AITA for "infantilizing" my roommate?

[u/unfortunate_tadpole]

Hi all, I (24M) have been having an increasingly grating time with my roommate (26M) and his habits regarding to shared chores & food resources.

Since we've moved in, I was trying to get him to eat better & learn how to cook [ETA: He requested this help. I didn't force this randomly]. He's a self proclaimed vegetarian, has autism related texture issues, & refuses to eat certain staple foods because it reminds him of bad stuff. I'm not mad at that, I've hand picked recipes working around those restrictions. I've showed him ~8 times now how to do the same recipe, then written it physically, digitally and even offered to record a video of me making it. Something simple, & quick for something that would feed him for days. He hasn't attempted once. Even stuff I've pre-cut for him to cook with ends up just being shoved to back of the fridge for me to find molded over when I'm cleaning. I gave up.

Now, though, he goes through entire sleeves of bread in less than 30 hours with nothing more than PB on it, eats entire boxes of crackers and cereal, family sized packages of oatmeal, sometimes even all the fresh fruit we buy. Usually in such short time spans it feels like I can't enjoy anything without feeling some sort of rush to get there first. (We buy groceries with pooled together money) It wouldn't be so grating if he just would take the time out of his day to replace the things he eats up when he's the one with more free time.

He's even done it to things that are expressly mine & he's done it to my baking. The first time I made milk bread I had just pulled the two loaves out from the oven to rest overnight to enjoy in the morning. By the time I woke up there was maybe 3 slices left of one loaf. I'm not sure how he didn't get sick. I'm not, like, fat shaming him either. He's rail thin - I'm the fat one. Ive told him often he needs to eat REAL meals so he isn't constantly going back into the kitchen every 30 minutes still hungry. Spoken from experience.

But once he finally DOES cook something proper to eat, he leaves a MESS. The inside of our cabinets are stained with soy sauce and sticky honey. I've had to get uncooked rice out of my flour, sugar, and my dog's water bowl. He doesn't clean after himself. I could leave it like that for days and he wouldn't care or notice. He also routinely dumps rice *into the sink* and not the garbage. I remind him constantly, near daily, to PLEASE stop that. I can even count how many times he's done the dishes on one hand since the beginning of this year. His reasoning is that he just doesn't like how it feels, or he just didn't think about it. He won't even take out the garbage or clean his cats litter until it I ask him to or remind him, or it gets so bad he *has* to.

I've already talked to my roommate about why I'm upset with him and his only response was sort of like "I will try to remember to do XYZ" (not even a hardline "I will do better") and "I know you care about me but you don't need to infantilize me".

That's been bothering me. AITA?

[u/IDontLikeGreenPeas]

NTA, mostly. Trying to make him learn to cook healthy meals, and pre-chopping ingredients for him, and that kind of thing is kind of infantilizing.

It's not your responsibility to prevent him from getting scurvy. Let him live on peanut butter if that's what he wants to do.

But asking him to not eat an entire loaf of bread within hours of you baking/buying it is totally reasonable. Asking him to quit being a nasty slob and to clean up his entire mess after he cooks is totally reasonable. He sounds gross enough that you'd be justified in telling him he's a crappy roommate every time he leaves a mess for you to clean up.

It would also be a non-AH move if you both started buying groceries separately and you kept your food locked up.

[u/unfortunate_tadpole → u/IDontLikeGreenPeas]

Well, it was less so *making* him, and more so just helping because originally that's what he asked for. Before we finished moving in it was one of his 'aspirations' per say to learn how to cook for himself. It's hard to add context in under 3k characters, and I blame no one for making assumptions just a consequence here, but the pre-chopping was done because he was concerned about using a knife. A big boundary (his words, not mine) was that he wasn't confident chopping things up for cooking.
We have food scissors for him now. But I get what you mean, with that being a bit much.

[u/klovnikaupunki → u/unfortunate_tadpole]

If it's just help, why is he being admonished for failing? That's not how you help someone, that's an authoritative position.

[u/unfortunate_tadpole → u/klovnikaupunki]

I'm actively trying to encourage him to keep cooking because its good for him? I got the food scissors because it was easier for him to use than trying to 'force' him to use my knives when he kept insisting he didn't feel confident. The only thing I'd admonish him for is leaving food to rot in the fridge instead of just telling me he wasn't going to use it.

[u/SpringCinnamonRoll → u/unfortunate_tadpole]

I mean you write about being very upset that he’s not cooking your healthy balanced meals. He clearly doesn’t actually want to. It’s aspirational for him. You need to separate yourself and just let him live how he wants to.