You thought you knew someone who was a picky eater? Well try sitting that person down next to 17-year-old Leah Frost and let’s stack them up in a food-avoidance contest. I am 99% sure that Leah will take the cake in this match-up (no pun intended).
Since she was a child, Leah Frost has eaten nothing but canned, thinned spaghetti. Due to her fear of most other foods, Leah has eaten thousands of cans of this mushy meal in her lifetime (and for your information, canned spaghetti is much, much mushier than anything you are imagining it to be). Leah’s mother, Yvonne, has tried sending Leah to doctors and therapists, but nothing has seemed to break her daughter of her intense food phobia.
Photo by Krysten Dorfman
Although these eating habits have been going on for many years, Leah has recently expanded her diet to include a FEW other foods. Such foods include chips, cheese, bread and sponge cake—quite the random assortment. Apparently Leah is not alone in her food phobia, though. There are other reports of people whose diets consist solely of foods like ramen, cheese pizza, chicken nuggets or Tic Tacs. And how someone lives off Tic Tacs, I will never know.
TLC even made a show back in 2010 called Freaky Eaters which followed people who clung to the same food every day.
Photo by Krysten Dorfman
In many cases, food phobias are linked to one of two things: food aversion and inability to swallow. The first takes place when certain smells or textures of foods lead to extreme nausea or even vomiting, and the second occurs when a person fears choking when eating certain solid foods.
Although there is no immediate cure for food phobias like Leah’s, let’s just hope that she can expand her horizon to a few more cuisines before having full exposure to college dining halls. Heck, even I have food phobias there.