The Science of Mating

Take our Are You a Good First Date?

Find a therapist near me

A "foodie call" is when someone has no real romantic interest in you but still accepts a dinner date.

The motivation in a "foodie call" is to just get a free meal or at least try a new restaurant.

If you want to prevent "foodie calls," you might suggest a more casual "lower-stakes" first date.

Have you ever been on a date where the other person seems much more interested in the mussels than your muscles, the crab legs than your legs, and the chicken satay rather than what you have to say? Then you could be on that person's "foodie call."

What Is a 'Foodie Call'?

A foodie call is when someone who has no real romantic interest in you still goes on a dinner date with you just for a free meal or at least the opportunity to try a particular restaurant or type of food. You essentially could become that person's one-time meal ticket. And based on previous studies, like two of them published in a 2019 issue of the scientific journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, it can be more than a one-time experience for those in the dating arena, with 23 percent and 33 percent of the women surveyed in those studies, respectively, admitting to having done foodie calls.

The studies found that those regularly doing foodie calls were significantly more likely to score higher on the "Dark Triad" characteristics—namely Machiavellianism (the tendency to manipulate others for self-benefit), psychopathy (the lack of empathy), and narcissism (an inflated sense of entitlement), as David Ludden, Ph.D., covered in 2019 in Psychology Today. That, of........

© Psychology Today