Diet constraints can test friendships
Maybe a month ago, I made a major decision, or, what counts as “major” for those of us who swing wildly between paradigms of eating and finally land somewhere: I would not eat sugar, except on special occasions. That’s it.
On the pressing issue of sugar — really, candy and ice cream — I am what Gretchen Rubin, who writes on happiness and habits, calls an “abstainer”. It’s easier for me to have none, than some.
Making daily decisions about what is allowed, and what isn’t, was too consuming, and too boring. (“None” can be relative. My “special occasions” are what she calls “planned exceptions”: limited opportunities to have the thing you want, without propping the gates open to allow for, say, a dessert after lunch, because this is the place that makes that flourless-chocolate-whatever.)
There are two absolute truths about food and relationships. One, that anyone who doesn’t enthusiastically support and encourage your attempts to be happier and healthier — with food, alcohol, drugs, sleep, sex, work, whatever — needs to go.
And two, that having to enthusiastically support and encourage someone who is changing the rules of who they are, and what they do, and subsequently who you are and what you do together, creates a glutinous tension where you used to both order the flour less-chocolate - whatever and eat it in shared sugar bliss.
As “wellness” shimmies into more and more people’s lives, and as we just generally get smarter and better informed about what food does and how it makes us feel in our individual bodies and in our individual guts and in our individual cells, eating changes and priorities change, and when that changes, so do relationships.
Nourishment has never been just about food, calories, whatever “macros” are (I’m learning!), and has always been about showing love by feeding and being fed, and by eating together.
Friendship is the relationship where most of us do the least amount of work, and can be the best place for our worst selves. So when a friend we usually eat with needs to eat somewhere different, or not eat out at all, the inconvenience can feel like an indictment of the relationship itself.
And sometimes, I guess, it is? People do re-orient themselves, personally and socially, around what they eat.
Non-drinkers might excise bars and late nights from their social life; gourmands hunt, track and photograph certain dishes at carefully chosen restaurants, alienating people who don’t care, can’t afford it or would rather eat a falafel; vegans, my friendships with whom have led me through every one of Toronto’s fine vegan dining establishments (and except for the one that charged $60 for, I think, some soup, they’re fine), are maybe feeling some vindication now that “plant-based” is a selling point.
People react to someone else’s changing food choices with a combination of judgment — because everyone has opinions on what is healthy, and what isn’t, and a Paleo proselytizer will get into it with a vegan — and shame about their own habits and desires.
Having someone to be “bad” with can be a lot of the point of being friends. When booze or bar food or movie snacks are off the friendship menu, it’s hard for the non-changer who wants this fundamental thing to stay the same, and for the changer who finds out that positive moves always include some kind of loss.
I realized, while RSVPing a month late, that when I’m in New Orleans for my friends’ wedding, I might have beignets (“It’s a special occasion!” I will shout around a ball of dough, lips powdered white), and I will have a glass of champagne, but I won’t get drunk or stay out late in honour of the brides’ love for each other, and my love for them.
So the onus is on me, the “abstainer,” to compensate for not being part of the celebratory slipstream that happens around a birthday or wedding or wherever consuming something, together, is part of the point.
That onus is an opportunity, though, to make it about something more than tradition, to find something more nourishing than food.