Wife Serves Fake Meat to Meat-Loving Husband and Son, They Freak Out, Sparks Voracious Online Debate

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

Aug 4, 2022 11:00 AM EDT

This wife and her daughters decided to play a trick on the male members of the household, who held a ridiculous disdain for any meat alternatives. (They clearly have been taking one too many pages out of Ron Swanson's book.) The wife slipped the two a meat alternative without their knowledge in their spaghetti sauce. They loved it until the plot was revealed, after which they proceeded to lose their minds.

To be completely honest… If your masculinity is so fragile that it can be destroyed by a tomato, then you need to take a seriously good look at yourself. That being said, I agree with the argument that you should never put unknown things in people's food.

This thread was posted to Reddit's r/AITA (Am I the A-Hole) subreddit by Redditor u/cheekylilbooger, who was wondering if she was in the wrong for tricking her husband and son.

Whether or not the poster was the a-hole in this situation was a divisive topic of conversation. Most seemed to think the poster was an a-hole for messing with people's food without telling them. This seems to us to be a very valid point. Others felt that "everyone sucks" for the aforementioned reason, combined with the fact that the father and son acted like immature a-holes. Others still thought that the poster had done nothing wrong since the father and son didn't have any allergies or moral objections to what they were being fed.

Here are a few examples of the takes offered in the comments, although arguments got more heated and multi-faceted than this.

"This is not really a meat eater / vegetarian issue," said RatioNo1114, voicing one side of the argument. "Tricking someone into eating something other than what they thought they were eating is a massive breach of trust, the fact that the substitution is harmless is irrelevant. That your aim was clearly to shame or embarass them over their dietary preferences does not help. Would it really be that different if they cooked meat and fed it to your daughters, telling them it was soy? YTA."

"Stop comparing what op did with feeding meat to vegetarians," advised CuteHoodie. "It is not the same at all. Father and son eat vegetables, vegetarians don't eat meat. Plus eating animals (aka things that were alive and sentient) [is] way different than eating plants, things that were never sentient/ never felt pain. It is not comparable. OP may be an a-hole but it is absolutely not the same as if her husband was feeding her -and her daughters- meat."

"NTA. They don't have allergies," stated ntrrrmilf. "Their concerns are not with the moral or environmental impacts of the fake meat industry, so it is not a flipside of being vegetarian or vegan. They are just being stupid. Make them cook their own meat."