"There's NEVER Anything to Eat in This House!"

Years ago, I knew a couple whose perennial, (unfortunately public) spat involved the complaint, “There’s never anything to eat around our house!” (First rule of unproductive discussion: use the words “always” and “never” when characterizing the other person’s behavior.) To make matters worse, the complaining spouse who invariably launched the dispute had the bad taste to do so at dinner parties in other people’s homes. To be fair, the spouse who had assumed the cooking duties was invariably defensive, but, with the reasoning of someone who enjoys fighting, seemed to take the position that “the best defense is a good offense.” Thus the accusation, “You can only recognize something to eat if it is prepared, plated, and has a sign on it that says, “Eat this.”

I have to admit that I chuckled whenever I heard this last bit. It reminded me of a Thanksgiving when my Mom had knocked herself out shopping and cooking for houseguests (a family of 5) and had the refrigerator and freezer packed to the gills with food. Her friend had the gall to make the complaint, “There’s never anything to eat around your house.” Remarkably, this friendship has survived.

So today, as I looked in my refrigerator, I found myself thinking that I needed to go to the store to stock up for my daughter’s visit this week. A couple of hours later, there is a great deal of food to eat in my refrigerator, with no intervening trip to the store. The fact is I don’t buy prepared food. I have onions, eggs, potatoes, fish, zucchini, kale, radishes, herbs, tomatoes, peaches, dry staples, and condiments. It seems to me that, like the battling couple of years ago, I alternate between recognizing and ignoring the food in front of me.

So, I find myself wondering whether others on the board sometimes suffer from larder myopia as I do. And if you are the partner who is the designated cook, how do you satisfy the quick-eats demands of the person you live with?

The couple in question? Still married 30 years later.

This post makes me smile - a running family joke of ours is "all you have in your house are ingredients" vs "you don't have any ingredients." I don't buy a lot of prepackaged foods; it's just not my style - but my in-laws (who aren't blessed with the amount of time nor enthusiasm for food that I am) rely on them.

OTOH, my sister-in-law knits, sews, journals, and generally keeps house while running her own business, any of which is far beyond my ability (in college, where I got a degree in drama, I was famous for costuming shows with 20-person casts using castoffs, staples, and glue) And she's never served a food disaster, ever.

Hi,

My kitchen is filled with ingredients, too. Whatever snack foods disapeer so quickly, we don't buy them unless we are having guests. When one is tired, wants something to eat immediately, then a quick look in the refrigerator and pantry does give you a sense of nothing to eat. There is plenty of food though nothing is ready to eat, because it needs to be cooked, assembled or otherwise prepared.

If I cook ahead or any leftovers, the family member who wakes up before dawn calls it breakfast. Thus planned excess disapeers without much of a chance of a second dinner or it lingers forever. Want pie for breakfast the next day? Gone.

What does generate discussion around my house is when food spoils and is thrown away. I have taken to tossing somethings discretely to avoid discussion.

I know all of the above sounds contradictory, though it happens all the time.

Our compromise is that I do buy some convienence meals/prepackaged foods when I go shopping, I just don't eat them. They all live in T's cupboard where I don't see them, but they are available whenever I'm out of town for work or sick or for whatever reason not home to cook. I also try to pre-cook things that freeze well in large batches and freeze individual dinners for easy "heat & eat"s. I do that a lot January through April 15th when I have almost no time for cooking outside of Sunday afternoons (I work in accounting - tax season!).

Cathy2 wrote:When one is tired, wants something to eat immediately, then a quick look in the refrigerator and pantry does give you a sense of nothing to eat. There is plenty of food though nothing is ready to eat, because it needs to be cooked, assembled or otherwise prepared.

I think that's true - the sense that there is "nothing to eat" surrounds the need for a quick snack - one that you take out of the attractive packaging and just eat. Even the best cheese would need to be cut up. My kitchen, too, is filled with ingredients, and I've always been the "cook" for whoever I've lived with, going way back, which meant I also did the shopping. Add to that, I don't snack, so if I'm thinking only of me, my tendency would not be to buy snacks. So that others are not disappointed by my "lean" shopping habits, I've learned to buy one or two things that are shelf stable for people to snack on (Trader Joe's chocolate almonds with sea salt, cookies, or something that I know someone particularly likes, for example) and stick those items in the cupboard. I tend to forget those items are there, so their existence doesn't bother me, and I've never heard anyone complain that there isn't anything to eat in the house.

Now, I think this issue comes up mostly with guests. So I try to be extra sensitive to their needs around visit time and, in the past, have bought items that I never would have dreamed of to keep the peace. (My brother's wife, for example, is practically vegan. The other day, I found a tiny bag of some type of sprout/sesame/wasabi/nature juice snack in the back of my cabinet from a long ago visit, and started cracking up as I slam-dunked it into the garbage.)

Cathy2 wrote:What does generate discussion around my house is when food spoils and is thrown away. I have taken to tossing somethings discretely to avoid discussion.

In Jacques Pepin's The Apprentice, in a very soul-searching moment, he admitted that a source of great marital discord between he and his wife surrounded his perception that she wasted food. To Pepin, wasting food was tantamount to a cardinal sin -- certainly an immoral act -- because he grew up starving in France during WWII. His American wife, on the other hand, did not share those same experiences, and had no moral issue with tossing away what he deemed to be perfectly good food. To make things worse, she didn't even like eating leftover food. After he realized that yelling at her wasn't going to get her to change her mind, and she realized that her actions just plain upset him, their unspoken compromise was that she would only throw things away if done discreetly, out of his presence, and after he had ample time to eat the food. If he had food in the fridge before he left for a business trip, he didn't expect that she would eat it while he was gone, or even that it would be there when he came back. And, in return, he didn't make an issue of it.

Sometimes the path of least resistance is the best.

aschie30 wrote:Now, I think this issue comes up mostly with guests. So I try to be extra sensitive to their needs around visit time and, in the past, have bought items that I never would have dreamed of to keep the peace.

True, I do have more such issues with guests. We just had grandmother-in-law staying with us for a couple of weeks, so we still have a few mystery foods lurking about that I'm not sure what to do with.

We were just talking about how our refrigerator and pantry are full, but there's nothing to eat.

We haven't had a chance to go shopping for a while, and while we've got loads of ingredients, they're not ingredients you can make a meal of. We're overstocked on condiments, beverages and seasonings.

Looking over the contents of our cupboards, my husband said, "We need to figure out more things you can make mostly with oregano."