Prince Harry hates lobster? I live with a basic eater too

Times

13 hours ago

Food, for me, is life. When I know I'm going out to eat somewhere nice, I'll look up the menu online and plan my meal, days in advance. Sometimes, when I'm having dinner, I'll already be thinking about breakfast. I organise holidays in terms of meals and restaurant visits, and could probably tell you my life story as a narrative of food. But I've just married someone who thinks about eating as much as she considers background cosmic radiation.
I doubt we're alone in having such differences. Athletes coupled up with non-athletes must experience all sorts of culinary tensions. It can't be fun being married to a model, as a greedy non-model, or to a restaurant critic, as someone abstemious.
Chrissy Teigen has written cookbooks outlining her passion for comfort foods, while her husband, John Legend, has famously claimed to start his day with a simple green salad ('I have a salad with pretty much every meal'). Meanwhile, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, has just made international headlines after outing her husband, Harry, as a man with basic tastes who, gasp, doesn't even like lobster.
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As it happens, Noor, my wife, doesn't like lobster either. But that's the least of it. She doesn't, unless it's a very specific kind of tandoori chicken, like Indian food. The only unprocessed fish she will ever consider is salmon (monkfish made it on to her plate, until she saw a picture of one). She talks about once having eaten eel (very common on sushi) in the way that others talk about once having eaten dog.
On holiday, the hotel buffet is not, for her, an opportunity for a three-course meal, as it is for most of us, she just has some fruit on a plate. When we're out, she'll spend an age looking at the menu, change her mind while ordering three or four times, and then always order the chicken caesar salad anyway.
Her go-to dish at home is Birds Eye gluten-free breaded fish fillets — basically giant fish fingers, with boiled vegetables. (She is not gluten-intolerant, just prefers the non-taste.) The only restaurant items I've ever seen her get excited about are the gluten-free doughballs at Pizza Express, with extra servings of bland garlic butter. I know I once wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece praising Pizza Express, but come on. Even I don't like it that much.
It's all about our childhoods, of course, but not in any clear way. Noor grew up in the relatively middle-class setting of north London, travelling, eating in restaurants, and should, on paper, have more sophisticated tastes than me. After all, the things I did not experience on the culinary front as a child included: bacon, coffee, beef, lamb, sushi, hummus, beetroot, Chinese food, Mexican food, bagels, pizza, Diet Coke, artichokes, duck and McDonald's.
I was in my early teens before I learnt that bread doesn't always come sliced, that boiled eggs don't have to be hard-boiled, and that salad is a thing. I was about 15 when a mate's dad took us out to a Chinese restaurant in Stafford and asked, when he saw me flailing around, if I'd ever used chopsticks before. I'd not actually been to a restaurant before.
But maybe the inexperience made me curious. Or maybe the mounds of Punjabi grub at home just made me incredibly greedy. For food wasn't just about sustenance for my Indian family in the Eighties and Nineties. We used it as a means of socialising (if there's one gesture that best embodies the overbearing, almost bullying hospitality that characterises Punjabi family life, it's someone refusing more food by spreading their fingers over an already overflowing plate), worshipping (one of the tenets of the Sikh religion is that anyone who attends a temple is given a free meal, or langar), passing the time (weekends were spent at food markets, where Mum would spend hours comparing prices at stalls before making any single purchase), and wishing for a better afterlife in reincarnation (spreading leftover food for birds has long been a morning ritual at home).
My parents moved to the West Midlands in the late 1960s, and when they weren't preparing Indian food, they were either working to pay for it or growing vegetables in our terraced home's back garden to produce ingredients.
When I think of my mum then, and now, it's usually an image of her standing in the kitchen, her apron imprinted with flour, some dal bubbling away on the gas stove, and her kneading chapatti dough nearby, while surrounded by Tupperware. Noor's parents also love their food, and her mother is a fabulous cook who has some incredible recipes from India and Burma, but their youngest daughter didn't inherit the enthusiasm.
It's not necessarily a neurosis. You get people who have limited palates because they had a limited range of food offered to them as children. You get anxious eaters for whom pickiness is an involuntary response to textures and tastes. But Noor, like Harry perhaps, is just one of the world's many culinary utilitarians. For these people, food is not necessarily, as it is for us, a language of love, a vessel for culture, a medium for creativity, a connection to heritage, a way to express affection and an act of intimacy. It's a burden. A routine, banal act of refuelling.
I can't say it doesn't sometimes cause issues. We're off to Tokyo soon on holiday, a world capital of gastronomy, and I'm already worried that she is going to cause offence by going into every restaurant with a request for a chicken caesar salad. She is so uninterested in food that I've stopped cooking — doing so feels like writing a poem for someone who can't read. She picks restaurants on the grounds of ambience, and often loses interest in food halfway through meals, which means I am scoffing about seven portions of Birds Eye gluten-free breaded fish fillets a week, on top of my regular meals.
But I'm not worried. Compatibility is overrated. People put so much effort on dating apps into finding partners with identical interests, when long-term relationships are about accepting inevitable difference, and learning to navigate the subsequent tensions.
Also, I know attitudes to food can change. One of my nephews was such an incredibly fussy eater that I once took him to a psychologist. But at university he transformed himself, through sheer willpower. He seems, simply, to have realised that it wasn't cool to sit with your mates, or with dates, in restaurants and order the chicken nuggets with fries. Nowadays, he doesn't think twice about scoffing oysters, or steak tartare or lobster.
And I sense progress with Noor. I've realised I can get her interested in broadening her diet if I point out that certain foods are good for her hair — so far, it has worked with avocado and blueberries. And, of course, when we go to Wolverhampton, and my mother presents her with an overwhelming array of sabzis, dals, chapattis, pakoras, samosas, parathas and gulab jamans, she does not and cannot refuse.