Food’s been on the brain lately — and it’s not just the holidays.

To hear the parental units tell it, I became quite picky by the age of six or so. All beans, red gravy and most vegetables became banned from my mouth. As the story goes, I said it didn’t like the texture. For the next decade and a half, I ate my macaroni with only butter and cheese and my veggie intake was limited to what I now know is a basic house salad.

It’s true what they say about our tastes changing, literally, as we get older. Our taste buds multiply as we age. With it comes a love for something beyond junk food and candy. That love doesn’t always translate to the ability to copy the basics of making one’s own dinner, as studies have shown and, as the title of this column indicates, just looking around.

Today’s teens and 20-somethings know how to load the latest modification to iOS 8 for their iPhone, but can’t seem to boil water or make tea. The fact one task is technical in nature and the other mechanical might shed light on why fast-food joints market heavily to young adults. My talents in the kitchen started slowly, with a basic scrambled egg omelet. I’ve graduated to pan-frying shrimp and the relentless pursuit of the perfect medium-rare steak — sometimes I hit the mark with it, sometimes I get distracted just enough to overcook it.

In a nutshell, my evolving talents in the kitchen followed the same timeline as my having to pay my own way in life (e.g. rent, budgeting, car payments, etc.). It’s interesting how economics causes certain other attributes to develop, n’est-ce pas?

Empirical data on the topic isn’t as plentiful as I thought, but it’s out there. One study, released in 2012 by the British-based supermarket chain Sainsbury’s, found just 30 percent of 934 university students knew how to boil an egg. An even smaller pool of blokes, 18 percent, knew how to make toast. It extended to basic home economics stuff too — just 23 percent claimed to know how to make a bed. Still, more than half said they knew how to set up a laptop with broadband. The message? We can inform ourselves but we can’t feed ourselves or keep house.

Parents out there with children whose palates haven’t evolved past “happy meals” must sweat it out, pure and simple. Take it from this formerly picky eater. It’ll come with time and other life lessons. And feed them advice in the kitchen, too. They might not become Guy Fieri or Bobby Flay, but they’ll thank you all the same.

Even now, any plate of red beans and rice that crosses my table better have a lot of sausage in it to mask the taste of beans. A recent accomplishment of mine is this hummus stuff. A paste made of a type of pea? Never would have predicted that for myself.

Keep it simple, though. Olive oil yes, olive juice no.

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Danny Barrett Jr. is a reporter and can be reached by email at danny.barrett@vicksburgpost.com or by phone at 601-636-4545.