Chiming in with:
Bring some of your own food. Better yet, eat before you arrive and mysteriously “lose” your appetite.
Invite the MIL to your home for a dinner that constitutes foods you can eat. Make sure she realizes there are all sorts of other tasty dishes that you do like.
DO NOT appease your MIL by eating disagreeable foods and getting sick from it. You are being a doormat.
Make sure your husband is behind you 100% on all of this or give up now.
Amen, brutha. . . why do people (restaurants, MILs, work luncheon planners, etc.) insist on this as an ingredient? I have gone hungry many times rather than eat this putrid substance.
I went through the same thing with my mom the control freak and astoundingly bad cook and my wife.
While there is a tendency to keep the peace, it is far more important to side with the missus. Besides, the missus was right on this particular issue. If you cannot eat a certain food, and the person cooking has been informed in advance, and yet still cannot be bothered to abide by those restrictions, then they’re being rude.
Repeated talking-tos from me didn’t work, so finally MrsB publically shamed my mum one night by putting a small portion of peas and a yorkshire pudding on her plate-- and when asked why said loudly that there was nothing else on the table she could eat, since she’d been a vegetarian as long as she’d known my mum, or hadn’t she noticed despite the frequent conversations.
Bad idea.
If she somehow gets caught doing this, she not only has deliberately messed up MIL’s house, but she is forever a whiner that needs to fake an illness because she doesn’t “feel like” eating perfectly good food.
The ugliness of how this could backfire is beyond imagining.
Um, because some people like it? I mean, personally, I can’t stand sea food, but I won’t insist that it be kept off of menus everywhere…
I’m always puzzled by people’s violent reaction to mayonaisse. Most other food products don’t inspire such vehement repulsion, but for some reason mayo just causes some people to have severe and ranting ick-fests. Not that I’m saying anywhere here fits this bill, but I did have one co-worker that would insist on making a big scene any time someone would use mayo. Are there other food products that get certain people so riled up they’d openly deride dining companions?
Oh, wait, I remembered that there are some vegetarians who can get this offensive. Okay, then, mayo-haters and extremist vegetarians. Anyone else?
JOhn.