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This one features my conversation with longtime sex advice columnist and podcaster, Dan Savage.
Now, if you don't know Dan Savage, you should at least be able to tell by the fact that he is a sex advice columnist that this conversation may get a little racy.
So if you're listening with kids, that's just another episode.
But if not... You're going to love this because Dan and I get into how food opinions and eating habits can affect dating and relationships, including my own marriage.
I also open up the phone lines and dish out some food and relationship advice of my own.
Of course, if there's a reheat you want to hear, drop us a line, hello at sporkful.com.
All right. Thanks so much. Enjoy my conversation with Dan Savage.
On Valentine's Day, it's romantic. People want to feel like their partners are attracted to them.
And think about the times you actually do want to have sex with your partner.
It's not when you sat across the table watching them chew, right?
People want to have sex with their partners after they went out and did something together.
Get out of the house, go effing bowling, whatever.
Just go be physically active, go do, go move with each other, and then you'll want to screw.
Watch your partner inhale chocolate mousse at a restaurant after a three-hour dinner.
You're not going to want to put your dick in there.
I don't know. You've never seen my wife eat chocolate.
You could put a video up on Twitter and I will check it out.
We'll be right back. How and what people eat can be common ground, but it can also be a source of tension.
Today on The Sporkful, love and sex columnist Dan Savage dishes on eating in a relationship and cooking in one.
Get the fuck out is also a division of labor.
Right. Somebody's moving around the kitchen, you know, and they're doing their thing and they're not, you don't communicate. very well and they don't want to knock into you and bustle like one of you just go the hell away by the end of this episode you'll be ready to wrap that special someone in fondant and take them up to bed Actually, that may be the only good use of fondant.
Just don't try to eat it. This is The Sporkful.
It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman.
Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
Valentine's Day is next week, which means it's a perfect time to talk with Dan Savage.
His nationally syndicated sex advice column and podcast are called Savage Love.
He's also the creator of the It Gets Better movement, which started with queer adults offering advice to young people struggling with their sexuality.
I met up with Dan in his office in Seattle, and I wanted our conversation to follow the same arc as a relationship.
We'd start talking about eating on a first date and end talking about food in a marriage. my marriage.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves, because as we know, first comes love.
I want to go through some of the different ways of sharing food and I want you to tell me what you think it says about the person.
You're sizing this person up on a date. People eat very differently because they're being observed and they know they're being observed because somebody is sussing them out about whether they want to keep seeing them and people eat self-consciously, particularly women, eat very self-consciously at that stage in a relationship.
How so? Like, give me specific examples.
What do you think is different about the way women eat? in that situation well women aren't supposed to you know when it comes to sex have desire uh you know they're not supposed to be the actors or agents of their own uh of making their sex life happen.
They can't appear to be lustful because of all the like slut-shaming and guilt we heap up on women.
And that spills over into food, you know, appetites, sexual appetites. for food can be stigmatized as well.
And women will perform eating and eat very little.
I'm not endorsing that. That is an observation.
I'm not saying that's how women should eat.
No, no. Or how all women do. You get into trouble when you start generalizing about 3.5 billion people.
But generally and broadly, I think, you know, you read what women have to say about how they eat on dates when they know the straight guy is observing them.
And the straight guy eats very unselfconsciously and a woman picks up the salad.
I mean, but... I know that when I was dating, I would be somewhat conscious, maybe less so than a woman, but I wouldn't eat... something that was likely to drop all over myself, which I do frequently when I eat.
Me too. Right. I wouldn't order something that might – negatively affect my digestive processes later that night.
Yeah, you don't want to fart when you're getting a blowjob.
That's right. Yeah, that's a turnoff, I'm pretty sure.
And so... You hope it's a, it's not always a turnoff, but you're always hoping it's a turnoff.
You don't want to accidentally find yourself in bed with somebody who's happy you had the baby back ribs and the beans in bed.
Well, you know, to each his own, Dan, as I'm sure you know better than anyone.
No, I'm totally down with the each his own thing, but I don't want to.
I should keep it to I statements. I shouldn't make it general.
You don't want the universal. You don't want to find yourself in bed.
Some of you do. I don't. Let's talk about the morning after.
What do you cook for someone the morning after when you want them to stay?
And what do you cook when you want them to leave?
Well, you pull out the stops if you want them to stay.
You don't make something you can't make.
Don't make something bad. Don't like pull out Martha Stewart and try to make eggs Benedict or something stupid.
And breakfast is simple. I never understand these people go line up for brunch.
On Saturday and Sunday morning, outside, there's a restaurant by my house, people lying down the block for brunch.
Making eggs is easy. Poaching a couple eggs, a couple eggs poached on toast and some sliced fruit, that's all you need.
And that's really easy and it's nicer and, and, uh, almost more thoughtful than something crazy.
You don't want to appear to be trying too hard.
No eggs Benedict. You want to try hard and fail because then what you've said is I suck at this cooking thing.
And you don't want to, you know, overplay your hand.
So something simple that you can bust out.
See, that's an interesting thing, though.
Matt says, please come back. Right. The thing about trying too hard.
This, I think, is an interesting relationship issue.
I'm sure you hear about it all the time in your work.
But like... Why is it that people don't like people who are trying too hard?
It's not that people don't like people who are trying too hard.
It's the sensing that they're trying too hard. creates sort of an obligation on you, makes you aware that, you know, it puts a burden on you almost.
If you have sexual relations with someone for the first time in your apartment and they come into your kitchen after showering off and there's some insane spread on the table, they're going to think, This is a little much for breakfast the first time I sleep over.
This is actually kind of... Makes me feel obligated to, A, if he sleeps over at my house or she does, to lay out a similar spread.
Like what's being communicated by that is, I'm so into you, I'm so into you.
And people aren't ready to hear that at the start.
Even if they are into you equally as hard, they aren't ready to hear it because saying that... with food or just saying it with words, that early in a relationship it displays poor judgment and poor impulse control.
The two things people look for in a partner.
Let's talk a little bit about Valentine's Day.
Do you and your husband do anything special on Valentine's Day?
Nope. I feel like it's almost like the relationship version of New Year's Eve.
Like all this expectation, all this pressure to make it something super special, which invariably makes it disappointing.
Right. And you've been assaulted by commercials.
There's this anxiety around not getting what other people are getting.
And I don't think that people should do anything on Valentine's.
My standard advice, though, for people who do do something on Valentine's Day, sex first, then go out to dinner.
Because the calls I get and the letters I get in the wake of Valentine's Day are from people who are nervous and disappointed and spooked that they didn't have sex on Valentine's Day.
They went out to dinner and then they came home and fell asleep.
Well, because you were full of heavy food and booze and chocolate and you fell asleep.
F, sleep. So have sex at 7 o'clock and then go out to dinner at 9.30 or 10.
When the restaurant's empty, easier to get a reservation, the staff isn't so frazzled, and you'll have already nailed the sex part.
Let's talk about couples cooking together.
There was a term that I heard. I don't know if the New York Times coined it, but that was the first time I came into contact with it a while back.
They did a story about couples cooking together.
Which only happens in Viagra commercials.
Right, right. Well, they coined the term kitchen bully.
And I don't know if you have this experience in your home.
I know I have this in my home in both directions.
Which is why couples don't cook together and shouldn't cook together.
Okay, go on. Cooking, I think, is a solitary process and everybody has their own ideas about how to be done.
And if one of you is the better cook or enjoys cooking in a relationship, I think you should seed the cooking. to that person.
If they indeed enjoy it, you're not burdening them with the cooking.
It's what they want to contribute. Let them cook and get the fuck out of the way and you clean up.
But, you know, you only ever see couples cooking together merrily in commercials where relationship dynamics are misrepresented in order to sell us products.
So tell me, so here's my personal situation.
You tell me how you think I should deal with this.
So I think my wife would freely acknowledge that I am the more experienced, accomplished home cook.
But she's a good cook, and there's a few dishes that she makes that I love that are really delicious.
The issue is that... especially since I've started doing this food podcast, sort of without meaning to, I've accumulated more food and cooking knowledge.
So now- I know more and it's very hard for me to walk into the kitchen and see her cooking.
And like, don't look, turn right around and walk back out.
Really? Yeah. Don't look. Even if I could say something that would make the meal better, like if I have a tip that's like, actually you should cook this chicken at 400, not 350.
And I know it'll be better. If you can gently slip it in.
Okay. Which applies not just to cooking. get away with all sorts of stuff in a relationship if you can gently slip it in.
So lube that comment up and gently slip it in.
So you beat me. I'm my wife. And pick your bet.
Like one comment per meal cooked, maybe.
Okay. That's good advice. But not this, that, the other.
Don't take over. Okay. So let's go ahead and role play here.
All right. I'm my wife. You're me. You just walked in.
There's one comment to make. Tell me, how would you say it to me?
I think the way to do it is this. You know, one of the people I interviewed said it's a good idea to do this.
Not I'm telling you that you're an idiot and you don't know, but we both didn't know this and now we both know it because I learned it doing my food podcast.
So if you frame it not as I am correcting you, but I have this new information that corrected how we both used to cook chicken, maybe you'll get away with it.
Maybe that's the lube you need to slip it in.
Okay, I like that. I like that. Good luck with it.
But I think you should go with my original advice, which is to back slowly out of the kitchen and go look at something else.
If you can't look at somebody cooking. without tossing comments out about how they could be doing it better.
That's a bad strategy for cooking. It's a bad strategy for sex.
It's a bad strategy for driving. It's a good strategy for a high-conflict relationship.
Oh, you know, you could be cooking that chicken, but, you know, I have a blowjob technique for you while you're down there that maybe you might find helpful.
It would improve the blowjob for me. Nobody wants to hear that.
While they're blowing you, nobody wants to hear that.
Coming up, I'll ask Dan for more advice on my own relationship.
Janie doesn't care as much about going to restaurants as I do.
So what's the solution? Then later in the show, I will take Dan's seat and become the relationship expert myself.
I'll help a couple in Illinois work through a unique food conflict.
Stick around. And now, delicious word from our sponsors.
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If you heard our recent episode in which I ate my way across Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, then you know...
How much fun I had. You know how delicious it was.
The soul food at Big Mike's. The coffee and incredible brunch at Croissant's Bistro and Bakery.
And the fish and quail and duck at Rivertown Bistro.
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Welcome back to another Sporkful Reheat.
I'm Dan Pashman. Hey, if you wanna hear what I'm eating and reading every week, you should sign up for the Sporkful newsletter.
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Again, that's sporkful.com slash newsletter.
Thanks. Now let's get back to my conversation with Dan Savage.
I still had some questions for him about food-related tensions between my wife Janie and me.
Do I have your wife's consent to hash out your relationship with her on the show?
Yes, I called her on the way here. She's a huge fan of yours.
She loves what you do. No thanks. But here's one of the things that we run into is that she's not as passionate about food as I am. she doesn't love to eat.
Like she, her idea of a great night is just like eating cereal on the couch and watching the real housewives.
Like that's all she needs. She also doesn't like to spend money.
So she doesn't... like to go out to... I'm not even talking about a super fancy, super expensive restaurant.
Even for the two of us to go out and spend $80... for the two of us to eat a decent meal, like I get excited about that.
And she immediately, the check comes and she's like, wasn't worth it for her.
Right, right. And I used to resent that a little more until I got ahold of these flavor tasting tabs that test your palate.
And she couldn't taste anything on the tabs, which the results show that she is in the bottom 25% of tasters.
So I feel like I can't really hold it against her.
And on one hand... Hey, look, we don't do everything together.
I can go out for a nice meal with someone else.
Ding, ding, ding. But like... But I... But...
I liked, you know, it's fun to share a great meal with someone that you care about.
And so she's a good sport. And she'll sometimes be like, yeah, sure.
Like, let's go out wherever you want to go.
But like there's a little bit of a disconnect there.
So what's the solution? You go out with other people and have those fancy foodie meals with other people who can really appreciate and enjoy it and – dish about it with you and you don't make her perform delight in a restaurant where she is bored or unable to Taste all the subtleties.
My husband likes to go out dancing and I hate it.
I don't enjoy it. Um, and every once in a while I'll go to a club with him just so I go to a club with him. but otherwise he goes out with his dancing friends, his clubby friends.
And I don't resent him for going out on those nights.
I'm like, bye, have fun. Thank you for not being the kind of insecure bag of slop who can't do this on his own.
So really what you're advocating. You go for the fancy meals.
She stays at home and watch Real Housewives and eat cereal.
And then you're both happy. Right. So what you're advocating for my wife and me is a poly-eater-ish relationship.
Yes, essentially. Poly-eatery. That's a good term.
You should totally have that trademarked immediately.
But what happens is, like, she might say it's okay.
Sure, honey, let's be polyeterous. But then I go out all over town.
And she's upset. Well, you just have to check into each other.
You have to talk to each other. And how does that explain?
Tell me how that conversation goes. Well, it works in my house with Terry going, I'm going out tonight.
Do you want to come? And I say no. And he says, okay, bye.
So I think you go to her and say, I made reservations at this restaurant.
If you want to come, I'd love to go with you.
If not, I'll make... I'll ask somebody else to come along and let her choose, let her pick.
And then she, without any stigma or guilt or sad feelings or long faces is free to opt out whenever she wants.
What if she starts going out for nice meals with other people?
How am I supposed to feel about that? I don't know.
I don't know how you're supposed to feel about that because –
That's the other side of the poly-eatery coin, isn't it?
Yeah, it is. But that's to stretch the sexual sort of analogy to its breaking point.
There are people with really low libidos whose partners get permission to go have sex with other people.
And then... When the low libido partner thinks they want to have sex with other people, the partner who's already been out there having sex with other people is like, I'm only doing this because you don't want to have sex very often.
And now you're saying you want to have sex more often.
Yeah. How do you advise those people? I advise them to break up.
Maybe we should back slowly away from this analogy.
Honestly, I don't foresee a day when my wife is going to start going out to dinner with other people.
I mean, we get two small kids. She's content with her bowl of cereal on the couch and her TV.
Yeah, and then you don't have to hire a sitter either.
You're saving money left and right. You can split the check if you go out with somebody else and you don't have to hire a sitter.
What's not to like? Another question about... Pick up a box of Lucky Charms on the way home for the wife.
Right. She loves Lucky Charms. Me too. So my wife was raised in a kosher home. which you probably know means no pork, no shellfish, but people may also not realize that it means you can't mix meat and dairy.
And it even means in a true kosher home, you're supposed to have separate plates and separate utensils and separate cooking implements so that nothing that ever has dairy on it can ever touch something that had meat on it.
Now, she is not... so insistent that we have our home that way.
But I'm also Jewish, but I was raised in a, like we eat everything household and I love pork and shellfish and I love to cook and I love butter on just about everything.
And we've reached this sort of like tenuous compromise where I said, okay, I won't cook pork or shellfish in our house.
I can eat whatever I want when we're out of the house and I can buy cooked pork or shellfish outside the house and bring it home and eat it on a paper plate.
Um, and I also won't cook with meat and dairy together, like really blatantly, like I'm not going to melt cheese on top of her chicken.
I'm not gonna make her chicken Parmesan.
And deep dish pizza with sausage is right out.
Right. None of that. But here's really the issue is that When I just talk about the kosher issue with her on an intellectual level, we really kind of agree that... That it's horseshit.
That it's goofy, purely arbitrary cultural inheritance.
Right. What I find frustrating, though, is that intellectually she and I agree.
But she feels guilt because she feels like this is a tradition that's been in my family for many generations.
I respect that and I'm respectful of the way her family wants to eat.
But it's frustrating for me when it's more like... I almost... If she was like, I want to be orthodox, I'm just taking all the rules, I'd almost be like, okay, you know, that's an issue on a larger level.
But like... It's more that she just feels... What is it you want me to say that's going to upset your wife?
I feel like you should slip me a piece of paper across the table with exactly what you want me to say about this. to help your wife through this?
Or what it is you've always wanted to say that you haven't been brave enough to say to her about it?
I think I probably said it all. I don't know if you have any advice.
Is this sort of tenuous compromise that we have which sometimes is a source of tension because she'll say like, she feels like I'm pushing her away from this thing she wants to observe.
But sometimes I feel frustrated because I feel like it's all a bunch of BS.
And why should I have any restrictions? So we have this kind of tenuous compromise that works nine days out of 10.
Is that the best we can hope for? Oh, yeah, absolutely.
If there's something else we should be doing differently.
Tenuous compromise is, I think, the gold star for long-term relationships.
If you can get to a tenuous compromise about something –
Yahtzee, you win. You won't get to unconditional surrender on most points of contention in a long-term relationship.
But if you can hammer out some – carve a groove into each other and hammer out a workable compromise, that's –
I mean, do you feel really restricted and restrained by the compromise that you can't make a pork loin for dinner for your family?
Not terribly restricted. But it's also, you know, like my parents will go buy me a delicious lobster roll and bring it to my house.
And that is delicious and wonderful. But you have to eat it in the car.
I can eat it at home, but it's still, I'm sort of like, but I would like there to be more lobster rolls in my life.
I'm not as... But there'd be less wife, Ben.
That's true. So you have to pick. Okay. The price of admission, more wife means fewer lobster rolls.
And hopefully you love your wife more than you love dead lobsters.
I do. That's Dan Savage. His nationally syndicated sex column and podcast are called Savage Love.
Now, as you know, we've been talking about the way food affects relationships here on The Sporkful for years, often by taking calls from you.
And while I may be no Dan Savage, I like to think I've dished out some decent advice over the years.
So right now, we're gonna share one of the very first food and relationship calls we ever did here on the show. and it remains one of our favorites.
So let's go to the phones. Hi, Dan. This is Barbara Young in North Aurora, Illinois.
My husband and I have issues about how we eat cornbread muffins.
Okay, go on. He always takes a knife and cuts them horizontally so there's a bottom and a top.
And then while they're warm, he butters them, lets the butter melt in.
I take the muffin and I break it with my fingers. top to bottom so that there's a piece of the nice crown, the nice top, and a piece of the bottom on each half and that it's craggy in the middle so when I butter it it's got nooks and crannies for all the butter to melt into.
And we don't understand each other, how we eat cornbread muffins.
How long have you guys been married? We've been married about 10 years together, quite a bit longer than that.
Okay. So it's two issues. Part is that you like the nooks and crannies.
Part is you want a little bit of top in every bite.
Yeah, pretty much, yeah. And the nooks and crannies, really what you're getting at there, Barbara, is surface area to volume ratio, a common hobby horse here on the Sporkful.
By breaking it apart and having an uneven surface on the piece of cornbread muffin, you are increasing the surface area available to absorb that.
Delicious, delicious butter. Yes, and it just tastes better that way.
Okay. All right. Well, that's a strong argument.
Is your husband Bruce around? Can I talk to him?
He's right here. Okay. Yes, hang on. All right, let's see what Bruce has to say for himself.
Hello. Hey, Bruce. How are you? I'm pretty good.
How are you? Good, good. So I was just talking to your wife, Barbara.
She's got some issues with the way you eat cornbread muffins.
What do you have to say for yourself? I have some issues with the way she eats it, too.
I'm not sure. I've always done it this way.
Cornbread, for me, when you try to tear it apart, often it breaks.
And so cutting it in half seems to keep the pieces together so you don't have little chunks around, which is one of the reasons why I do it.
And I like cornbread muffins a lot. I like the top better than the bottom, but I still like them both. butter it and eat the bottom and then eat the top later and really enjoy it.
What do you say to Barbara's comment about the butter, about the crags, the nooks and crannies, and the advantages that those present?
I think that's just a little overrated. I find with a nice smooth surface to put hot butter on. it melts right in and through the cornbread.
Do you ever slice the cornbread muffin horizontally, put the butter on the insides, and then griddle it so it gets golden brown and crispy?
Let's see. No, I have to say I've never tried that.
That certainly sounds fun. It's more than fun.
It's freaking amazing. This is an interesting one.
So what do you think about it? Where do you lie in this controversy?
Well... I have to say that I think your approaches probably say a lot about your personalities.
For instance, actually, you know what? Barbara and Bruce, I'm going to put you on hold for a minute.
Are we good? They can't hear me? Okay. All right.
I'm going to make a prediction. I'm making a prediction.
We'll see if I'm going to be right. Barbara likes to get in there.
She likes to pull the food apart with her hands.
She wants maximum butter. She is someone who...
She's more the one who's a little bit willing to take risks, a little bit more full of gusto.
Bruce, he's more the steady... He's the steady hand.
He wants a nice smooth cut. He's got his way of doing it.
It's the way he's always done it. And he's happy.
All right. I also suspect that Bruce is neater than Barbara.
Those are my predictions. Okay, let's bring him back.
Hello. Bruce and Barbara, can you hear me?
Yeah. Could you hear what I was just saying just then?
No. Okay, okay. So keep Barbara nearby. I'm going to ask you a couple questions now, Bruce.
Between the two of you, which one would you say is the more sort of adventurous, the one more likely to take risks, the one who's more, who may... live life on the edge with a little more gusto?
Well, personally, I'd say that we're pretty close, but probably me.
Really? Yeah, I'd agree. Really? Well, it shows you what I know.
I buy a lot. And now which one of you is neater around the house?
That would be me. So it was the exact opposite of what I had predicted.
Well, I will tell you this. Here's where I come down on your debate.
I think that if you are going to eat the muffin hot out of the oven, I would go with Barbara's approach.
I would break it up by hand because I agree I want a little bit of that crust in every bite, and I like those crags for catching more butter.
However, I have often done Bruce's approach when the muffins aren't quite so fresh, and in that case, slice them in half horizontally, butter the insides and then put those buttered inside sides down and griddle them in a nonstick pan so they turn golden brown and crispy and buttery.
We have to try that. We often have more than enough cornbread muffins to have some the next day.
We're definitely going to try that. And if you really want to go hardcore...
If your muffins are big enough, you can do what I call muffin trifurcation.
Slice them into thirds. This time I would go vertically. slice them vertically into thirds, and then you have the middle slice that's got two open sides.
You butter both sides and griddle both sides of that one.
Now you are vastly increasing your butter per muffin, which is something we can all get behind, I think.
Well, Barbara and Bruce in North Aurora, Illinois, enjoy your muffins.
Thank you so much. Thanks, guys. Take care.
Thanks for the good ideas. And our editor.
The show is mixed by Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher.
Our executive producers are Chris Bannon and Jenny Radelet.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman. And I'm Noni from New York City, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.
This reheat was produced by... The team that produces The Sportful today includes me, along with managing producer... and senior producer Andres O'Hara.
Our engineer is Jared O'Connell. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app?
Yes, the SiriusXM app. It has all your favorite podcasts.
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Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
