When Your Family - And Dog - Keep Switching Food Preferences

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published November 3, 2025] ©2025

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve pretty much become a confirmed lacto-ovo-pesci-clucko-heifertarian.  Which is to say, no pork or veal. And truthfully, the heifertarian part is increasingly rare.  But every once in a while, I just have to indulge in a hamburger although working hard at not thinking of the bovine who gave its life for this. I’m truly sorry, cow.  But boy are you delicious.

While I think I’m a pretty flexible eater, accommodating family members’ dietary preferences – which now includes five grandchildren – has been a challenge.  For years, I tried to keep up with whatever brands of yogurt and peanut butter and bread the grandkids would consume.  Fortunately, as they’ve gotten older, they’ve become far less picky.

My older granddaughter is still the toughest.  She’s currently a vegetarian (mostly vegan) with the exception of … hotdogs. Yup, seriously.  She’s a vegan-BallParkFrankian. This is definitely a niche dietary category. 

As the family shopper, I always did my best to stock my husband and sons’ preferred foods and beverages, only to have them change those preferences without informing me.  And I confess, even the dog did (and still does) it.

It’s bad enough to have a pantry full of food from your usual market that no one is eating anymore.  But if it came from another market to which you made a special trip to acquire it, it makes the household shopper positively surly.

I am sure I am not alone in this.

My husband, Olof, for example, seems to go through cycles of favorite snack foods.  For a while, he preferred unsalted roasted almonds that, given the quantity in which he was consuming them, were really only available in those bulk bins at Sprouts. 

So I’d buy up to ten pounds at a time and transfer them to plastic containers and store them in the freezer.  They take up a fair amount of room but usually he was eating them at a sufficient pace that there would quickly be room for other freezables, like the dog’s homemade food.  She’s an incredibly picky eater and has, at 16, a delicate stomach.

So after a while, I’m noticing that there still seem to be ten pounds of almonds in the freezer, and they aren’t moving. 

“So, Olof,” I say, “what’s with the almond situation? You don’t seem to be eating them.”

And Olof replies, “Yeah, I’m kind of tired of them.  Would you start getting unsalted mixed nuts instead?”

Alas, unsalted mixed nuts went the way of roasted almonds.  Then he was on to tortilla chips and fresh salsa.  But I now know pretty much every recipe you can make with ten pounds of rejected almonds, and an abandoned cannister of unsalted nuts.  Pestos! Brownies! Crusted fish!

A few months into the snack chip phase, I couldn’t help but notice that the current opened bag of tortilla chips had gone stale, and the container of fresh salsa had expired.  I ended up dumping both.  Olof had moved on to sliced cheese.

“Olof, min lilla lutfisk,” I said, “would it be at all possible to indicate to the family shopper – that would be moi - when your food preferences have changed? Because the family shopper lacks clairvoyance but is finding herself increasingly aggravated at the lack of communication skills in this family.” 

When my sons were growing up, and even in their adult years, keeping up with what they’d eat – and drink – seemed to be a constantly changing tableau as well.  School lunches would start coming home uneaten. For a long time, Henry would only eat sandwiches made from cold cuts from a certain deli (not, of course, the one at your local supermarket.)

Keeping up with Henry’s beer preferences over the years has also been a losing battle.  Whatever I have in stock is the beer (IPA?) he used to drink.  So I make a note for the next visit. But by that time, he’s already moved on.

I have to admit, even the dog does it.  No, not change beer preferences.  She’s a confirmed teetotaler. She’ll suddenly refuse to eat whatever she’d been eating, so I try her on something else to find something else she likes.  Then I go ahead an order a case of it (minimum order) which she decides she doesn’t like when we are halfway through it.

I’ve tried making homemade food for her as well which, like the canned stuff, she likes until she doesn’t.  But since it is labor intensive to make, I end up with a freezer shelf full of containers of food she won’t eat.  Fortunately, I finally got rid of all the damned almonds so at least there’s room for it. 

But I really wouldn’t mind having room in the modest freezer section of my side-by-side refrigerator for actual food. 

OK, I admit I’m an enabler.  But like most moms, it’s built into our ego systems to want to take care of our families, and even our incredibly picky dog, and have their preferred sustenance on hand.

I’m thinking I should start a Rejected Food Bank with other moms in my area.  We could all post the stuff our families have stopped eating and exchange it for something our own family might. Because I got really, really tired of pesto.