I didn’t let my husband eat the meatballs, AIBU?

[dancebabybee]

My husband is an incredibly fussy eater. Basically, he will only eat beige foods and sugar. This makes going out to eat very difficult as well as cooking for him at home. There have been times in restaurants when he will complain there is NOTHING he likes on the menu (despite the menu being extensive) and he ends up eating a bread basket. I am giving you this history as it is important for what happened this evening…

I made meatballs, tomato ragu and spaghetti for dinner. Due to my husbands extreme fussy eating, I don’t usually cook for him and he is left to sort himself out. Me and the children had this for dinner. When I went into the kitchen afterwards, he had started picking at the sauce left in the pan, scooping the meatballs out, scraping the tomatoes and sauce off. I asked him whether he wanted me to make him some pasta, he said no he just wanted to eat the meatballs. I told him to please not, as it will just leave a load of sauce that nobody will want to eat without meatballs in it, and I wanted to save the spare for lunch or dinner tomorrow. He then got annoyed about this and sulked off…

AIBU?

It is 100% ok for the cook to judge what is or isn't acceptable for a family member to do about food when that family member causes food / money / work wastage and makes extra work for the cook in the form of extra meals or washing up.

He needs to buy and cook his own food, wash up afterwards, and take his greedy paws off the food meant for the rest of the family.

I really don’t think that policing what another adult must eat is ok.

If OP was happy for him to eat it all, then it’s unreasonable to get upset at just eating the meatballs. If that’s all he wants to eat then that’s his choice. Leftover sauce etc can easily be worked into other dishes or frozen for the future.

I have a really healthy appetite - unfortunately!! - and eat a broad range of food. I eat loads of veg. There isn’t much you could put in front of me that I wouldn’t eat. I say this for context as I had an ex who would get very angry with me if I didn’t clear my plate. If we ate out, he’d be furious if I left more than what he considered to be an acceptable amount. It wasn’t about waste, he just thought it was unacceptable and that I was showing him up.

It got to the point that I started to get anxious about eating in front of him - and when I get anxious I physically can’t eat. It was a vicious circle. It took me a very long time after I left him to normalise my eating habits again, and to rediscover the joy of eating out.

I know OP isn’t as extreme as my ex, but I really feel strongly that it’s not ok to decide how or what another adult eats.

If she didn’t want him to have any of it as she had planned to eat it for lunch the next day, that would be different. But that wasn’t t the case. She was happy for him to eat it, but only if he ate what she told him he should be eating. That’s really controlling.

I totally understand that a person might not want to be with a picky eater, and that’s fine. We all get to make our own choices. But if you are with a picky eater, it’s absolutely not ok to say they can only eat the leftovers if they eat them all. It’s absolutely not ok to tell them they can only share your food if they eat all the bits that you tell them to, even if they don’t want it.

Is he really fat and unhealthy? I find picky eaters gross. Sorry.

I would say if he is a picky eater he should make his own food - not ruin what has been cooked for the whole family.

I disagree.
It's completely different being happy and ok with him eating a portion of a prepared meal, and being unhappy about him just taking the protein out and leaving the rest, she said he has a habit of this and will take the chicken out of the pan if she makes fajitas or take all of the fish out of a fish pie.

This is a completely different situation to your ex so it is not the case that she is simply just not as extreme as him.

In my home people can have as much or as little as they want of a meal, but if I made a stew or something and there was leftovers for the next day and someone decided well I don't want it as a meal but I'm going to take all of the beef out of it and have that instead I would think that was so rude and disrespectful, but then they wouldn't do that anyway and wouldn't need to be told it was rude, because it's a social norm.

It is not controlling to not want someone to take all of the meat out of a prepared meal. If they only want meat or fish then they could stick a portion of meat or fish in the air fryer instead of picking apart a portion of a meal that someone else would have happily enjoyed whole.

Yes. An eating disorder. Disordered eating at the very least.

I have more knowledge on eating disorders than I would even wish to have.

I said upthread about my 18 yo dd having diagnosable level ARFID. I spent years and years getting my dd’s diet balance and pretty ‘normal’. Still a bit fussy, but she ate a decent variety of foods. Then she copied the popular girls and stopped eating lunch. That’s all. This change led to her choose vegetarianism (which is a common means of restriction) to seriously restricting her eating. At one stage, she stopped eating and told me she didn’t need to eat to live.

Just one change snowballed something, which almost took her life. All the years of work fell apart. When she started eating again, she was having 3 things once a day and then 2 other things once a day weekly to every 10 days as a ‘treat’.

Your dh is very different to my dd. I am not suggesting this is on the cards for him. What I’m saying is to be careful to assign blame, rather than curiosity of how things could change. And I would be very careful with taking the line that you are right now.

As a bloke I do find it genuinely astonishing how many other adult men seem to be like this with food. I get that in some cases it might be a neurodiverse thing, but it's amaze me how self-limited some people's are.

TBH I was a bit like this as a kid (no veg apart from peas) but my palette has evolved over the years.

Right. So not only does OP have the labour of always meal planning and cooking for the DC (unless DH decides to rip open a UPF packet and fire up the microwave), she now has to carry the mental load of finding recipes for DH’s picked over offcasts. This sounds both painful and sexist.

No, but the vast, vast majority of people do. Bonding over rituals is hardwired into us, and for most of us, that's sitting down to eat together. My exH developed disordered eating and it was weird and lonely cooking and eating alone all the time while being married. Like being single, except I couldn't find anyone else to come together with at the end of the day each day. Never eating together loosens the bonds between couples.

Now that I'm single, I don't find it so lonely to cook and eat alone. It was much lonelier when I was married but still had no one to eat with and chat with at the end of the day.

You're probably going to say "Why didn't you talk at other times," and we did, but after dinner you tend to get on with other things or watch TV together. When you sit down to eat together, it's a concentrated opportunity for chatting. And you're facing each other, as opposed to facing outwards on the sofa.

I appreciate that you don't care for eating with others, but for most people it is a central part of being in a family or a marriage, and when someone in your household doesn't want to sit down and eat with you, it's strange.

Yeah, my exH developed disordered eating, either ARFID or orthorexia, and I found it very strange, sad, and depressing to be married to someone who wouldn't sit down to eat with me. Often he'd be fasting, or he'd survive on a snack that he'd eat standing up. So I'd cook and eat alone, just like when I was single, which is not fun when you're married. Even though we didn't have kids, the way you describe this issue above is exactly how I felt.

To give you an idea of how disordered his eating became, sometimes he would take a week off work and eat and drink nothing but water for seven days. A seven-day water fast. Literally zero food or drink except water. He'd take annual leave to do it so that he could just rest, as he'd have keeled over if he'd tried to actually do anything.

I think I win the prize for craziest ex-husband.

You’re missing the point. The OP implied that she wouldn’t have minded him eating the meatballs if he had also eaten the sauce and some pasta. Her issue wasn’t with the leftovers being used up, but that he didn’t eat them in the way that she deemed appropriate.

Is he a dry eater rather than a fussy eater? It seems like he doesn't like things in any kind of sauce (or things that mix). That's more an issue with texture than taste. He's actually eating quite a diverse range of flavours.

While I agree with you that it's not acceptable to ruin the leftovers that can be used for another meal, could he be accommodated somewhere in the process?

If he likes meatballs next time you make the dish take some out before adding the sauce. Let him have just the chicken in a wrap for fajitas. You've been with him long enough to presumably know which bits he likes/doesn't.

We can all say i wouldn't put up with a fussy eater but you presumably married him knowing this so I'll assume he has other qualities.

It sounds like this has reached a point where you've had enough, and I can understand why. I'd have done the same in these circumstances so it's about finding ways to avoid it getting to the pan scavenging- and if he says no to having the things on their own then you've every right to pull him up.

I couldn’t stand having to deal with a partner with a fussy or limited diet. You made that meal for yourself and kids, it wasn’t his to pick at.

Instant ick.

Everyone the dinner was made for had eaten. He is responsible for making his own dinner. OPs lunch is not his dinner. Especially not the best bits.

A pan of 6 meatballs with sauce and pasta is two lunches. Or one person can eat all the meatballs and then still be hungry.

It's wasteful, lazy, greedy and selfish to eat just the best parts of someone else's food. It is literally the same as if he'd pulled the cheese off a pizza and eaten just that.

It's also incredibly inconsiderate because OP is shopping and cooking meals that could last 2 days for her and the kids and he's wasting it so she then has to cook for everyone again while he only has to sort himself.

Yanbu.

Who the feck goes to a restaurant and only has bread?

I've known some fussy eaters but this takes the (beige) biscuit.

Incidentally, is 'beige food' a literal description of the food's colour or does it generally apply to any bland food regardless of colour?

It is OK to suggest that autism is behind this, but I get very pissed off because the inference is that you have to tolerate it!

(I was actually hectored on another thread for standing resolutely by my decision not to date autistic men a ever again. The fucking cheek of it.)

In any case, he could just be spoilt and awkward.

No consideration that you are trying to instill healthy eating into your children.

Or does he just not notice that you cook excess food for the next day as a habit?

Selfish prick, bet he's selfish in other ways, too.

But but but if DH rips the cheese off of the pizza, OP should find a creative recipe to incorporate the crust into a meal for everyone tomorrow night!

That's not comparable though is it.

It is if it’s off the pizza leftovers as that could be a lunch for the next day the same as the meatballs and sauce.

Yes you are correct.
We must all bow down to your superior take on the subject.

It's really not a pita at all thinking about what you can replace the fecking meatballs with after a long day when you'd rather just put your feet up watching Withnail on The Traitors.

It's not a pita at all to have some twat come along and ruin your well thought out meal plan.

The OP deserves a fecking medal.

The OP clarified in an update that this is in fact the point.

There would still have been enough meatballs for the second meal (lunch) if he'd just had a few, padded out with some pasta. But he only wanted to take the meatballs, leaving leftovers that OP has stated no one would want. Not to mention the added yuck factor of leftovers someone had been poking their hand in and scraping at. Bleurgh.

It isn't about policing what someone eats. It's that they have an agreement that he does his own meals and doesn't touch the food she makes for her and the kids (as he claims not to like any of it). But here, without communicating or checking if it would be convenient he helped himself to someone else's tomorrow's lunch without a thought for the extra work it would create. And probably ate his beige crap as well so went without nothing. Selfish, greedy, thoughtless muckworm of a man.

@dancebabybee let the man eat ffs!

He has Autism I take it?

Pizza with no cheese is fit for the bin. Pasta sauce is perfectly useable.

Some of the attitudes on this thread are diabolical. All of the food in my house is there for any of us to eat. There is no such thing as "my" food or "not his food". If anyone in my family tried to behave like that I'd be disgusted. It's a family home, not a uni house.

The agreement is that he sorts out his own food.

Jeez.
His behaviour is more akin to a young person living in a student household than a family home!