There comes a point, usually somewhere in your mid-late twenties, where going out-out loses its appeal. Instead of getting dressed up and going to a bar, paying £20 for a £6 bottle of wine and shouting over music, you go to each other's houses and, unlike in previous years where 'eating is cheating', have dinner.
Dinner parties are ostensibly lovely things. You fill your home with candle light and a French Spotify playlist, lay the table and pretend that you're in a Richard Curtis film. Or at least, that's the idea. In reality you more often end up with mascara melted from the heat of the oven, a row with your other half who bought chives because 'they didn't have basil' and a laundry list of 'dietary requirements'.
When you ask, the week before the dinner, 'has anyone got any dietary requirements?' you feel like a grown-up. You're so organised and together. So thoughtful.
If you're lucky, you'll have made friends with the kind of easy going people who reply breezily 'I eat anything' while secretly hoping you won't serve any of the vegetables they secretly despise.
But you might not have had the foresight to pick your friends based entirely on their willingness to eat whatever you serve for dinner, and then you're in trouble. Dietary requirements are a stalwart of 2019 life. Gluten free, pescatarian, dairy free - the list goes on and on.
It's very boring to complain about how in 2019 we all have dietary requirements, and laughing at people for not wanting to eat gluten is so unfunny that it belongs on a Mock The Week rerun on Dave. But the truth is, balancing lots of different eating agendas is hard, harder still when everyone starts excluding large swathes of the nutritional landscape.
If your requirement is based on an allergy then you're golden; no reasonable person is going to serve something you're allergic to. Religious mandates also get a free pass, as do ideological ones. So if you're celiac, dairy intolerant, kosher, halal, vegan or vegetarian you're fine.
But what about 'requirements' which are really more of a preference, like not eating carbs?
Many of the people I love refuse to eat carbs. Blame growing during the years where celebrities sang the praise of Atkins, alongside that whole societal obsession with being thin thing that most of of us share. Whether or not excluding carbs is a sensible idea is a debate for another day – the point is, I know that if I'm hosting a dinner party and I ask what people do and don't eat, the reply will often be, 'carbs', to which I will roll my eyes in exasperation in a way that I would never do with any other food-based request.
There's a sort of hurt in someone rejecting the experience of sharing food together, like the evening you are creating isn't worth waking up half a pound heavier.
There are practical reasons to resent someone saying they don't eat carbs. Cutting carbs out of a dinner makes it expensive. Meat is the priciest thing that you can cook and if you don't have a dish which is a meat and carb combination, you're going to have to up your quantities. So when you tell your host that you don't want carbs, what you're saying is that you want all of the costly parts of a meal without any of the cheap bulking-out bits.
It's also borderline impossible to serve something which is both vegetarian and low carb, unless you're up for serving a plate of vegetables with a drizzle of olive oil and a squeeze of lemon.
But there's more to the resentment of the 'no carbs please x' text than just the logistical annoyances. There's a sort of hurt in someone rejecting the experience of sharing food together, like the evening you are creating isn't worth waking up half a pound heavier. It's similar to when someone who does generally drink alcohol picks your party to abstain at. The inference is that you and your gathering aren't worth it.
I've been the no-carb requester, as well as the no-carb request-ee. I know that the 'right' thing to do is to hope that your host isn't serving pasta and take a very small portion of whatever potatoes/rice/bread you are offered. But as is so often the case, it's not that easy.
When I've gone zero carb it has always been motivated by a sad self hatred which meant I wanted speedy, unsustainable weight loss. A classic crash diet, filled with lightheadedness and thrice daily trips to the bathroom scales. During those periods of my life I've dreaded going out for dinner, lain awake at night working out how I'll cope if I'm asked to eat pasta.
When you do a hardcore exclusionary diet it becomes your lifeblood and the only way you can socialise is when you know if won't involve having to touch a piece of bread. You mash cauliflower into a pizza crust and pretend that it's nice, you order carb-free bread flour from America and pay £30 for shipping. Dieting is often a kind of madness, and in the throws of that madness I have found myself enormously grateful to hosts who (at least to my face) don't raise an eyebrow at the request for a protein-only meal.
So no, 'I don't eat carbs' isn't a 'reasonable' dietary request, because it's not an allergy or an ideology or a religious mandate. But sometimes, in a world that weaponises food and tortures us with our own bodies, it's a necessary evil, the only way that you're able to go to the dinner party at all. So hopefully the friend who is cooking for you loves you enough to only roll their eyes behind your back, and not to say anything if halfway through the evening you crack and fall face first into a dish of potatoes.