Vegan FAQ: What About your Partner?

What about him?

It goes something like this:

Do you have a partner? (yes)

Are they vegan? (no)

How do you…live together?

There can be a lot of questions tied up in that. I usually interpret it as, “How do you manage the daily tasks of meal planning and food preparation when you eat so differently?” The “so differently” piece is still a strong assumption – after all, he can eat all of my food – but left to our own devices, we do eat differently, so I’ll leave that alone.

I’m bad at answering this, because this is the only way I know how to be. I was vegan before we lived together. I’ve never lived with a vegan partner, and he’s never lived with a non-vegan partner. But from the frequency with which the question comes up, and the glimpses I get into other people’s relationships, our household is a little different:

1. Most nights we eat different meals
2. We explicitly divide shared work in half
3. We have shared meals on special occasions, and the weekend counts as a special occasion
4. All of this contributes to our relationship being both less efficient and more egalitarian than the average hetero marriage in our families and social circles

1. Eating different meals

Most of our meals are fairly low-effort, with mine especially being less “cooking” and more “assembling.” I eat wraps, full of hummus and greens and maybe tomatoes if I’m not too lazy, probably three nights a week. He eats sandwiches and soups and salads a lot of the time. Even our salads are usually individualized: he likes spinach and bacon bits and the Italian dressing that comes from a packet, I like collards and kale with miso on top. He sometimes makes more involved meals based on a family cookbook, and I occasionally have the foresight to load up the slow cooker in the morning. He doesn’t cook meat in cast iron pots – ew – but otherwise all of the kitchen is shared.

In this sense, we eat like we’re roommates, not a couple.¹ And in this sense, we’re at least a bit deviant. Food is as much cultural and emotional as it is physical. Eating together is part of emotional attachment. This is amplified for life partners: newly married couples have a sense of “proper” eating and their habits converge over time.²

But we are normal³ in the sense that we do eat together most of the time. No one asks, “What’s for dinner?”⁴ but we do ask, “What time do you want to eat?” We drift away from this sometime, with working late and evening plans somtimes conflicting, but we usually come back to it. In that way, weekday dinner is a similar ritual to what I grew up with, time to chat and catch up and switch from a day of work or school into an evening of real life.

2. Dividing shared work

There’s ample food-related work beyond preparing individual meals, which we split. We take turns grocery shopping, with whoever isn’t going giving the other person a list. He texts me from the grocery store to ask where the nutritional yeast might be, and I text him to ask what a chicken “tender” is and if it is meaningfully different from chicken breasts or thighs or other anatomical parts.

I do all of the dishes for both of us, which sounds wildly unfair but is in exchange for him doing all of the laundry for both of us. No one is particular is assigned to clean up the kitchen beyond dishes, so it goes slowly downhill over time, along with the rest of the place, until one of us gets tired of living in squalor or someone comes over for a visit and we both frantically clean all morning. Fair enough.

3. Shared meals and special occasions

Longer ago than I can remember, probably after being given the remarkable Party Vegan, we started attempting to cook elaborate meals together. These were party meals, with appetizers and main courses and desserts, for just the two of us. This has evolved into making something together most weekends. Sometimes it’s a full party for two, where we cook for hours, stuff ourselves, and have a week’s worth of leftovers. Sometimes it’s just pasta and arrabiata sauce that we’ve made fifty times and know by heart. Usually it’s with wine. Tonight, for New Year’s Eve, we’re making gnocchi from scratch and a couple of sides.

We’ve become good cooks, which virtually no one knows because virtually no one in our lives would be excited to come to a big vegan dinner, most definitely not our families on holidays. But we did have a lovely three-person vegan Thanksgiving this year.

When we cook together, it’s always vegan food. I don’t cook meat, because it’s viscerally repulsive and because why would I labor on something I’m not going to eat? I sometimes get asked if he adds meat or cheese to our shared meals, which just sounds weird. How do you slap meat and cheese on top of a casserole after it’s cooked? In a curry that’s already simmered? And why would you? If the meal wasn’t tasty or filling until you added animal bits afterwards, you cooked badly.

We almost never cook for each other. I do make cookies and muffins and brownies to share when I’m in the mood. He did cook me a multi-dish Indian meal once as a surprise – and I think as an apology, though I can’t recall for what. Sometimes I think that would be nice to cook for each other more often, as a caring gesture, but it’s hard to imagine it as a daily practice, and I dislike the thought of it becoming an expectation.

4. Less efficient, more egalitarian

The big downside is efficiency. We generate a lot of dishes some days.
I don’t know how things would change if we had a kid or kids to feed, though I’m sure we could figure something out. It would be less total work to make one meal with two people’s worth of food.

Yet, in a hetero relationship, odds are good that most of the time it would be me making that single meal, me planning for the week, me needing to remember that we’re low on rice. The upside of not being able to easily default to the pattern we both grew up with, where our fathers asked, “What’s for dinner?” and our mothers did the majority of the work involved in anticipating, answering, and cleaning up after that question, is being forced to figure out what works for us, which has led to sharing work fairly. This has obvious benefits for me. The benefits for him are less obvious, although I like to think being a self-sufficient adult has its rewards.

Another upside is that we both eat what we like. Shared meals appease our shared tastes, and the rest of the time we both indulge our idiosyncratic preferences. We also manage our own health-related food choices, which gets back to division of labor, this time mental/emotional labor. I flinch every time I hear a man complain about what his wife does or doesn’t “let” him eat. It could be a caring dynamic – “My partner is helping me take care of my health” – but I only seem to hear it as an accusation of nagging. I mostly hear this among my parents’ generation, although I’m not sure whether this is because my generation shares food work better or because we aren’t quite old enough for widespread high blood pressure and high cholesterol. I’d bet on the latter. Someday I’ll figure out the real answer, using ATUS instead of my random anecdotes and shoddy human memory, but not today.

We’ve developed habits that work for us, so I don’t give this much thought except when I’m asked about it. But when forced to think about it, the shortest possible answer is either, “It’s no big deal” or “How do you handle all of this in your household, and how did you get to that point?”

1. Of course, we are roommates, and remembering to be a decent roommate isn’t a bad foundation for an equitable live-in romantic relationship. ↩︎
2. They also have “food conflict” and “food projects”, described in that same article. ↩︎
3. Normative, really, but who wants to be pedantic? ↩︎
4. To which the only response would be, “Dunno, whatchu makin’?” ↩︎