No—you do not need tiny dishes for food photography.

The comment you saw was about true macro meaning roughly 1:1 magnification. In a real 1:1 macro shot, the subject recorded on the sensor is life-size, so fitting two normal dishes or glasses in the frame would be impossible unless they were extremely small.

But most food photography is not shot at true macro magnification. A macro lens can still be useful because it focuses closer than many other lenses, while also letting you step back and frame the scene normally. Many photographers use macro lenses more like portrait lenses for food, often from some distance away.

A reversing ring is different. It turns a normal lens into a very high-magnification close-up setup. With that arrangement, you usually must move the whole camera to focus, work very close to the food, and have extremely shallow depth of field. That makes it much less practical for photographing whole plated dishes.

So for full food scenes, normal dishes are fine. Use macro only when you want close detail shots, and realize a reversing-ring setup is much more restrictive than a true macro lens.