Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.
Dear Care and Feeding,
I have been married to my vegetarian husband for more than 10 years, and we have two school-aged children. He has been a vegetarian for more than 20 years and has never pressured me or anyone else to adopt his diet. I enjoy cooking and grocery shopping, and make it a personal priority to continue to learn and improve my skills.
I have some great meat-free meals that we have on our family rotation, but I often make a meal where I can offer both meat and a vegetarian option. My husband will only cook vegetarian food, and it stresses me out because he just sort of makes things up along the way. We are both strong-willed people, so this has been a point of contention.
I do 80 percent of the cooking (MY CHOICE), and recently, my husband said that he wants me to stop making a flex-type menu because I am “othering” his portion of the meal. He thinks it’s offensive and a waste of time. I was taken aback by this, and honestly, a little hurt/confused. Is it offensive to make something like pasta that has a meatball and a veggie meatball? Is it wrong to offer one dish that has bacon and one that doesn’t?
I have no interest in becoming a vegetarian. I think that fake sausage and meat substitutes are a major downgrade from the real thing, and I am not interested in eating them myself. I also think that it would be challenging to achieve my health goals without animal protein. I don’t have a problem cooking these things and regularly encourage my children to try them as part of their meal (they enjoy some of his food, but not all of it). We talk a lot about how there are different types of diets and people have them for different reasons. Am I wrong for feeding my family this way? He says that he will just “fend for himself,” but that seems like a horrible way to feed a family as well. Does anyone have any suggestions?
—Food for Four
Dear Food for Four,
I’m going to be real here: Your husband is being unreasonable. The way you have been planning your meals seems like a sincere act of love. I understand why you are hurt and confused. No one likes it when their partner or spouse doesn’t appreciate something you do just for them. The fact that he’s “offended” by it makes it sting even more.
I am actually a bit confused by your husband viewing your cooking a unique and special meal for him as being offensive. I know he might be a vegetarian for multiple reasons, so I won’t make an assumption here. But I’m wondering if his feelings and attachment to vegetarianism are morally changing. For example, maybe he feels—perhaps even more now than before—that eating animals is wrong, but he can’t say that he wants you to be a vegetarian because that’s not the agreement in your household. In that case, he’s not expressing the conflict as explicitly as he could. He might not even know how to explain how he’s feeling.
At any rate, it sounds like you should just let him “fend for himself.” You mentioned that there are some vegetarian meals that your kids also like, so I would only cook those and let him know in advance when you plan to, so he can figure out his meals accordingly. It might seem like it’s not the most effective or efficient way to feed your family, but what’s most important is that everyone is indeed fed. Plus, your husband is grown. He can figure things out for himself.
I do hope, though, that your husband begins to express more clearly his reasoning behind his declarations. After he’s been on dinner duty for himself for a while, bring the subject back up. He might have the words he couldn’t find before.
—Arionne
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