Howto decline invitation to eat (u can't stand the food)?

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How do you gracefully decline invitations to eat with people in these situations without offending them?

1) One of my best friends is Indian. He sometimes invites my friends and I to go eat Indian food. No offense but I naturally do not like Indian food, not to mention I'm mildly allergic to some of the spices.

2) A neighbor holds frequent barbecues and always undercooks the meat. I got sick last time when he invited me to eat BBQ at his place and don't really wish to eat his food again and decline his invitations without offending him..

Why don't you go and just not eat the food? Tell your friend you're allergic in the first example, and in the second you could offer to help cook so it's done right. Or bring your own food. If I'm invited out to eat somewhere where I wont be able to eat the food, I will eat before going or bring my own food.

Also, if you eat before going and dinner is at someone's house, ask for a small portion ("just three bites, please" or "just enough to taste. I had a late lunch but this looks/smells/sounds so good.") and then move the food around a little bit with your fork. Most people won't notice that you didn't eat anything if you keep a fork or a drink in your hand and move stuff around a little or cut up part of the portion if it's a piece of meat.

I learned this from reading Judith Martin ("Miss Manners"). She doesn't have all the answers, especially for us autistics who need more detail than the average person, but she goes a long way toward explaining what's considered proper behavior in different situations, some of them quite difficult ones.

Good lord--why are you so concerned about their feelings? You sound like my parents, who cared more about everyone else than themselves or me. ("What will people think?")

If you don't want to eat with them, just decline their invitations. You aren't required to provide an "excuse" (period).

Some people's feelings get really hurt if you turn down their food. I know it doesn't make much logical sense, but to many NTs, sharing food is a ritual of bonding and friendship that hurts to have turned down. If one doesn't want to hurt people who are valued in one's life, it's best to learn "graceful" ways to not eat their food.

I learned the hard way that the feelings surrounding the food-sharing ritual transcend allergies and, while a person would not want others to eat food they are allergic to, they will still often feel pain if that food is rejected. It can be a difficult situation to navigate.

The thing for me is to decide how I feel about hurting the person. If I don't care whether they're hurt, I don't try to play "diplomat from Mars" over their food offer. I jsut say "no thank you" and move on, leaving them to deal with whatever pain they might or might not feel. If I consider them a friend or hold hopes that an acquaintanceship between us might blossom and grow into a full-formed friendship, I'm more careful about the food issue.

And then there is the woman who used to be a friend but kept getting more and more rude about my carefully polite stepping around the food issue due to allergies, sensitivities, and general health issues. She started with "I couldn't be so disciplined as you are" to which I told her that it was an easy choice for me when I might love some foods but they don't love me back. I chose health and lack of illness over flavor any day.

From that, it graduated to pressuring me about food, then taunting me about it by getting up in my face and making loud "yummy noises" while (disgustingly) slurping down chocolate cake. Then she started pulling out Bible quotes and trying to say that I was being un-Christian in not eating every food that ever existed. That was the final straw for me and I quit being her friend. She got really weird and started pursuing me and really freaking me out until I had my husband telephone her husband and she hasn't spoken to me since. (Thankfully!)

People like that, I don't care what they think about what I eat or don't eat. But people who are trying to be nice, decent people, who I like and hope to build a friendship with, I find it best to try to be diplomatic and tactful as much as I am able. Not because I'm worried about "what they will think" but because I don't want to cause pain to someone I like and the food rituals are very important to many (most?) NTs. There are some sociologists who say that food choice and food sharing go deeper into the human psyche than religion. That's some pretty serious stuff and can stir up a LOT of unwanted emotions if not handled with care.

1. Be honest that you are allergic to many Indian foods. He'll either pick another place or at least one that serves non-Indian cuisine as an option.

2. As the neighbor to make your meat well-done. If he can't, don't eat the meat.

Hope you're not offended by my laughter, but the irony is too much - we're supposed to be socially weird, right? Your little story is so absurd it gets funny, but it's also deeply disturbing. I'm glad you managed to get rid of her, she sounds completely deranged.

Also, welcome to Wrong Planet!

I'm not offended by your laughter because I'm able to see the humor in retrospect, once I cooled down from being severely freaked out and confused over the whole thing.

My NT husband, who is pretty good about explaining the "other planet" to me, says that the way she acted is extremely normal for a middle-aged woman whose grown children have left the nest, who has no career and no one depending on her for their care or for her wisdom and hasn't adjusted well to these changes in her life. According to my husband, there are scores and scores of women like this out there and he is teaching me what sort of things I should not casually reveal about myself because it gives these sorts of people a handle with which to start neurotically twisting at my life because they have nothing (they see as) valuable in their own life to twist at. It's a sort of mothering-instinct gone feral. From your and my perspective, it *is* completely deranged but within a certain social strata combined with age and life experience, it's a profoundly normal reaction to *my* abnormality of choosing to only eat fruits and vegetables.

In fact, her husband - who is pretty level-headed and a decent guy - saw everything that was going on and didn't realize he ought to interfere with anything until my husband called him. Her behavior is so normal on "middle-aged NT woman at loose ends Planet" that her husband saw what was happening but didn't *see* what was happening until it was pointed out to him and then he did obviously talk to her because she turns her back when she sees me.

Her husband, on the other hand, still greets me and chats pleasantly with me, never bringing up the incident with his wife or the fact that my husband called him . . which is also profoundly normal behavior: to pretend that something doesn't exist. I've seen this one repeated often in Miss Manners as the proper way to deal with most kinds of social nastiness that don't require an apology from one's self personally. And the wife's behavior is so normal (though rude) that Miss Manners has addressed how to deal with it many times. Unfortunately, my efforts to produce the "correct" response to the rudeness were severely confounded by my growing anxiety at the general social wierdness and my lack of ability to be assertive without being aggressive. My choices came down to fight-or-flight so I fled.

Thanks for the welcome to Wrong Planet.

I would offer to bring something you can eat without croaking! Or you invite them to your place and you do the cooking. Or just tell 'em the truth -- "I'm allergic to some of the spices and I'm not sure which ones, so..."

at Sparrowrose
"mothering-instinct gone feral" I know this one, it's closely related with "I'll make you do what (I think) is best for you no matter how hard you fight it". Hubby was a vegetarian for 8 years and his mother tried to "slip" meat into his food every time he visited and was constantly nagging and tell him he'll become ill. She honestly only wanted what was best for him I'm quite scared of people's good intentions, they often act aggressive and are surprisingly stubborn. Understanding what makes them do that is fascinating but rarely helps me deal with the situation, so I usually just keep my distance. Good manners on the other hand I can understand - they might seem irrational sometimes, but help in so many situations (at least if everybody involved has the same reference), especially in establishing boundaries and keeping some distance without looking like an arrogant jerk. It's also easier to learn to be polite and well mannered than to decipher and react fast enough to non-verbal cues or non-familiar behaviour.

I apologise to the OP for if I hijacked the tread, but Sparrowrose's posts were very interesting. If you're not really unlucky, the allergy excuse should work, I even used it in restaurants and everybody accepted it. And it's correct, if you want to have a good relationship with these people, don't be blunt, they might get very defensive. You could tell your neighbour you just had something to eat or that you have other plans

When I was about 12, I was invited to dinner at a classmate's house. Her grandmother cooked chicken. I bit into the chicken, and it was raw inside. I had no clue about raw-chicken diseases or anything like that, but I did know that it was revolting. So, I didn't eat any more.

The grandmother and father kept insisting that I eat all my dinner, and that my friend was always required to clean her plate. I wanted to point out that the chicken was raw inside, but I thought that might be rude. So, I kept just saying, "No, I really don't want any more." It became uncomfortable because I felt threatened. The idea of having to bite into that raw-in-the-middle chicken was abhorrant. So, finally, I said I was hoping to lose some weight, which was fairly true. The father said, "What?! You're not fat! !! You're just pleasantly plump!" Luckily, they stopped bugging me about eating more.

I have noticed that the whole food-pushing thing really varies from culture to culture, too. I knew a guy whose wife was from the Phillipenes (my spellchecker won't accept any version of that), and she would cook huge amounts of delicious food. If you were a man, you could be on your third heaping plate of lumpia and whatever, and she'd come up to you and say, "Eat!! ! Eat!! ! Why are you not eating!!" and try to give you even more. But if you were a woman, god help you if you eat more that one little bite of anything. "Get away from that!!" It was the same thing with a Chinese lady I worked with for a while, and her candy jar. Men were encouraged to help themselves to handfuls of candy every time they passed her cubicle, but if a woman even looked at the jar, she'd look you up and down, like, "don't even think it."

Such a great topic! I'm pretty picky and this whole area has been a minefield throughout my life. I'm pretty sure that my relationship with my mother-in-law got off to a bad start when the day I met her I threw up her turkey salad (which I didn't like, but ate a bit of it to please her.) Then the place I last worked had two traditional hangout restaurants, despite a whole city of other great eating places. These two places had awful food, but with enough beer or margaritas, no one else cared. I was sick several times from eating the food there and I didn't drink, so I had to develop one safe dish at each. It was a wild deviation from anything on the menu, and I got a lot of not terribly good-natured teasing about it. But when I absolutely had to go to lunch there, at least I could eat. This whole area is still a work in progress in my life.

I frequently worry about this from the other side, like when I should and shouldn't offer people food, when I'm going to be offensive for shoving cake down their throat.. when I should offer them something if they say it smells good even if I've not made enough for other people..

I'm the same way. I want desperately to understand but it really doesn't help. Sometimes nothing really helps other than escaping. As I mentioned, Miss Manners (one of my social learning heroes!) has instructions for what to do when people behave in a rude or bizarre manner but when I'm actually in such a situation I freeze and freak out and am unable to do what Miss Manners has taught me to do.



I like the ritualistic aspects of etiquette. For a while, I perseverated on etiquette books and at one point grew quite a collection, including a few old, rare books that were worth some money (though their worth to me was of a higher value than selling them would have been.) Having read through tons of them (and I still can't resist reading an etiquette book when I come across one I haven't seen) Miss Manners comes out my favorite because she's fun to read (she has a lovely dry sense of humor) and because she addresses more than just how to set a table.

For example, she's written about things like what to do when you're at family dinner and your uncle starts ranting about "those people." Or, more in context with this thread, she's written about what to do when others offer you something (chocolate cake/their coat/cocaine/whatever) that you don't want yet won't take no for an answer. These sorts of topics are much more useful to me than what I have gotten from most other etiquette books.

I like to know what to expect and I sometimes go through the possible reactions someone will have and figure out how to respond in each case, before the fact, so that I'm not caught off guard in a real situation. Helpful though my husband is in deciphering the NT world for me, this is one of my "quirks" (read: necessities) that he has never been able to understand. He used to try to tell me to stop over-thinking things and just let life happen and stop wasting so much time worrying about every single possible contingency but I don't think he actually realizes how functional all that "over-thinking" makes me and how "damaged" I would appear to him and others if I hadn't gone over things beforehand and made plans. It's just part of how I use my intellect to compensate for my social deficits.

I am so very fond of etiquette and proper manners because a whole society has thought out many of these situations for me and offered me a response that has been agreed upon by (much of ) society at large as the best way to react without causing offense or worse. (Sometimes people say to me, "I love how you don't care what other people think about you!" Truth is, I care very much what other people think about me because what they think determines how they respond and how they respond can include things ranging from plugging up the tailpipe of my car to laugh at how I can't get it started to locking me up in an institution and filling me full of drugs to keep me quiet. I'd rather just get along with people and avoid the difficult ones as much as possible.)



And very long-winded. I apologize for rarely being able to say things in few words.

My (German) ex-mother-in-law was like that. When she would come to visit, she'd bring bags and bags of food and lecture me angrily that her son was wasting away (he had actually gained weight since we married) while I was getting fat (I had lost weight) and that she had brought this food for her son and I should feed it to him because he was too skinny and not eat it all myself.

Then she would take the living room curtains down and iron them, all the while griping that Americans didn't know how to keep house and pretty soon the griping would shift from what a lousy housekeeper I was to how awful America would be. "Nothing good has happened to me since I come to America! Nothing!" she'd gripe.

One time, my ex-husband timidly offered, "But mom, I was born in America."

"This is what I mean! Nothing good!" was her response. After that, he didn't bother trying to defend me or himself or America or anything. And the next time she came to visit, he'd just let her in so she could pick us apart again.

In retrospect, it's amazing to me that the marriage lasted as many months as it did.

I've never met my current husband's family. He and I both like it that way.

no, i naturally could care less so i just give them the standard "no" unless they deserve some explaination/excuse (hence, this thread)