Cooking can be a labour of love, filled with the finest ingredients and served on an silver platter, or it can be a quick and easy meal made for sustenance more than flavour. Microwave meals and instant noodles spring to mind for the ultimate dinner for one.
Sometimes a lazy meal is all you need, with minimal effort to provide a warm and comforting dinner. But people's ideas of easy food varies - even within households.
One man on Reddit had made himself and his girlfriend a chicken and vegetable stir fry for dinner, only for her to dismiss it as 'lonely man's food'.
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"My girlfriend calls this lonely man's food. What do you guys think?" asked a Reddit user showing off his dinner. This quickly sparked other users to reply calling out his girlfriend for ignorance of other cultures and sharing their own much less healthy 'lonely man' dishes.
One user responded: "Fried noodles? I think there's a billion people eating a variation on this every day in East Asia who'd find your girlfriends view as baffling as I do!"
Another added: "And a not-insignificant number of people in the UK too." while a third replied: "Yeah no clue here coming from a Chinese family here. This looks way better than what I'm able to cook for the wife most days.
"Having vegetables that look fresher than frozen is definitely higher up than that lonely man description."
The cultural difference was pointed out by many other users, who suggested the original poster's girlfriend was ignorant to cuisines outside of her own. One said: "I'm Chinese and the opposite of lonely, with a wife and 2 needy toddlers. I'd call it a stir fry too, looks great. Excellent amount of veggies."
Stir fry, which the original post looked to be, is a traditional dish in China and other Asian cultures and often features noodles, vegetables and meat fried in a wok. It became popular during the Ming dynasty and although stir frying is a simple cooking method, it remains popular today across the globe.
"Lonely man food in my mind is the beige delights of freezer gravel," joked another person, while others suggested the likes of Rustler's burgers and oven pizzas for "lonely man pizza".
One man shared his "lonely man" choice of food, saying: "My lonely man food is a collection of small jars of Lloyd Grossman's Tomato & Chilli pasta sauce and a few bags of whole-wheat fusilli. Nothing else, just pasta and sauce.
"Used to include a few tins of tuna and some mayo but it's not worth the money any more."
Another commenter said: "Looks like a stir-fry to me. Lonely man's food would be a microwaveable curry and rice for one."
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