Confessions of a teenage food square: ‘I thought anyone who used Parmesan had an olfactory – or possibly psychological – disorder’

In the mid-1980s my “five a day” were: Cornflakes, potatoes, rhubarb tart, a Granny Smith, half a pot of marmalade. And that was an adventurous day.

Few vegetables other than the spud passed through my digestive system between the early 1970s and the early 1990s. I never touched tea or coffee until well into my 20s, and drank no milk for 25 years. For at least a decade I was a no-fish zone.

My childhood soup had to be strained to decontaminate it of any solid material that looked like it might once have grown in soil. A French family I lived with for a student exchange at the age of 16 were told I had an allergy to tomatoes (a lie).

Pizza I saw as a piece of perfectly good bread desecrated, first by the application of hated tomato sauce, then by the piling on of highly suspect vegetables and spicy meats that tasted nothing like proper sausages.

Even a relatively plain food like pasta never got a look-in, on account of the peculiar sauces that invariably accompanied it.

Not that I didn’t eat a lot. By my late teens I had worn a path to the bread cupboard. I had kept a few potato farms in Dublin and Meath in business through lean years. And I had been indirectly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of pigs, cows and chickens.

But outside of bread, butter, jam, eggs, cheese, meat, potatoes, a few regular desserts, crisps and sweets, and about three standard fruits (all of which were consumed in vast quantities), I would eat almost nothing.

It sounds strange now to recount the conservatism of this diet, but I don’t think it was unusual among boys of my age at that time. Ok, I might have been a little bit worse than average at trying new foods in friends’ houses. Any Asian dish would turn my stomach. If a foodstuff even came near mayonnaise or ketchup I would consider it inedible. And I thought anyone who used Parmesan cheese had an olfactory - or possibly psychological - disorder.

Did it last? Only for a couple of decades. The first stirrings of change occurred in the late teen years.

An impoverished student summer abroad in 1990 forced me to engage with various forms of pizza. First I would only eat a type topped with potato, then gradually began nibbling the tomatoey ones, like a would-be murderer trying to build up resistance to a deadly poison.

Little by little things changed. I got the munchies a couple of times when there was no “normal” food around. A couple of late-night kebabs taught me that a combination of mysterious multicolored sauces could taste absolutely first-rate.

And Dublin changed too; in the 1990s new restaurants and gastropubs began to pop up almost as fast as ugly apartment blocks and BMW showrooms. Before you could say "Charlie McCreevy" I was guzzling ever-more-exotic fare in buzzing bistros.

I also met the then future Mrs Goodman, who to this day takes all the credit for transforming me, Eliza Doolittle-style, from knuckle-dragging northside-dwelling food square to omnivorous, southside-dwelling gastronome. But I think it was more to do with the kebabs.

Today I’ll eat almost anything. Fix me a kale smoothie. Rack up those oysters. Pass that smelly cheese. Mind if I try your beetroot chutney?

But though I walk the earth behaving like a cosmopolitan modern man, I’m not much better than a science-fictional android who has learned human ways. Many of the sophisticated foods do little for me.

I’ll gobble up sushi but derive no pleasure from it. While making approving sounds about the starters in a restaurant, I’m actually thinking they don’t come close to rasher sambo level. And if I feel good after a salad it’s not because I enjoyed the food; it’s because I feel virtuous, like I’ve assisted a blind person across the road.

Food for me remains, fundamentally, a fuel that we need to continue living. Unless it’s something truly gourmet, like some toast spread with marmalade, or a full Irish breakfast. Just hold the ketchup please.