Is it really common not to have one's choices of not eating some kinds of food respected?

In My Humble Opinion
101

I don’t have any dietary restrictions, but about 10 years ago I recognized that I’d let myself become fat. As a tall guy (6’5") and someone who has been fairly fit most of my life, BMI calculators had never actually been something I was too concerned with. I had been 6’5" 225 for a long time, which according to a BMI calculator is barely into the “overweight” category. However muscle mass above average tends to throw off the calculator a bit.

So I’d never really concerned myself with my weight. However I had been in a minor injury that involved me stopping my normal workout regimen. Fast forward 1.5-2 years of eating junk food and not working out later and I was at 265 lbs and I looked and felt “obese” just like the BMI calculator said I was.

I’ve never been one for half measures. When I decided it was time to reverse that trend, I settled on an extremely strict regimen of planning out my meals so that I was hitting a specific number of calories consumed per day. I didn’t want to eat on the fly and count the calories later because I felt that lead to me making bad decisions during the day. A few days of going over my calorie intake limit and I was just inclined to forget the whole mess. Most other diet plans that didn’t involve calorie counting didn’t appeal to me because I felt like they were working on faulty premises. I can intellectually understand the law of thermodynamics. I understood everyone burned a different amount of calories per day, but as long as I ate the same amount each day and weighed myself every day, I could calculate an average weight loss/gain and thus I’d be able to (after a month or so) calculate exactly how much my body burned, on average, in a day. From there I could plan out exactly how much weight I would lose per week or month and plot out my entire weight loss.

This was a very involved process, it’s not fun or easy to plan a week’s worth of eating in advance. There is a lot of weighing things on highly sensitive food scales. A lot of what I ate were pre-packaged foods because the absolute calorie values on them made the whole process much easier.

Anyway, I never realized before then how social eating has become. Anytime I would turn down lunch or dinner invitations, people would act offended. At first I would just say “I’ve made other plans” and other noncommittal things. Eventually I just started flat out saying, “I’m on a weight loss diet, I don’t eat anything at restaurants because there’s no way for me to know how many calories are in the food there.” My thought was that when confronted with such an open statement, most people would lay off. That isn’t the case, people become obsessive when you won’t go out to a Mongolian buffet with them for lunch or won’t go out with a group of people for dinner. Even worse is drinking buddies who don’t understand why you can’t at least come down to the bar to “hang out” even if you aren’t drinking. (The answer is that it’s hard to hang out with a bunch of people who are drinking if you aren’t drinking, it makes you want to drink and relax. Once you’ve started to drink and relax it quickly becomes easy to drink a whole day’s worth of calories in a few hours on a Friday or Saturday night.)

Finally I had lost the weight, started exercising again, and I’ve never had that problem come up again. As part of my “life long” maintenance I weigh myself and chart it every day, if I ever see my average weight creeping up, I’ll usually just watch what I eat for a few weeks to fix things. I always remember that it took me about two years to get fat, and because of that it took me a long time to get rid of the fat, so as long as I never let myself even start to get fat again I’ll never be faced with a huge mountain of weight loss to climb.

My experience with what felt like constant pressure to eat (and often to eat unhealthy, high calorie foods) really made me sympathetic for the people that are significantly overweight and can’t lose weight. If you’re an alcoholic you can, with discipline, just get rid of all your friends that don’t respect your problem and insist that you drink with them. But when you’re fat, it’s very hard to do the same. People expect you to eat with them on occasion, people expect you to accept things like birthday cake at work or baked goods. No one really understands that no, it really isn’t okay for you to splurge today. For someone battling with their weight a single splurge can turn into a binge. Sometimes just by ignoring your diet for a day or two, you lose all that momentum and willpower that was keeping you going.

I almost think that if I were to do it again, I would just lie to my friends and tell them I’d developed some rare food allergies and could only eat very specific food and could no longer eat in restaurants. I don’t necessarily think that would stop the pushiness, but I think it would give me a better “response” and I wouldn’t have to explain in detail to people why I didn’t want to “cheat” for the day.

102

I think it’s one of those comedy-British “oh no, after you” sort of things. You’re offering to leave out an ingredient your guest may not like in an effort to be pleasant, cordial, and accommodating, and your guest is insisting you leave it in for the exact same reason. I mean, if I were at someone’s house and they were kindly fixing me dinner, and they mentioned that they were going to use an ingredient that’s not normally in a recipe, I’d assume they put that unusual ingredient in because they like it that way. Taking them up on their offer to leave something they clearly like out would make me feel like a bad guest, the same way putting them in after I said “Sure, go ahead, I’ll just pick them out of my part” would make you feel like a bad host.

Mind you, if it were something that was hard to pick out or imparted a strong flavor to everything around it, like cilantro (why do people insist on smearing that crap all over everything in the whole serving dish? Why?) I’d accept your offer to leave it out, but something like mushrooms or raisins? I wouldn’t want to deprive you when it doesn’t have to impact me.

103

I’ve been killing animals with my own hands for over 40 years. I’ll shoot them with a gun from far away, or with a bow and arrow. I’ll go up to their corpse, cut them open with a knife and rip all their organs out. I’ll carry their carcass back to my place, string it up and skin them. I’ll send it off to someone more practiced in the butchery arts to have them rendered into good cuts or ground meat. Then I’ll happily eat this meat for weeks/months.

Never felt even the smallest twinge of guilt.

I think most hunters will tell you the same. I actually suspect you’ll find more “meat eater’s guilt” amongst people that only eat mass produced meat. Growing up so close to the reality of it made me very cognizant of what I was eating from day one.

That ham we had for dinner on Christmas? Well, that was the cute little piglet me and my dad brought home the year before. I remember how fun they were when they were small, I remember taking slop out to it every day and it getting bigger and bigger. Eventually it became a full grown hog, we fought it into a truck and took it off to be killed and cut up. Then we would bring back the meat and eat it.

The chickens my mom would kill all by herself and cook for us? I had fed and handled them since they were a box full of cute little baby chicks.

When you grow up like this I do think you have a great deal of respect for what meat is, but I think it also makes you never even consider feeling guilty over it. Animals eat other animals, we’re animals. As the only demonstrably ethical animals I don’t have much of a concern over the people who have decided they do not believe in eating animals over ethical concerns. Gandhi opposed harvesting silk because it killed insect inside its cocoon. That is what it is, I don’t have a problem with Gandhi’s ethics. I also don’t have a problem with wearing silk or eating meat, though.

I’m happy to let anyone eat or not eat whatever they want, it’s none of my business. But I enjoy guilt free burgers and steaks on a regular basis, and have never felt even the slightest bit of sympathy or remorse for the animal.

104

As a teetotaler, I get that a LOT. My in-laws are notorious for that. I’ve lived close to them for 8 years, and in all of the times I’ve had dinner with them, I’ve never had an alcoholic beverage. Ever. Yet either in-law (but mostly my father-in-law) will offer me a drink. I’m sure that, in their own minds, they’re being polite, but it’s just thoughtlessness. It’s to the point where I do not enjoy going over for holidays or other occasions where alcohol would be offered.

105

As someone with food allergies - you wouldn’t get that much better a response. I do run into people who are personally offended that I won’t eat food that might kill me. It still interferes with social eating. And you still have people who don’t understand that NO, you really can’t get away with cheating.

Hey, if I know someone is trying to lose weight I wouldn’t dream of forcing food on them. I might well change plans to accommodate their diet, if that was at all feasible, because being overweight is a serious problem and if you like someone you encourage them to be healthier, you don’t find ways for them to “cheat” that will have a negative impact in either the short or long term.

If changing plans for eating won’t work, I’ll invite them for a walk instead - it can be very sociable without requiring calories to be consumed.

106

I must say, the cook featured in this story is a total asshole. Also, a moron. Who doesn’t know that ketchup is made from tomatoes? There’s a PICTURE OF A TOMATO on pretty well every package of ketchup I’ve ever seen (except perhaps NoName Brand) for God’s sake.

So, how did the other guests at the party react? I hope this person was told what a tool they are either directly or indirectly and I also hope they apologized. I also hope you don’t spend time with this twat anymore; however, if it’s your MIL or something I guess that could be quite difficult.

107

My parents started getting around this by saying. “Would you like a drink? We have everything from booze to soda to just plain water. What is your preference?”

It’s the ceremony of being a good host without the pressure to consume alcohol, because they’re making it plain they’ll accommodate a taste for anything they have in the house.

They’ve also made it a point to stock non-alcoholic beverages when they’re aware a teetotaler is coming over. But then, they’re thoughtful and considerate people.

108

Oooh that actually makes a lot of sense, thank you!

109

That makes meat-eaters sound neurotic and I don’t actually think i’s true. “The presence of a vegetarian threatens to make them think about uncomfortable questions.”? I disagree. When we go to restaurants with friends, we order the food we like and they order the food they like and the question of who is eating what rarely ever comes up other than in the “Oooh! That looks really good!” kind of way.

For hosted dinners, it’s not really any different than accommodating things like keeping kosher.

Now if some vegetarian is pontificating about the eeeeevils of meat and making everyone uncomfortable, that’s totally different, that person is being a jerk. But the mere presence of someone who doesn’t eat meat, for whatever reason, threatening all surrounding meat-eaters with “uncomfortable thoughts” doesn’t seem all that plausible to me.

110

The thing is, it’s rude for you to notice that I scraped the mushrooms off. It is! Obviously I was being discreet about it (I mean, if I’d said, “Oh, ewww. MUSHROOMS!” then that would be a different story, but that’s not what we’re talking about) and it’s a social bandage. It’s like how at a nice dinner we all pretend you didn’t fart. I am not a picky eater, and if I knew it would hurt your feelings because you don’t have the sense to not notice that I scraped them off I would have eaten them. Maybe even liked them. But I don’t prefer them, is all.

111

Yeah, I was pretty pissed off about it myself for quite awhile, but this is an example of quirky human psychology.

See, the host had been very careful to avoid canned tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, etc. in all the food. No tomato in the salad, for example. So far so good. But in this area people don’t say “tomato ketchup” they just say “ketchup”, there are several brands of it I can think of that don’t show a tomato on the label, and while, if people really think about it they’ll remember ketchup is made from tomatoes, the connection isn’t as strong if you’re in a hurry, distracted, or just not used to being so damned careful. I’ve also run into this problem with people not making the connection between cocktail sauce and tomatoes. If the word “tomato” isn’t in the name it becomes easier for the mistake to be made.

People with dairy allergies run into this, too - people will eliminate cheese and milk from something, but then put yogurt in. Or they won’t make the connection between “whey” and “dairy”.

So… in retrospect it seems like a totally asshat, stupid, cruel thing to do. Unfortunately, it’s a mistake a lot of people can and do make. Which is exactly why I don’t play the game of “I tell you what I’m allergic to and you decide it’s safe”. The average person does not have the incentive I do to research foods and ingredients. It is all too easy for ignorance or psychological quirks where “ketchup” doesn’t automatically trigger the “tomato alarm” to put me at risk.

I honestly don’t know - I was either puking or lying on the bathroom floor until the ambulance came. Wasn’t too cognizant of my surroundings, either, I was going into shock. How other people were reacting was sort of low on my list of things to notice.

A full blown severe reaction to food can be quite dramatic and also quite frightening for onlookers. The changes in skin color and the facial swelling can look like special effects from a horror movie. Granted that I suffer the worst, I’m also trying to spare those around me distress as well.

One particular person who was present that night (who, apparently, was assisting my husband in getting me into the bathroom, calling 911, and crowd control) used to invite the husband and me to his super bowl parties for years afterward. Always saved the bags and stuff the munchies came in, dragged me into the kitchen for 10 minutes when we first arrived, and let me figure out what was and wasn’t safe for me to eat. I much appreciated it. Never, ever had a problem eating at his house. He never ever pressured me to eat something if I didn’t want to - which I also much appreciated.

Other people just don’t want to invite me over to dinner. They just don’t want to take the risk. I can understand that. As long as they don’t socially ostracize me otherwise I’m OK with that.

Oh, no more dinner parties for me at that house. There was a weird mix of profuse apologies combined with this sort of weird blaming me for the party ending on a low note. I assume there was some guilt involved on the part of hosts who, on reflection, did realize their mistake.

When invited to dinner parties I either offer to bring something I can eat, or offer to assist in the kitchen during cooking - the latter choice actually seems quite welcome for a busy host trying to get ready for guests and that way when we sit down to eat I know exactly what is and isn’t safe. Thus, the evening proceeds without need to interrupt the fun to call 911.

112

Don’t get me wrong, I get your point, but how else am I supposed to say it? I usually just politely say that I don’t like seafood (and if I’m out with a group: “But you guys are more than welcome to eat up!”- I’ll even compliment that their food looks nice, blah blah). Then the 20 questions starts. If pressed, I’ll say I’ve tried a lot of seafood in my life and don’t like the flavor. Then, “BUT WHY DON’T YOU LIKE THE FLAVOR? WHAT SPECIFICALLY???” Thus, fishy.

Trust me, most times I’ll just sit there saying I don’t like it. Every so often when pressed, I’ll say fishy. Because. . . well, that’s what it tastes like to me. If it’s something all fish tastes like to me, that’s fishy. If something tastes like beef, I’ll describe it as beefy. “Tastes like chicken” is another common thing folks say that means a wide range of things, but we all generally accept it to mean. . .tastes in someway like chicken. I don’t know why “tastes like fish” should be any different, because. . .well, fish does. That’s why people who like fish like it.

Oh, and as far as “fishy” goes- I’ve had people say things like, “Oh, smell that? That fish is old and gone bad.” So, I guess that’s what “fishy” means in a literal sense. But to me, all seafood tastes like that to some degree- some more so than others, but even the freshest, fanciest of fish has that smell and taste to me. Sorry.

113

Then there was the time that for my birthday someone wanting to be really really nice to the poor diabetic who always turns down the cake because it is sugar laden made a beautiful cake frosted with a ganache made from diabetic chocolate :eek: and had most of the staff in the bathroom with the runs for the rest of the afternoon:eek::smack::frowning:

They were trying to be nice, but didn’t realize what all that maltitol would do to everybody. They promised to run any recipe modifications past me next time they wanted to convert something to diabetic friendly:D

114

sobs inconsolably

Regards,
Shodan

115

Diosa, I know what you mean. I also hate fish because it tastes like, uh…fish. I have on occasion had people try to tell me that I can eat fish because fish isn’t meat! So it’s allowed for vegetarians to eat it! I just explain that I don’t like fish so it’s really not going to happen.

That way I don’t have to get myself worked up about how there isn’t a vegetarian “doctrine” that I’m following, with foods that I’m allowed and not allowed to eat, and that I wouldn’t be breaking any “rules” by eating fish because there aren’t any rules to vegetarianism. It’s not a freaking religion, it’s a dietary choice! If I say I don’t eat fish, I don’t eat fish, and trying to convince me that it’s not meat and therefore doesn’t “count” in some way is actually really annoying.

116

Yes, and at a *nasty *dinner we point and laugh at the farters, subjecting them to merciless mockery.

A *proper *host will note on the dinner invitation which sort it’s to be.

117

Usually it’s implied in the dress code. “Black tie optional” is a poot free zone. “Fake tuxedo t-shirts and booty shirts requested”, he who smelt it dealt it.

118

Yeah. Or telling someone that you don’t like shrimp.
Apparently that actually means, “I want to anally rape your puppy and set him on fire”, by the reactions I get.

119

What the hell? She shouldn’t get flak for saying she doesn’t like seafood. Isn’t that the entire point of this thread?

120

Seriously? Your in-laws politely offer you a drink (and you acknowledge they are being polite) when you go over there, and you presumably politely turn it down, and this exchange is so harrowing that it makes you not want to spend the holidays in their home? Wow.