For Anna Jones, it’s lemons. For Ben Benton, it’s rice. For Gurdeep Loyal, it’s anchovies on pizza and, for me, it’s Yorkshire Tea in the morning. I could – did – date someone who “didn’t drink hot drinks”, but I would never have married a man I couldn’t make tea for when I woke up, or who couldn’t make me tea in turn.
These are what I’ve come to call “meal-breakers” – mouthfuls whose joys we feel our loved one must share, if we’re to share our lives with them. They are foods and drinks we cleave to as much for what they say about us and our values as we do for their smell, texture and taste. For most, it’s not so much the meal as the principle it conveys; not the anchovies on pizza so much as being with “someone who appreciates food as an act of collective joy – that embraces an ethos of all plates being communal,” says Loyal, author of the cookbook Flavour Heroes. The meticulous divvying-up of brown, salty silvers to ensure an even distribution on each pizza slice: that’s the sharing ethos he looks for in a potential soulmate.
Is this fair? I once dated a man who didn’t share food. When we didn’t work, I couldn’t help but blame his revulsion at my suggesting we order nachos.
“As much as music and sports, food has a tribal aspect,” says food writer Ben Benton, whose popular Go To Food Podcast is a hotbed of culinary opinions. He tells me that the episodes in which a well-known food personality says something that doesn’t resonate with their “tribe” are the ones that garner the most comments online, as listeners discuss whether this “aberration” is one they can forgive.
Dating’s the same, Benton says: “We’re constantly reading cues for how a prospective partner aligns with us and our values.” Not everyone follows sport or cares deeply for music, but food seems a reliable social cue because everyone eats. “There is so much politics to it, too: how you shop, how you consume, how you view the world,” Benton adds. As lenses go, it’s pretty powerful. Yet do we risk making snap judgments when we narrow in on a particular food or food group?
“People cast aspersions on your personality because you’ve ordered an oat milk latte,” sighs comedian Stevie Martin, who is vegetarian and allergic to dairy. Veganism, in particular, comes with a lot of cultural and political baggage, perhaps because it’s more holistic than just eschewing meat and fish. But to dismiss a prospective partner on account of their not having cow’s milk, well, as Martin points out, that says more about you than it does them. “You can be a racist, sexist pig and be allergic to dairy. You can treat people like shit and be vegetarian,” she argues. As if to prove her point, her husband, a wonderfully kind and funny man, cooks and eats meat at home; and Martin has never even dated a vegetarian or vegan.
“That’s never been a dealbreaker,” she says. “It’s how they’ve dealt with my being vegan.” She remembers one ex-boyfriend who insisted on steak restaurants when they went to Paris, and who then laughed when she could eat nothing but bread. “If they have a problem with how I eat, that tells me they’re narrow-minded and uncompromising,” Martin says. For her, the most important thing is that she and her husband eat together, whether that means the same dish or one tweaked for their differences. With fellow comedian Lou Sanders, Martin hosts Vegans in Your Regions, an Instagram series that puts vegan products to the test. She’s been delighted by some of their discoveries: “Anything that requires beef mince – bolognese, curries, chilli – my husband and I now make with Moving Mountains or Linda McCartney mince. We’ve also found great pasta sauces that we both love. The lovely thing is that we still get really excited when we find dishes we can both enjoy.”
Benton describes these meals in which both halves delight as existing in “the central part of your culinary Venn diagram. This needs to be large enough that you can go Monday to Friday eating together. If I’m out, my wife will cook from the part of the diagram I’m not in and vice versa, but there’s a big central part we’re happy existing in.”
Sometimes, these mutual meals come easily, sometimes they take work; but, if you have a sense of what that person loves, you can often translate that into something you can share together. “Think about favourites as more conceptual,” says Anna Jones, whose recipes are particularly good at catering for different diets. “For example, spaghetti and meatballs can become spaghetti with spinach polpette.”
Even when your tastes are different, there’s usually some middle ground. Benton’s wife prefers her carbonara “practically scrambled, which I used to think disgusting, but now we eat carbonara weekly throughout winter. I serve mine and leave hers to cook a bit more. It feels like a coming-together.”
That’s the thing about dislikes, says Tamar Adler, author of multiple cookbooks including her latest, Feast on Your Life. They’re more a reflection of experience than of personality. “We’re probably right to judge someone for being rude to a waiter or serving themselves before others. But if they don’t like fennel or anchovies, or think martinis should made with vodka – I mean, that is rough,” she shudders, “but you might be doing yourself and them an injustice if you assume that makes them a barbarian.”
To believe that martinis should be made with vodka instead of gin is “erroneous. But it’s something that can be healed with time and exposure.” Adler’s tongue is only partly in her cheek, for it’s true that most couples want to feel in sync in their appetites – and that how we eat and drink can reveal our appetite for other things. “In many ways, it’s our first symbolic order,” Adler says. On her first date with her now husband, they cycled to a place that promised the town’s finest hand-pulled noodles. That he loved hand-pulled noodles as much as she did didn’t matter so much as “his gastronomical and physical adventurousness in biking out there to try them. A lack of curiosity – that’s the dealbreaker,” she concludes. “And probably the vodka thing.”
The more people I speak to about this, the more I am struck by their strength of feeling, and by how much food and drink can stand for. When recipe writer and cookbook author Elly Curshen went on a date with a man who “ordered a large, white hot chocolate”, it was the childishness she felt it betrayed that gave her “instant ick”. Karen Barnes, author of KB’s Joyous Things Substack, could never have married a man who didn’t like roast chicken because of the “gentle, generous ritual of it” – which is how I feel about my teapot in the morning. Only Jones has a non-negotiable that’s solely about flavour: the “bright, forward, puckeringly sharp lemon. I work it into almost every dish.”
Years of interviewing people about food, writing recipes and, of course, his marriage have taught Benton that the most important meals for partners to align on are the comfort meals: “You’re tapping into culinary vulnerabilities. We get strong reactions around takeaway orders on the pod because that’s what we have when we’re tired, sad or hungover, and we don’t want to be judged.”
Childhood dishes also fall into this, and are arguably more important, because, as well as providing comfort, they can be cornerstones of our identities. I will never love my mother-in-law’s chicken rice on the same deep, psychic level that my husband does, but if I’d hated it, it would have been a rejection of far more than food.
In the end, the need to know and be known by a partner is universal. That can entail a book, song, place or even video game, but food will always offer the quickest and most intimate “in”.
“The only thing more intimate than eating together is sex,” the late anthropologist Kaori O’Connor once told me. She was as right as she was forthright: only food has the capacity to render us as exposed, deeply loved and elated. We may not always align. We may require some tessellation. But if we laugh at, revile or simply refuse to try a potential partner’s favourite mouthful, it rarely bodes well: for lunch, a life together or the bedroom.
