The One Food Ed Sheeran (35) Has Always Avoided — Despite Traveling the World
He carries ketchup on tour across continents. He books omakase sushi tables in London, makes pilgrimages to Taco Bell every time he lands in America, and has launched his own hot sauce line that he tests on every meal while on the road.
Ed Sheeran is, by almost every measure, one of the more enthusiastically adventurous eaters in pop music. Which makes the one food he spent his entire childhood completely avoiding all the more surprising.
He Grew Up Without Meat Entirely
Sheeran did not always eat everything. For the first thirteen years of his life, growing up in a small town in Suffolk, England, he was entirely vegetarian.
He revealed on the Off Menu podcast that the vegetable options available to him as a kid were, in his words, not great, and he suspects this is part of the reason he eventually started eating meat at all.
The turning point came at school, with a sausage, and his relationship with food was never the same again.
The Philosophy That Changed Everything
Once Sheeran started touring and traveling, his approach to food became almost the opposite of what it had been.
He told Off Menu that he used to be a pizza and chips man and that was all he ate, but once he started traveling the world his thinking shifted entirely.
His rule became simple: if a whole culture collectively loves something and calls it their own, he is going to try it.
That philosophy has taken him from Japanese omakase counters to Indian curry houses, from Nando’s on a lunch break to Tex-Mex at Taco Bell in the middle of an American tour. Meat, once entirely absent from his life, became something he embraced with genuine enthusiasm.
The One Thing That Still Gets Left Off the Plate
Despite his rule about trying everything a culture loves, there is still one combination Sheeran will not touch. When he launched his Tingly Ted’s hot sauce line, he told the brand that the sauce goes with absolutely everything on tour.
Everything, he clarified, except bananas. That, apparently, is where the adventure ends.
It is a small detail, but from a man who has built an entire food philosophy around saying yes to whatever the world puts in front of him, it carries a certain weight.
His Wellness Transformation Has Reshaped Everything Again
In 2025, Sheeran’s relationship with food shifted once more, and this time more dramatically than any tour had managed.
He told Men’s Health that he had lived a pretty unhealthy life for a long stretch of his career, eating takeaway every single day and drinking regularly, and that he had never genuinely connected wellness with how he felt mentally until he changed course.
He stopped drinking alcohol, cut out smoking, dropped the nightly chicken wings and wine that had become a tour ritual, and started working with a personal trainer for the first time.
He lost more than 30 pounds and told SiriusXM Radio Andy in September 2025 that he was in the best shape of his life, adding that he had never had a six-pack before and had decided to see if he could actually get one.
The kid who once survived entirely on pizza and chips, then spent years eating his way across every culture on the planet, is now the man making his own hot sauce, running with his wife, and cooking for his daughters at home.
The only food still firmly off the table? Bananas with hot sauce. Some lines, apparently, even Ed Sheeran will not cross.
