My mate offloads his unhealthy food to me. How to tell him I can’t stomach it?

A friend keeps offloading his unwanted foods – cakes, chocolate and cookies – onto me. He likes to have a healthy diet and would rather see me die of a heart attack and diabetes instead. How do I get him to stop?
C.C., Stanmore, NSW

As far as your offloading friend is concerned, he’s performing an act of monumental benevolence. He’s thinking, “You know, I could’ve chucked this calorie-dense, tooth-rotting crap in the bin where it belongs – and not the compost bin because I wouldn’t want any worms or blowfly larvae to suffer dental, heart or tummy issues. But then I thought, wait, I could give this sugary, stroke-inducing shite to my dear friend in Stanmore! They’ll eat anything!” Which is why, unsurprisingly, the act of offloading foodstuffs can be a tremendous insult to the offloadee: nobody wants somebody else’s unhealthy, only-just-edible, food hand-me-downs; they’re the oversized, ’90s-era shoulder-padded jacket of the pantry.

Thankfully, putting an end to unwanted food-based offloading isn’t difficult. You just have to do what my brother-in-law, Steve, does whenever we try giving him our cakes and chocolates and any re-re-re-thawed-out sausages that we were nervous about giving to the dog. He shakes his head and says, “Nah, don’t want it” in a disgusted and dismissive way, ensuring we can take no pleasure in our monumental act of offloading benevolence.

So just try The Bro-In-Law “Nah, Don’t Want It” Technique, and really lay on the dismissive disgust; your friend will eventually get the idea and start binning the food. Or he could do what we ended up doing: unloading all unwanted treats on the neighbour’s kids. Children are the only grateful food-offloadees. And they can handle it: their digestive tracts are more rudimentary than a compost maggot’s.

guru@goodweekend.com.au

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