We don't yuck other people's yums

and how puppy heads fit into all of this

At some point in my late teens or early twenties, I was with my aunt and younger cousins. I don’t remember where we were, what we were doing, or what we were eating, but one of my cousins noticed someone eating something she didn’t like, and made it very clear that she was grossed out. “We don’t yuck other people’s yums,” my aunt reminded her. I had never heard this phrase before, and it stuck with me.

Obviously, everyone has their own food preferences; it’s what makes us individuals. Some of these preferences are culturally bred into us. There are many religious food restrictions, like keeping kosher or halal, practicing vegetarianism as a Jain, or Mormons abstaining from caffeine (to name a few). There are also things that some cultures eat that others don’t consider to be a food item: insects, offal, super processed foods, etc. And then of course, there is a rejection of foods that seem “yucky” based on all of our culturally ingrained food inclinations and personal preferences. Some people don’t like mushrooms, some people don’t like oysters, some people are just picky eaters in general. Additionally, a lot of people just haven’t been exposed to foods that are unfamiliar to them. There is no universal rule of what makes a food “yucky” or what makes a food “yummy.” As another common phrase puts it, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” We don’t get to decide what other people value, or like to eat, and it’s not our place to enforce our personal preferences on other people.

For me, I love the concept of not yucking others’ yums as a whole, and have truly tried to to always practice it. My motto is, if someone considers it food, try it. This has led me to taste some amazing things around the world that I might not have tried if I was more close minded — tripe sandwiches in Florence, reindeer sushi in Finland, raw eggs in Japan, duck blood soup in Malaysia, roasted fish eyes in Sri Lanka, among many more delicious bites. But on a less adventurous level, this has become a much bigger part of my life now that I have a toddler. I joked when I was pregnant that my worst nightmare would be to have a picky eater, and I got unbelievably lucky that so far, my daughter is an excellent eater for a one year old. She is definitely still a toddler though: though last week she loved strawberries, this week she won’t touch them. She loved her mushroom risotto until I added chicken to it, then rubbed the rest in her hair. She loves potatoes, meatballs and spinach, until I combined them all into a fritter, and then she refused to eat it. It’s a lesson in extreme patience for a mom who is a chef and an adventurous eater, but she also loved eating salmon roe sushi so I’m currently coming out way ahead here.

One of my favorite food stories was told by Anthony Bourdain. I saw him speak at UCLA in November 2010. My mom wanted to take me, and my grandmother, who is a pescatarian, was in town for Thanksgiving and asked to join us. She is the nicest, most polite woman (and an excellent baker, by the way), and I knew that Anthony Bourdain was not going to be her cup of tea, but she insisted on coming. Bourdain spoke about having food restrictions while traveling for his show No Reservations and how he could never be a vegetarian because he’d insult too many people (I’ll paraphrase from here). Sometimes, he goes to a farm where the family has prepared their one chicken for the month to share with him, and what’s he going to do? Say, “oh I’m sorry, I’m a vegetarian, I don’t eat that”? That would be so offensive. Of course, he shared, he did have some lines he really didn’t like to cross, like eating pets. But if he showed up to a family’s home, and they had prepared a plate of boiled puppy heads, what was he going to do? “Bring on the fucking puppy heads,” he said, to laughter in the audience and a reddening of my grandmother’s cheeks.

It’s a great lesson, Bourdain-ified with a little shock, a good amount of cursing, and a lot of truth. The phrase “bring on the fucking puppy heads” has definitely been used a lot in my family in the ensuing years since. Most notably, in 2018, my mom, grandma and I went to Israel and Jordan, and ended up on a tour of Wadi Rum with an amazing Bedouin tour guide, who told us that he was taking us to his “restaurant” for lunch. This turned out to be a canyon in the middle of the desert with a small ashy spot that he had clearly used repeatedly for cooking. He’d brought a whole feast of freshly made food: hummus, tabbouleh, babaganoush, and had marinated one of his chickens that he had slaughtered and prepared that morning. My poor grandmother was clearly not thrilled by the prospect of this chicken, so we reminded her of the story that Bourdain had shared with us years before. To her credit, when this gorgeous succulent chicken was served to us, she put on a very brave face, said “bring on the fucking puppy heads” and ate half of a drumstick.

cooking with Mohammed in Wadi Rum, Jordan

The goal of all of this is not to love every possible food out there. I definitely don’t. But “picky eating”, or more basically, refusing to try foods because they are unfamiliar or seem “yucky”, is something we should all work on. Beyond that, it’s just not nice to make someone feel bad about things they like, even if we do it in the privacy of our own heads. And even if we can’t bring ourselves to try the fucking puppy heads, what we can definitely all do is acknowledge that while puppy heads might not be something we’d try, someone else might like them, and it’s not okay to yuck other people’s yums.

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This month’s recipe is for head-on grilled shrimp, which at first glance, may not seem to be a great fit for this post’s theme of not yucking yums. But I’ve chosen this recipe because it’s for one of my all time favorite foods: shrimp heads. I love them so much that I will split an order of head-on shrimp with my husband and let him eat the actual shrimp meat while I eat only the heads. If abaemi (sweet shrimp) is on the menu at a Japanese restaurant, I will always order it, and I will be snobby and disappointed if they don’t serve it with the deep fried head. I even have a shrimp tattoo partially because I love shrimp heads so much. For grilled shrimp, the best way to eat the heads is to remove them from the body, then pull the legs out from the main head shell. The inside of the head should come away with the legs…you can eat that whole part!