Pushed away: Vegetables; Vegetable Juice

It requires everything to arrive palatable and will refuse necessities outright when they are not, which reads as fussiness and works as insulation. Beneath the insistence on pleasantness sits a harsh verdict against itself, formed in a perfectionistic house with an unavailable mother and a standing report of falling short, and anything plain or bitter risks letting that verdict speak. What it asks for is one unsweetened thing, taken, with attention paid to the fact that the verdict does not actually arrive.

If it isn't pleasant, I won't take it, even when it's the thing I need.

It echoes Zhu Bajie, the pig-monk of the pilgrimage who takes the comfortable road and the good meal and avoids the hard one, and who was thrown out of heaven in disgrace long before any of it. The form implies a task: to swallow one mouthful of the hard road on purpose.