Picture a story. You’re at a family member’s house. Food is served. You look down at it. It stares back at you. You think that you are stronger, that you can beat it. You cannot. No matter what your final decision on what to do with the meal is, you’ve already lost.

Such is the backdrop for the story of a pregnant woman who simply couldn’t keep up appearances anymore and told her MIL what she really thinks of her cooking.

More info: Reddit

If you accept a meal as a guest, you’re better off not saying that it’s not tasty in the future, unless you want to risk upsetting your hosts severely

Image credits: lucas mendes (not the actual photo)

A pregnant woman wanted to know whether she’s a jerk for finally refusing her mother-in-law’s and her family’s favorite meal

Image credits: NecessaryAct35

Image credits: Andrew Dobrow (not the actual photo)

They were visiting the MIL and she served a meal she’s perfected over the years – mac and cheese with salmon, kimchi, pineapple, and more

Image credits: NecessaryAct35

Image credits: Ben Sutherland (not the actual photo)

Perhaps because of pregnancy altering the poster’s senses, she finally couldn’t stomach that meal and had to speak up about it

Image credits: NecessaryAct35

Image credits: LABabble (not the actual photo)

Her choice of words is where she may be a jerk, saying “I simply cannot eat it anymore”, implying that she never liked it in the first place

Image credits: NecessaryAct35

The mom, feeling deeply hurt, has decided to give the cold shoulder to the poster, despite her apologizing and making excuses

If you’re kind of a picky eater like me, you know that visiting relatives or friends can be a harrowing experience. It may sound silly, but knowing that you’re going to have to do the whole song and dance of patting your stomach, saying that you’re full or not feeling too good, making up excuses, fending off questions, is just too much.

And that may make you say “well, just eat the darn thing”, but it’s not as simple as all that.

Sometimes you can stomach it, for politeness’ sake. Sometimes you just can’t – one look at it, and you’re ready to unleash the stomach content rainbow. One whiff and here it comes.

It’s even more difficult as in many cultures, refusing food on the first go may indicate politeness – you’re shy and don’t want to take it, you want to show your own humbleness, etcetera.

Thus you are stuck in the original poster’s (OP) situation. It’s understandable that you’d want to please your SO’s family, especially seeing as your first encounter with them is some type of dinner at their place. You try to be chipper, accept most things, and compliment the cooking.

And strange food combinations are… nothing strange, really. Something that may seem unacceptable to you is widely regarded as a delicacy elsewhere. A well known example is pineapple on pizza – one of the most controversial toppings of all time.

But people also put bananas, kiwi, anchovies, and god knows what else on their food. As a struggling university student I thought that I discovered something new by making pasta with beans, but it turned out I had just made pasta e fagioli – a traditional Italian dish.

Image credits: Eugene Kim (not the actual photo)

What I am trying to say is that the mom’s combination sounds foul to many, me included, but it’s not as if she’s committing a cardinal sin against humanity. People are frequently overly hung up over what other people eat, to an extreme degree, ewing and yucking at something they’ve never even tried.

Kimchi plus mac and cheese is actually quite popular, especially in Korea. So is salmon in the same dish. I don’t know about pineapple, but I am one of the pineapple-on-pizza-eating freaks, so who am I to talk?

Many people were aghast at the MIL’s “perfected” recipe, but I don’t believe that should be the focus here.

The focus is that the OP really could have refused the dish in a better way. She should have done it earlier, for a start. Saying that you don’t like any of the ingredients in mac and cheese would have been easy and quite blame-free, especially as she was pregnant and it’s well known that flavor perception changes unpredictably during such times.

LifeHacker suggests several ways of being more polite in refusing foods and hopefully not bringing on your MIL’s ire.

Saying that you really want to try something else on the table or are saving room for it is an easy way out. My favorite classic is piling something that I like on my plate, so I’ll have a foolproof excuse not to try anything I hate.

You may also say that some ingredient makes your stomach upset or, even better, that it was already upset before you came in. That lets you eat little and simple foods, making sure you don’t need to try anything that you’re not accustomed to.

If you absolutely must eat a bit and can’t worm your way out of it, you could drown it in some strong-tasting sauce, hopefully killing the flavor.

This story got almost 12k upvotes on Reddit, with 4.2k comments to boot. In the discussion people overwhelmingly hated on the ingredient combo and judged the poster not to be the jerk. There were a lot of level-headed responses that the poster was very impolite and that she was a jerk, but they were drowned out by the shouting of others.

Share your own crazy food combos and favorite ways to get out of eating things in the comments below!

The community judged her not to be the jerk, but many said that she was a jerk for how she handled the situation

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