A healthy reminder that there is a significant difference between picky eaters and people who have aversions to certain foods due to medical issues - and the people with medical issues shouldn't be lumped together with picky eaters.
Your friend who always refuses to go anywhere new, won't try anything new, always insists that everyone in the group only go to one food spot or else they'll throw a tantrum or a pity party, which makes everyone in the group upset but still follow through to avoid the tantrum, and their excuse for avoiding certain foods is "I don't like them" but they've never tasted them or anything similar, and refuse to even try - yes, that's annoying as shit, you have the right to be annoyed by that. That is being a picky eater and acting like a little kid.
Your friend who has a very strict diet due to gastrointestinal issues, where if they stray away from their safe foods, will cause extreme stomach pain, horrible nausea, painful constipation/diarrhea, vomiting, exacerbated symptoms, etc - asking you to settle for a resturant where the one thing they CAN actually eat without physical turmoil is avaliable - that's not being a picky eater.
"I don't want to eat this because I don't want to try a new food, because I just have a feeling that I PROBABLY won't LIKE it." - picky eater.
"I can't eat this because it will cause me severe physical pain later or even minutes after consuming it." - NOT a picky eater.
On top of that, the individual with medical issues will always take priority over the picky eater in the group. Picky eater wants to go to a burger food truck and refuses to go anywhere else, where grease and red meat will make my stomach feel like it's exploding and leave me vomiting for days?? Enjoy starving for a night, picky eater. I'm not putting myself through extreme physical turmoil because you want to act like a fucking three year old.
Edit: Of course, since posting this, the "what about autism" crowd has jumped on the bandwagon. Autism, just like ARFID, is disabling. It is a condition. If eating certain foods causes you physical symptoms, it's medical, and as I clearly stated above, medical issues take priority over picky eaters. Why are YOU correlating picky eaters to autistic folk and people with ARFID when they AREN'T picky eaters but instead abiding by their condition?
This is genuinely pretty funny to me because I've made a post before about how people will hear an annoying or infuriating behavioral pattern and the internet will immediately bring up autism as if those things have a correlation. If your first instinct, when presented with a description about a negative behavior in an individual, is to pull the autism card, you're fucking weird. -Sincerely, an autistic individual.
