picky eaters

We have a lot of picky eaters in my family. I swear it must be genetic.
In mine and Turbo's case it's exacerbated by the fact that we both have a type of hypoglycemia that allows us to go a long time with out eating and not suffer any loss in energy....until it's too late and our system crashes. Turbo was in the hospital at least a dozen times early in his life. He wouldn't eat enough and eventually his little system couldn't keep going and he'd spike a really high fever and we would be back in the emergency room.
It was so bad that I got almost daily calls from my family simply to find out what Turbo had eaten for the day.
My dad loves to tell the story of when Turbo was around 4 and they took him to a nice restaurant. The kids meal was prix fix so it included everything from the drink to the dessert.
He proceeded to just shove the food around for the entire meal, including a dish of ice cream.
My dad tried to get him to eat a piece of pie and Turbo politely declined. My dad says "are you sure, it's pretty good?"
Turbo gestures to the ice cream he's not eating and says, " I'm ok Pa-Pa I've got my ice cream."
It flabbergasted my dad that Turbo was declining a bite of pie based off of the fact that he already had a dessert...that he wasn't touching.

Things started to change for the better when Turbo was about 5 or 6 and I discovered I could get Turbo to eat nearly anything as long as I ordered the hottest thing on the menu Suddenly i could take him anywhere in town and I knew I could get him to eat. I'd order Jamaican jerk chicken or General Tso's and he would be fine.
He would frequently complain about the salsa not being hot enough which usually got a funny response from the waitstaff. I loved going to the local Indian restaurant and ordering whatever I wanted : chicken tandoori, stewed eggplant with chilies and the staff would gawk as Turbo ate whatever I put in front of him. He actually developed a standard line that he would say whenever somebody acted concerned if the food was too hot for him. He'd say " Pretty good...could be hotter but it's got nice flavor."
Then things got even easier once Turbo discovered the magical sauce that changed his life.
Buffalo Wing Sauce.
He was around 7 when his appetite went into overdrive. He ate constantly and it was all covered with Wing Sauce.
He could tell you the top five places to get wings in town and rank them in order for you. He traveled with a bottle of sauce in his backpack in case he wound up having a meal someplace that didn't have the sauce. He put it on his school lunch.

I never had a magical sauce like that when I was a kid...in high school I did go through a pretty serious fling with barbecue sauce. But there were many unpleasant times that I was at a babysitter and I had to skip lunch and wait until my mom picked me up because all they had was peanut butter and jelly or the tuna fish had celery in it.
The ultimate example of this was a time when a lady tried to serve me some PB&J on wheat. I asked as nicely as I could if possibly there might be something else and she said.
"like it or lump it."
My response was to say "well then I lump it!" and smash my fist into the sandwich and storm out of the room.