Norm Stories: The One Food That Norm Would Not Eat

Norm loved food.

Norm was not a dog who you would call a "picky" eater. He always found something to eat on the streets on our morning and evening walks. (Hipsters love "street food," which I guess makes Norm an original hipster.) Especially during the darker months of the year, when the morning and the evening walks could be in the dark, Norm would be sniffing in the bushes and, all of the sudden, I hear him crunching on something. Chicken bones, especially chicken wing bones, were always welcome (although less prevalent after the KFC on Windmill closed). He found hundreds of chicken wing bones on the sidewalks and road gutters over the years. It's like there were people driving along, eating chicken as they drove, tossing the bones out the windows as they toddled down the road.

Norm would find week-old burritos in the gutter on the roadside. Or week-old French fries. Even greasy Taco Bell wrappers could be within his grasp. He once swallowed a large chunk of deli ham that was in a plastic bag on one walk, swallowing it quickly so I couldn't pull it out of his mouth. (He threw up the plastic bag a couple of days later with the ham still inside. To Norm's credit, he didn't try to eat that ham a second time.)

Up until his last week or so, Norm had only once previously not finished his breakfast before supper time. And there were probably only a few times before that that breakfast was not gobbled immediately. Supper was always devoured immediately.

Norm absolutely loved all food. Except one thing. There was one food item I gave Norm to eat that he absolutely refused to eat it. Brie cheese.

And Norm loved cheese. He even loved moldy cheese. When I had cheese in refrigerator and got that white dusty mold on it, I would cut that section off and feed it to Norm. Yum. Yum. So brie, being a moldy cheese, should have right in his culinary wheelhouse. If you thought that, you would've been wrong.

I once bought a small segment of Brie that was on sale cheap at the grocery store. Norm, as he would do, begged for some of it. So I cut off a bit and gave it to him to eat. I paid no attention, but a minute or so later, I saw the piece of Brie on the family room floor, a few feet from Norm. So I picked it up and gave it to him.

It would not be accurate to say he spit it out. That's not quite what happened. He had his snout up a bit. It looked like the brie, once it was touching his "lips" -- the outer skin around his mouth -- I know dogs do not "technically" have lips -- but once the brie was touching Norm's lip-equivalents, it's as if the brie cheese itself jumped off Norm's lips, leaping several feet away. All with no apparent effort from Norm to propel the unwanted cheese away from his mouth.

So, yes, there was one food that Norm would not eat.