In my circle of friends, Anne is the Adventurous Eater. She's always the first to discover the newest ethnic restaurant, or the weirdest concept restaurant. Scheduling lunch with Anne generally goes something like this:

ME: I can do 12:15 next Tuesday.

ANNE: Great! Have you been to that new Laotian-Lapland fusion place downtown?

ME: Um, no, not yet.

ANNE: We gotta go! They have the best Huff-Doo-Po-Krak anywhere! And it's so cute!

Anne is from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, a town not exactly famed for its gastronomic delights, so we often wonder how she's come to be such an intrepid diner. Another friend, Marsha, is more conservative about what she slides onto a plate. She tends to greet Anne's restaurant choices with something approaching horror. Just this week, I called her to tell her where we'd be meeting for Anne's birthday lunch. Marsha's reaction? "Oh God, not that skanky place! Only Anne! Maybe they're not open for lunch? Want me to call and check?" she added hopefully.

I like some pretty strange foods myself, but I lack Anne's pioneering menu spirit. Show her the freakiest thing on the page and she's game to try it. Barbecued eel? Loves it. Unpronounceable Vietnamese conglomerations? Absolutely. Raw sea urchin? Oh yeah baby, you only live once so bring it on. Her enthusiasm is infectious, so in her company one finds oneself pounding the bar and hollering for another order of mackerel cheeks. A few years ago, my brother Mark came for a visit and we all went out for sushi. The next morning, hung over, he stumbled into the kitchen and said, "Last night, Anne talked me into eating these weird little fetal octopus. I feel kinda rough." We weren't surprised - on either count.

Finicky, boring eaters are probably much more common than epicurean warriors like Anne. Is there anything more tiresome than the guy who only eats red meat with A-1 sauce, salad with ranch dressing and canned corn? How about the woman who thinks that the very building blocks of life are contained within a grilled chicken salad? Were these the people who, as kids, lived on Mrs. Paul's fish sticks, white bread, Kool Aid and Cap'n Crunch? I read once that it takes, on average, seven exposures to a new food before a child will accept and like the taste. I told my stepson this a few years ago, as we were putting grilled salmon in front of him for the third time. He figured that he only had to endure it four more times, then he'd be free for life, right? Theoretically, yes. Except, it's now one of his favorite foods. Along with asparagus, broccoli, and green olives -- all rejected on the first, second, and third try. I'll go all the way to seven tries if I have to. I learned that from my mother.

My mother was Fran. Her philosophy was The Fran Plan. It was based on the notion that Fran didn't have the time, patience, or frankly, the interest in lengthy investigations into what foods her children preferred. We were expected to eat whatever she cooked, because hello? does this look like a restaurant? Demanding a meal other than what she'd put in front of us was not an option - unless we were prepared to die waiting for it. Tell my mom you didn't like meatloaf and she'd respond, "Hmm. You've been on earth, what? Six years? You haven't even had teeth the whole time. You have no idea what you don't like. Sit still and eat." Fran once kept me at the dinner table for three hours. It was me against a slab of ham. I informed her that the ham slice looked like the dog's tongue. She informed me that I could sit there all night, or I could stop being so dramatic and just eat it. She won eventually, but not till I'd qualified for the Oscar for Best Performance by A Child Being Unspeakably Abused by A Mother Who Obviously Does Not Care. My mother would no more fix a special meal for a finicky kid than she'd fly. And if you believed my dad, she was more apt to fly anyway, given the right broomstick.

Fran even broke my cousin Renee out of her painfully constricted culinary rut. Renee was a terror, a spoiled only child of divorced parents whose every whim and mood had been indulged since birth. Her mother let her keep a bottle till she was five because, as she put it, Renee "just wasn't ready" to give it up. Renee ate about four foods, none in any great quantity, and was as skinny and translucent as a plastic anatomy model. Her mother shipped her out to our house in Wyoming one summer to toughen her up and give her a taste of family life. Fran was warned about Renee's eating habits, warnings she dismissed out of hand. "She'll eat what I tell her to eat" was Fran's grim response. Sure enough, that prophecy came true in about three weeks . Renee began eating everything in sight, devouring her meals and often, whatever was left on our plates. It was an amazing transformation - made more amazing by the fact that it lasted after she returned home to New Jersey. To this day, Renee is a great cook and a lusty eater. She was saved by The Fran Plan.

I shouldn't make it sound like it was easy for my mom. It took us a while to accept her absolute and terrifying authority on this subject. We tested her. We whined and complained as kids will. We sniffed and poked at anything new as though she were trying to poison us - which we fully believed her capable of, by the way. Fran was one of those mothers who never had to raise her voice to correct us. She'd just give us a long, speculative look, a look that clearly implied that she was bigger and could maybe kill us and get away with it. Certainly our father wouldn't complain if we turned up missing. We were nothing but an expense and a nuisance to him. We figured she loved us, but we knew that Fran couldn't be bribed or negotiated with. Because of her we learned good table manners, we learned to enjoy a variety of foods, and we learned, when we were guests in someone else's home, to politely hold our breath and swallow something icky without complaining.

Only once did I get revenge on Fran for her mealtime tyranny. I was about ten years old, and the family was enjoying a very rare dinner out in a restaurant. We'd gone to a new gourmet pizza place in Jackson Hole, and my parents ordered a Mexican pizza. It arrived with black beans, guacamole, and sour cream. I took one look and announced, "I don't like that. I want plain." Naturally, Fran rolled her eyes and gave me the usual how-do-you-know-you-don't-like-it-you've-never-tried-it speech. They shoveled it onto my plate and handed me a fork. As a veteran of The Fran Plan, I knew resistance was futile. I braced myself, loaded up a slimy forkful, and closed my eyes. It was every bit as nasty as I'd feared Another forkful, then another, and then, it happened. It felt just like the description in my fourth grade science book of a volcano erupting. There was even an audible rumble way down deep inside of me. I opened my mouth to say, "Mom, I don't feel good." What came out instead was the Mexican Pizza: all over me, the table, and the floor. My father's eyes bugged and he yelled, "Jesus Franny!" (This, because anything having to do with the kids was both my mother's fault and her responsibility and very likely, had been planned in advance by her to ruin his one evening out.) The interesting thing about that Mexican Pizza was that it looked pretty much the same coming out as it did going it. What a gruesome and repulsive spectacle it must have been for the other diners in that restaurant! What a nightmare for our waitress! I can't give you any more first-hand details though, because after vomiting on my family, I collapsed into a wailing heap of tears and had to be carried to the ladies room for clean-up and comforting.

My friend Anne, the gloriously open-minded food adventurer, has never thrown up in a restaurant. The only food she's ever tried and disliked was a plate of fermented soybeans mixed with raw tuna. It smelled and tasted just like garbage, and even Anne was defeated by it. However, since there is a kind of sick justice at work in the world, she's managed to give birth to a daughter who doesn't eat anything. The child, now nine, survives, as best we can tell, on whatever microscopic food particles she inhales while breathing. Medical science should kidnap this kid and study her. Anne has accepted her daughter's unearthly digestive system with her usual good spirits, and has simply turned the full force of her thwarted culinary and maternal instincts on her friends. "Try it!" she urges. "It's yummy!" Ask her what the lumpy brown balls she's put on your plate are, or what's in the soup, and she'll merrily respond, "No idea! Probably something good!" She's usually right - must be The Anne Plan.