Man's husband loses it when he's 'tricked' into eating vegan pulled pork. AITA?
When this man cooks some alternative food for his husband, he asks Reddit:
'AITA for making my husband a vegan dinner even though he’s completely against becoming one?'
I (24M) and my husband (25M) have been happily married for a little over a year now. We met through a mutual friend and he learned very quickly that I am a vegan. About a year after we met and got closer, we started dating.
He had no issues with me being vegan, but made it very clear that I couldn’t force him into being a vegan, which I respected. I haven’t ever put him down for eating meat in front of me, as that is his choice. Each to their own. We even served both vegan and meat-inclusive food at our wedding to accommodate both of our families.
Up till now, everything was great. However, recently I’ve been seeing a ton of vegan recipes on my pinterest and decided I wanted to try making one for dinner. We don’t usually end up getting to have fancy dinners at home as both of us work full time, but I found some time today to cook something up.
It was a recipe for pulled pork sandwiches, but the pork wasn’t actually pork, instead it was jackfruit. He seemed a little stressed about work but I showed him the surprise dinner, and that seemed to help his mood out.
He ate it happily, and even complimented my cooking. I didn’t say it was a pulled pork sandwich. All I had said was that I made some sandwiches for us, nothing more and nothing less. But when he asked what was in it - and when I told him it was a pulled pork sandwich with jackfruit as a meat alternative - he lashed out.
He shouted, telling me that he made it clear he was staying a meat eater. I tried explaining that I wasn’t trying to turn him into a vegan, but he’d just walked away then. This happened a few hours back, and now he’s refusing to talk to me.
I feel like I might be the asshole for making him a vegan meal even though he’d made it extremely clear he wouldn’t become one, because even if it wasn’t my intention to make him one I still made a vegan dinner that passed off as one with meat in it. So Reddit, AITA?
Let's see what readers had to say.
reasonablead3605 writes:
NTA. Having a vegan meal isn't a bad thing. If I was dating a vegan and they made me a meal my default assumption would be that meal is vegan unless we had a separate conversation about it. This is a weird reaction from him.
owlsncardinals writes:
Absolutely NTA. Making a meat eater a single vegan dinner is not coercion or sneaky in anyway. His anger is super misplaced and kind of dumb of him, no? He ate it, thinking it was pork, with his partner whom he knows is vegan, and didn't think to ask until after the fact?
What exactly is his expectation? A notification each time you cook that what you've made is vegan?
It's one thing to not want to become vegan. It's another to be against anything that is vegan. Is he against Oreos? Corn on the cob? All fruits and vegetables? Perhaps the issue at hand is that jackfruit is a very close 'fake' for meat and as a food he wasn't familiar with, he felt fooled, but you did nothing wrong.
gcot82 writes:
NTA at all. Vegan food is absolutely normal food. You are in no way limiting him or making him change. You made a nice meal that he enjoyed, it just happened to be vegan. Does he expect you to make him dinners that you can’t eat at all?
As an omnivore, The aversion some people have to eating a single meal without animal products is incredibly childish and weird to me.