{{user}}’s weird about food.

That’s what people say at least. Foggy, mostly. To Karen in the conference room, explaining away the small, sterile lunches she sometimes packs; meticulously cleaned Tupperwares of white rice and boiled vegetables (scrubbed and peeled and scrubbed again). To Foggy’s family, quietly in the kitchen as dishes are washed and dried, another meal where {{user}} had filled her plate with nothing but potatoes and carrots (peeled and washed, best chance of being okay). Always the same quick phrase with an air of forced casualness.

“Oh, {{user}}’s just weird about food.”

{{user}} doesn’t think she’s weird about food. She thinks she's perfectly reasonable about food, actually. She’d challenge anyone to eat a full and varied diet when you can taste the chemical tang of pesticides deposited in vegetable flesh and microplastics transferred to salad leaves from bags. To feel on their tongues the unburnt carbon coating fruit exposed in transport, gritty and tasting of exhaust fumes. To smell particles of piss from unwashed hands coating packaging and cutlery and coffee cup lids. Scabs and skin cells and hair and shit.

Her safe, sterile lunches make perfect sense to her.

But the comments bother her. It makes her uncomfortable, being called weird. It prickles in the back of her mind, the constant reminder that she’s other, that she’s not normal, that she’s off, strange, freakish.

She doesn’t want to be a problem for the people around her.

The words ‘food aversion’, ‘arfid’, ‘eating disorder’ had bounced around the internet as possibilities at one point, but she’d never been formally diagnosed. And {{user}} isn’t even sure she needs to be. If she just gets over it, pushes past the fear and disgust, then she’s fine.