Adventures in Etiquette

I work with two very lovely people.  We share an office and a love of eating.  Recently, one of my coworkers made pasta salad for our little office.  I was super excited because I love mozzarella cheese.  But I was also nervous because her pasta salad had olives and grape tomatoes as well.

Raw grape tomatoes.  I've come around to cooked tomatoes, but raw is an entirely different story.

So colorful!  But I only eat half of the foods pictured.

I figured I could get away with not eating the olives.  Olives are a controversial food.  It's pretty acceptable to dislike them.  However, most people like tomatoes.

So I ate maybe a third of the tomatoes.  And I hated them.  But the big old hunks of mozzarella made up for the grossness of the tomatoes.  And the fact that I even ate that many tomatoes is a testament to my need to be polite.  I didn't want my coworker to see me eating her pasta salad and think that I didn't like it.

I'll give raw tomatoes another chance sometime in the future.  I'll try them in a salad filled with other things.  Maybe I'll try them again this summer.

I think I'm going to need at least a year to work up to olives.