Picky eater with guests 2679

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I am a picky eater myself. The logical and obvious thing to do is either to offer choices to all guests, or to serve something that the picky eater will like to everyone. Not to do so is impolite, as the wife tacitly acknowledged by offering the sheepish excuse to the gathering. The rule I follow myself is - never serve anything to anybody that you wouldn't be happy to eat yourself. Equally important - do not use a party to indulge your own private cravings.

In this case, however, it's very, very obvious what was going on. She was trying to get rid of leftovers. They probably had the pie a couple of days earlier, and what was left needed to be eaten up, but there wasn't enough to serve everyone present. The ice cream came from the bottom of mostly- empty containers. So she served the last of the pie and ice cream to the husband, and got something else for everybody else that she knew the husband wouldn't like, so that he wouldn't feel either in a quandary as to what to have or left out of something good. Here, however, the wife missed the basic point. A dinner party is never the place to get rid of the last of leftovers. You do that on your own time in your own privacy. The pie and ice cream should have been saved for a more opportune moment.

I wonder also whether an additional problem might have been basically a domestic argument. The wife desperately craved something chocolate, but the husband, not liking it, tried to put his foot down. Using the excuse of a dinner party as cover, the wife went out and got the cake anyway, settling, or so she thought, the argument. But the husband refused to back down and in a last-minute compromise the wife said that if he didn't want the cake he could eat whatever was left over. In that case it would be the husband that was at fault. If he feels it necessary in order to be a good host to eat dessert, then he should choke down what is offered to everyone. Otherwise he can wait until everybody else has left to have his dessert. Still, it's possible he was eating in front of his wife as a gesture of open defiance to what he felt resentfully to have been a fait accompli.

-- Alex Rast (remove d., .7, not, and .NOSPAM to reply)