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Amanda Patterson

Getting into a relationship means a whole lot more than getting into somebody’s pants. It means getting the whole package: the way they squeeze the toothpaste, leave their dirty socks in the bathroom, pick their teeth, or put Garth Brooks on repeat.

Sharing our inner food selves is an intimacy we often don’t acknowledge. But food—glorious food—steams and wafts from the core of our beings. So what happens when one person’s roast lamb is another person’s tofu stir-fry?

Early on, a couple probably only eats together a few times a week. Later it becomes real. She puts ketchup on everything. He licks the butter knife. She doesn’t eat vegetables, ever. Eventually though everyone has to do the long range math: I like him, but can I handle how he breathes through his mouth while he eats?

Seriously, if mouth breathing ends a relationship, it wasn’t meant to be. So a vegetable never passes her lips and you fall in love anyway, what then? Two couples who have signed on for the long haul dragged out their dirty laundry for our education.

Rob and Nelly: Lamb and sharing

Rob Jenks loves lamb. Nelly Hadhighat hates lamb. Rob also loves to share entrees at restaurants. You can see where this is going. Rob always wants to order lamb, and share. Nelly doesn’t like lamb or sharing. They are getting married this summer.

“I say I’ll order what I want, you order what you want, no sharing. But he wants to share,” Nelly says.

“I usually don’t get lamb,” Rob says. “I should just accept it and order whatever I want.”

Nelly has a crust aversion. She won’t eat it. So, early on she asked Rob how he felt about crust. He said something that Nelly interpreted to mean, “crusts are great,” and proceeded to give him every crusty piece of pizza that came their way. For like, three or four years. Finally, the other shoe fell.

“Rob lost it. What was it, two years ago?”

“It was more like a year ago,”

“No, it was two or three years ago, what did you say?”

“I hate the edge sometimes!” Rob offers up on cue. “Just because I don’t hate it doesn’t mean it’s fair that I eat it all the time.”

Imagine Stephen Tyler humoring someone at a bar with a quick “Walk this Way.” That was about the emotional quality of Rob’s performance.

It wasn’t just that they knew what the other one was going to say, it was like they had been sawing away at this stuff for so long, the saw’s teeth were little nubs. They had accepted that there would be no solution.

Alas, some of their tastes have met in the middle, like the way they cook eggs. Rob used to like them chopped up and dry, Nelly scrunches up her face and makes a mocking little chopping gesture to show what it was like. But now they are egg centrists –not too dry, not too moist.

Nelly still gets embarrassed by Rob’s “aggressive” eating style, and Rob feels sorry for Nelly because she doesn’t like more things. But they like each other, and for forty minutes they laid out the trimmings of five years of food irritations, differences, and all-out fights without once re-engaging.

Karen and Jonathan: Wisps of tofu

Cambridge residents Karen Shakman and her husband Jonathan Ledlie both know right away what their food fights are about: meat.

Until she got pregnant a couple of months ago, she didn’t eat it. Her super high cholesterol motivated her to give up all red meat and most dairy. She had also stopped eating wheat because of an allergy. Then she met Jonathan.

“He didn’t know we could make miso soup at home, and he never cooked tofu,” Karen says. The fish dinner he cooked on their first date caught her attention, though. “I thought it was a total turn-on,” she says.

As a single man, Jonathan cooked a lot of meat. “I made chicken, beef, pork. Whatever, it was dinner.”

He had dated a vegetarian and a woman who kept kosher. So Karen’s food choices didn’t faze him. But it didn’t get real until they moved in together.

“Before, I’d eat my regular thing and then I’d go over to her house and eat Karen food. And that would be cleansing, and then I’d go back home.”

He wasn’t prepared for the pan designations: his were for meat. Or for the routine of door opening to keep the smell out of Karen’s clothes. He said he wondered at times if it was worth it.

They have lived together for four years now, and most of the time they both like their tofu-centric diet. Except when they are throwing a party. Then Jonathan wants to make a roast lamb. And Karen doesn’t.

“I feel like when people come over they want to have a delicious meal, not just wisps of tofu,” Jonathan says. He doesn’t like forcing his “weird meatless existence” on others, and contrarily, he says Karen doesn’t like to impose “meatness” on people who come to visit.

“It’s partially money,” Karen says. She argues that you can feed guests well without meat and it's much less expensive. And then there is the health issue.

“In some ways I don’t think he respects the high cholesterol thing,” she says. “There is an underlying script, ‘You don’t let me have what I want,’ and I’m cheap. But he likes it.”

In the end, Karen buys the $5 boxes of cereal that once made her question the relationship, and Jonathan likes being five pounds thinner.

“We have to negotiate,” Karen said. “Neither of us lets the other one just run with something.”

. . .

In a partnership there is no separating the wheat from the chaff. Even the juiciest steak has gristle you’d rather feed to the dog. But in the end, all parties seem to agree: It’s all part of the package.

Amanda Patterson can be reached at apatterson@theoysteronline.com

04/05/2006   |   Permalink