

I have the friend from high school who has even worse eating habits than myself, and dislikes all the same foods I do. She told me this may be due to being a "supertaster," or extremely sensitive to certain tastes. Sharp foods in general bug me. Outside of the aforementioned set of hated items, I don't seem to enjoy pineapple or anything with vinegar in it as much as other people do. On the other hand, I love spicy foods. It just doesn't seem to add up.

I think the real reason is I come from an extended family of intensely picky eaters. My father never eats cheese, except once in a blue moon when the family gets a pizza delivered. My brother, Ben, and I both loathed pizza during our teen years, but during one drunken night at college Ben, having not eaten anything solid for a day or two, indulged in a slice and never turned back. He likes tomatoes, but doesn't really like much else. I love broccoli, but Ben only likes the broccoli stems, and my sister, Ruth, only likes the florets. Nobody in my family likes mushrooms at all. I'm the only person that enjoys eating tofu and drinks rice milk. I think you're beginning to see the kind of environment I grew up in.

But before you brush off my condition as nurture over nature, I have since discovered many members of my extended family also have similar tendecies to completely avoid cheese and tomatoes. Could it be genetic? We may never know the real answer, but I console myself in the notion that maybe my problems aren't completely caused by my being touched in the head.

In conclusion, let me state that I do NOT feel like I'm missing out on something in life just because I don't eat pizza, sushi, or whatever. Sure, it would be nice to have a bigger set of possible foods to choose from come dinnertime, but you know what? I have more options than your average vegan, so there.