a-spoon-is-born:

one of the ways i know this culture has a massive issue with consent

is the sheer amount of people I’ve known that just lie & tell people they’re deathly allergic to foods they dislike

because otherwise people will hound them, mock them, coax them, harass them, try to force them to eat it, or even trick them into eating it, and they will never hear the end of it

your coworkers will bake it into a fucking pie, call it something else, and wait til your birthday, gather everyone and their first cousins to sit around in a circle waiting for you to put a forkful into your mouth and then point rhythmically at you in a chanting, glaring, sweating, unholy circle like SWISS CHARD SWISS CHARD YOU JUST ATE SWISS CHARD HA HA HA SWISS CHARD NOW YOU LIKE SWISS CHARD

Because forcing someone into a situation where they don’t feel safe declining putting something into their body they’d rather not be there is totes 100% wholesome American fun

And this is something so known that it’s infinitely easier to just lie and tell people that you’ll die if you eat that food…which actually doesn’t always stop it from happening

It’s not just the USA, it happens in other places.

I love cooking. It’s something I’ve found I really like learning, especially when I can find recipes with things I like. But I also like cooking for other people! Problem is, when I cook for other people the three or so dishes I make for me don’t cut it, and they expect me to eat everything I make, even when it’s things that will make me sick, so I don’t do it too much.  People make fun of me or get mad at me for being a ‘picky eater’, including my own family.

I had a mild oat allergy as a child, I don’t have any that I know of now (though i tend to avoid things with oats in them anyway, so I don’t know), but there are plenty of things I can’t eat for various reasons. Even as a child I was forced to eat oatmeal. There was this one cooking class I went to in middle school. Mostly it was very simple, and I was completely willing to try some of the food. One of the three things they taught us involved chick peas. I voiced that I didn’t want to eat them, and had a teacher (my school’s teacher as it was a field trip, not the food instructor) actually try and shove them down my throat. And that wasn’t even the end of the chick pea thing. See, a year or so later, I was at my cousin’s house for dinner, and they made chick peas. I mentioned I felt sick at the thought of eating them, and explained why, and was promptly accused of making it up and lying for whatever reason. The details on this may be off, but that’s the gist of what happened. I was still forced to eat them, and I felt sick for a while.

I have a lot of problems when it comes to food, and like a lot of people I was forced to eat plenty of things I didn’t want to for whatever reason as a kid and refuse to eat them out of an aversion. Being autistic doesn’t help, either, because trying to explain why the taste and texture of certain things makes me want to eat a shoelace instead gets the same reaction of ‘you’re so dramatic, eat it anyway, you’re not five’.  I’ve been trying new things a lot lately, and people express absolute shock every time because I’m supposedly so picky, and honestly? Fuck the culture surrounding food.