How we consume food
Having dinner every night with the same person makes you notice things that you don’t normally do. Now, I don’t know if the following difference is a cultural difference or a more personal one, but I think it’s the reason why my JBQ rarely eats all his vegetables.
Let’s say that our main entree consists of a meat chunk and some vegetables (e.g. a pork chop and long green beans, or a beef steak and some peas). The way I eat is that I cut a small bit of the meat, I put it in my mouth and immediately I get a forking out of the vegetables and then mix it in my mouth, munching the two items together. I repeat until I finish my plate, and if some salad is around, I might eat some of it in the midst too. I always make sure that at towards the end of my plate, I have as many veggies left as I have meat, so I can eat them in the same number of “forkings”. AFAIK, all the Greeks I know eat the same way too. We mix several flavors in our mouth.
The way JBQ does it, is this: he cuts meat, he eats it and he repeats until about 1/3 of the meat is out. Then, he takes a forking of the vegetables and he eats that. Then, he continues with the rest of the meat until he has eaten about 2/3s of it at which point takes another stub at the vegetables. After he has eaten all the meat, there are plenty of vegetables left in the plate, at which point he usually eats them alone, and sometimes he just goes half way through to them and then he stops eating them and proceeds to the cheese (French people eat green salad and cheese after the main meal).
No, I don’t think that he is trying to avoid the vegetables. I think the key here is the fact that he never mixes flavors and this forces him to eat too many veggies at once at the end (that usually have minimum flavor) and so he bails out on them. He is used to not eat meat together with something else, I just don’t know if this is the way JBQ eats, or a French thing in general…