Because she’s the host. Unless it’s a potluck, it’s the host’s responsibility to see to all the guests’ dietary needs. And she’s family. You don’t single out a family member like that and suggest they pack a lunch while everyone else is getting served by the host.
There is a huge freaking difference between the vegetarianism/religion category and the I-just-don’t-like-this-type-of food category.
And, I’d like to emphasize again, that I’m not saying that people can’t dislike a particular food and avoid it. I’m talking about people who eliminate entire categories of food. It’s one thing if he says – I’m not so big on the chicken curry, but I’ll have an extra helping of the saag-paneer. It’s entirely different if he says – I won’t eat any Indian food.
How can you stop interacting socially with your freaking daughter’s freaking husband? You’re suggesting that this kind of social isolation is perfectly normal. It’s not.
I love gumbo and decide to make a big pot. I call friends and family to see if anyone wants gumbo.
Sister - “I don’t eat swine - will you leave the sausage out?”
Friend - “I don’t like tomatoes - can we eliminate those?”
Cousin- “I no longer eat ‘bottom feeders’ - how about no shellfish.”
Neighbor - “I really hate okra - how about a skip on those?”
Brother - “I’m worried about bird flu - let’s not add chicken.”
Now each person wants “gumbo” without their personal item. They want the rest of the gumbo ingredients to be served.
I say, I’m making MY gumbo - You’re welcome to come and share but I REFUSE to make 6 versions of one dish to make everyone happy. Do some of you think I’m a poor hostess?
ascenray, I’m not trying to be argumentative, but your posts here truly confuse me. It seems to me that you’re saying the mother-in-law in this case should absolutely cater to the son-in-law who will not eat Indian food, while at the same time you’re also saying that he is being utterly unreasonable for not finding something she cooks to be acceptable. Additionally, it seems to me that your biggest beef (pardon the pun) about ths situation is that the man in question is Indian (or is married to an Indian woman) and doesn’t like Indian food, as though the two are completely incompatible conditions.
Can you please clarify, and suggest your solution?
In a perfect situation, no you don’t. This isn’t a perfect situation. He’s not going to eat the food. Doesn’t matter if they think he should. That gives them a few options: Eat what he wants, Eat what they want while making something else for him, Let him fend for himself. That’s it. As long as he’s being polite, they need to accept that he’s not going to be sharing the Indian food and do the next best thing.
I think it’s weird that he can’t find any Indian food to eat, and I’m a picky eater. In the end though, it doesn’t matter why you’re not eating something. If John doesn’t want seafood because he keeps Kosher, Sean doesn’t want it because he’s a vegetarian, Hans won’t eat it because he gags on it and Evan is allergic, the end result is still the same, as long as they’re polite about it. The seafood isn’t going to be eaten.
If you can’t stop getting worked up over the fact* that he’s not going to eat the food, then you need to stop having dinner with him. I’m not suggesting that it’s normal to exclude him. What would be normal would be for people to just let it go, and do the next reasonable thing. Which would be to make something he will eat, or let him bring his own dish. Not to force everyone else to eat spaghetti until the sister feels pressured to divorce him.
*I know we’re talking about a real situation, but now I’m just talking hypothetically now. I don’t know remember how the parents react, and am not going to dig through two threads and numerous pages to find out.
Not in the least!! I’d just (discreetly!) not eat what I didn’t like. You invited me! I have no right to dictate how you cook - and I never would presume to. If I didn’t like it, I’d just not come.
Absolutely not. In this hypothetical case, all of your potential guests have been rude. Each of them should have either politely declined - “So sorry! I have other plans” (not mentioning that their other plans are “anything but eating swine/tomatoes/bottom feeders/okra/chicken”) or discreetly picked out the the item they can’t/won’t eat without comment.
If you DID receive those rude responses, the polite answer would be, “Oh, I’m so sorry, it’s already made. I’m making spaghetti next Friday, can you come then?”
The kind of mother-in-law who was willing to stop her son-in-law from passive-aggressively jacking everybody else around. If he is the one with the eating requirements then it is his problem when they affect his life and enjoyment.
As has been mentioned in this thread, over and over, if someone doesn’t want to eat some kind of food drop the subject, and move the Hell on. Just because you think someone is being rude by refusing to eat certain foods, does not give anybody else permission to drama queen it up over that refusal.
For God’s sack, somebody has to act like an adult. So tell picky SiL that it’s Indian food, or to find his own happiness, and be done with it.
No. There is no freaking difference at all. It’s all food-that-won’t-be-eaten. And it’s really no one else’s damn business why somebody doesn’t want to eat particular foods.
I cannot fathom the mentality of people who’d get so worked up over what other people decide to eat. Is there nothing more traumatic in their lives that they have to drama queen over the eating choices of friends and families ruining the lives of millions?
I know, I know. If we don’t all cave in to peer pressure and conform to the mandated vittles, the terrorists will have won.
My take is that you will have to either compromise or deal with the social consequences of being picky. I’m willing to make some adjustments if people have diet needs or preferences, but if they are creating too many difficulties for me or ruin my enjoyment, I’m not going to invite them to things or hang around them much.
If you want to get over being a picky eater (or if you want to lose a lot of weight in a hurry) go traveling. Other cultures’ ideas of what constitutes “food” are sometimes way, way different than yours, and if you do what I consider “real traveling” you end up in places that are not appreciably Westernized and don’t make concessions for weird outland food. You experiment, find stuff you like and branch out from there, or you starve.
I’ve never been picky, but I wasn’t all that experimental as a kid. A couple of times, I had frogs that we speared in the lake when I was a kid, and I had some snake jerky from the guy at the bottom of the hill who used to make jerky out of just about anything, but that was the weirdest stuff I can ever remember eating.
Then I came to Japan.
Picky eating is strongly discouraged here and it seems to be an unofficial national pastime to see if they can offer foreigners weird stuff that will make you gag. Some of it, even Japanese will refuse to eat. Now, there are very few things I won’t eat. I’ve had raw wild boar and deer, raw horse, all kinds of guts both raw and cooked, eyeballs, insects. You learn to adjust. I actually like umeboshi and those slimy little mushrooms that a lot of Westerners won’t eat. Even so, I have found a few things that activate my gag reflex. I can’t eat uni (sea urchin roe) without gagging from the texture, though the taste isn’t bad. Nattô smells like garbage to me, and while I can eat it, I won’t eat it willingly. I gave it a chance, it didn’t take. Shiokara is another dish that I can eat, but won’t if I have a choice. I’d actually rather eat dried grasshoppers (kind of nutty) than shiokara.
Based on that Wiki link, I think I’d like to try that. (I love sour stuff.) Is it fruiy sour like freaky lemons? Or bitter sour like vinegar or rancid juice?
Oh, and count me in as someone who, in the case of the Indian food example, thinks the picky eater and the family takes turns compromising. The son-in-law shouldn’t always be the one to dictate what everyone else eats. To be fair to everybody else, if he won’t eat the meal everyone else plans to enjoy, then he can bring his own take out.
I will decline food if necessary, but never force my palate on anybody else. If I know I won’t like the food, I’d eat before hand and then enjoy the socializing with the gorup while nibbling on a hunk of bread.
All of the above. They’re really, really, really salty. They’ve naturally got a ton of ascorbic acid (stave off scurvy, yay!) and the modern ones are soaked in vinegar too. A lot of people don’t like them. There are even some Japanese who don’t like them much. My favorites are the ones that are made the old way; they’re all shriveled up and hard but have a tinge of sweet too.
(1) SiL cannot be excluded from family occasions
(2) MiL cannot, knowing that SiL will not eat any Indian food, serve only Indian food
These are part of the social conventions in an Indian family. SiL, having been born into an Indian family and then choosing to marry into an Indian family should man up to the choice he’s made and make concessions to these conventions, i.e., learn to occasionally eat, if not like, some Indian food.
And here you are missing the point. It’s not that I or anyone else cares what any particular person likes to eat or chooses to eat.
Take a look at the conclusions people are coming to –
This shows that what you eat (in social circumstances) is not merely a factor of your personal tastes. It is a social issue, and being very rigid about what you will eat (when you’re with other people) is a social handicap, and is likely to result in some level of friction, annoyance, or social isolation. That’s the point. To get along in society, you have to occasionally eat things you don’t like. If you’re going to absolutely refuse to do that and if your eating preferences are very narrow, you’re going to make yourself into a nuisance in your social circle.
I forgot to complete the point I wanted to make (and I missed the “edit” window) –
It’s not that the social group cares what “other people decide to eat.” It’s that the person with the limited eating preferences is always imposing his preferences on everyone else. That’s the problem.
I was watching Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” TV show yesterday, the one where he’s in Namibia, featured in this thread and I thought it was interesting and relevant to this discussion.
All I can say is that the segment where’s he’s eating with the Kalahari Bushmen was frighteningly disgusting. I was eating lunch and actually felt sick watching them prepare the warthog’s anus. Understand, this is in the desert, there isn’t a whole lot of clean water around to wash body parts with, so you can imagine how clean a digestive tract is going to be before cooking… He ate an omelet cooked by pouring egg on the dirt and mounding burning sticks over top of it. Every single piece of food had to have the dirt and char and twigs knocked off before biting it, and you’d still get a days supply of ash and sand and shit in every mouthful.
He spared nothing afterwards in describing just how horrible the warthog tasted, every single bite (anus or not) was disgusting. He also said that sharing food is a show of generosity, people sharing the food that sustains them, so travelers should “put on your game face, eat up and ask for seconds”.
In his current book of essays (I think it’s called “The Nasty Bits”), Bourdain goes on at length about how he believes that no guest should ever reject food offered by a host on the basis of “I don’t eat that” or “I don’t like that.”
He was particularly offended by reports that Woody Harrelson boasted about visiting Thailand and eating the same salad every day because he’s a vegan.
I agree with Bourdain’s point of view on this. When you’re a guest (or a traveler in someone else’s homeland), you need to be willing to at least try something when it’s offered to you. The only exception I’d give are for people who have allergies to the item or a strict religious reason for not eating it. (And, no, being kosher when it’s convenient does not count. If you’re always kosher, then fine, but don’t use it as an excuse to get out of offending guests because you won’t try something they’re offering you.) I was a little picky when I was a kid, but I was always willing to try new things because it was encouraged for me to do so. (I wasn’t threatened with food or had it forced on me, but I was encouraged to at least try a bite of it before I decided about it.) I’ve eaten things that are gross to me because it was offered, but I didn’t gag or make faces while eating a bite or two because it tasted bad.
But you’ve missed the point that I was making: the limited-eater is imposing his preferences on everyone else because they’re letting him. They’ve giving in to his drama, and in turn reacting with drama of his own. They’re not blameless martyrs; they’re enabling the picky eaters to steamroll over them.
They haven’t had someone elses preferences imposed on the group – the group has imposed someone elses preferences on themselves. You are all acting like picky eaters have some mysterious powers of mass mind control, requriing everyone else to eat as they do. Bull.
If someone is a picky eater, they know it damn well. Offer some options to him or her, and then stop making an ordeal out of it.
So the hypothetical SiL doesn’t want Indian food. So the Hell what. The world isn’t going to end if MiL shows him where the sandwich fixings are. The entirety of Indian culture isn’t going to come crashing down because one person in the family doesn’t like what they’re eating.
When people get together they want to eat together, and when people eat together, they will not easily choose to do something that will result in one member of the group watching everyone eat. That’s a fact of human social interaction. You can’t get around that by calling it “their drama” or “mass mind control.” When one person refuses to acknowledge that this is a fact of human interaction, he or she throws a wrench into the social works.