Food and friends, part I: Food is social life

February 26, 2024 By in Essays, Life, Personal Tags: , , Leave a comment

Before I lost my tongue to cancer, having friends over for dinner was my most common form of hanging out:

No sane person wants their tongue removed, but having it out and not being able to swallow has particularly awful resonances for me: I’ve been into food and cooking since I was a teenager, and “going out to dinner” was the most common form of going out for Bess and me. “Having friends over for dinner” was our most common form of socializing. I chronically experimented with new food and gadgets in the kitchen. What can I make with fish sauce? Is the sous vide machine worth it? Can an air fryer replace the oven for many dishes? Will the capers in cauliflower piccata alienate our guests?

After the surgery, the questions changed. Would I meaningfully survive at all? In that first week after the surgery, I felt I should be dead. What would happen to me? Would any semblance of normal life be achievable?

I like to eat—or, rather, liked to eat—and, at current levels of technology, everyone needs food. So why not combine what I like to do, what everyone needs to do, and what I can afford to do? “Come over for dinner” is low stakes: eat for an hour and discuss the projects we’re working on, the things we’ve learned lately, or the ideas we’ve been having. Then go somewhere else, or do something else, or finish the work.

Most people experience diminishing marginal returns from hanging out: the first hour might be great, the second okay, and the third drags. How many times have you wanted to leave some event that was good for a while but ceased being so, yet you felt socially obligated to? For this reason, a time constraint, true or not, improves a lot of meetings: “Let’s go for that walk at 3:00, but I have to run by 4:00.” A lot of us aren’t that interesting, or don’t vibe as well with one another as we could or should, or aren’t working on projects that are fun to share.

Things are past the optimal point when phones come out and videos or whatever start being passed back and forth. For some reason, a lot of people want to fill the time they have with hanging out, but my ideal is different: we should hang out for the right amount of time—which is, I think, usually the length of a long meal—and that’s typically not all day, even if theoretically all day is available. Because the ice cream is there doesn’t mean all of it should be eaten; because the day is there doesn’t mean the whole thing should be spent.[1]

That a lot of us aren’t maximally interesting is a weakness mostly ignored in David Brooks’ book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, as I describe in “The quality of your life is the quality of the people you get to know.” Yet Brooks says some people are better at eliciting the best in others, and that we can consciously improve our ability to elicit the best. I want to think I am one of those people, and that the act of feeding people interesting things helps to bring out the best in them, but, if I’m being honest or realistic, I’m likely not.

A few people, or rather a few combinations of people, generate positive marginal returns, not diminishing ones: the more time I spend around them, the more we know each other and the deeper we can go together (Bess is like this). “Combinations” is key: sometimes I may unlock positive marginal returns in Steve, but not in Christy. And Christy may unlock positive returns in Dave, but not in Steve. Someone whose chief projects are woodworking probably won’t get as many useful ideas from me as someone who wants to discuss books. I can’t usually predict when a relationship with positive marginal returns will develop—people talk about “chemistry” in couples, but there’s a different kind of chemistry in platonic relationships that go deep, or in partnerships, like co-founding a business. The involvement of a project seems key. Ben Horowitz describes what these kinds of relationships usually need in The Hard Thing About Hard Things:

Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works.

Omit the word “business” from that quote and the important idea remains: a lot of the best relationships are neither pure combat nor pure validation. They’re somewhere in between, which is often the sort of thing I’m trying to get at when I speak of “generative” situations, which I do often:

That last link concerns psychedelics, which can be a powerful binding agent between people and groups—stronger even than food. Some situations are more likely to yield generative outcomes than others, and it’s worth trying to engineer situations that are conducive to generating positive marginal returns. Like sharing a meal.

One of the core primitives of life is the ability to meet and bond with other people. Psychedelics can do that, and so can food. I’m surprised that food isn’t consciously considered as a way of bonding with others by more people. While other activities are great, whether hiking or lifting weights or making short movies or starting a company, the basic universality of food has virtues.

The basic universality makes dinner casual. Success, friendship, insight, epiphany: “Accident, contingency and luck play a massive role” in all these things. When I’m having people for dinner—and the word “people” is deliberate, because many aren’t yet friends, and some never will be, which is fine and expected—I’m trying to increase the surface area for accident, contingency, and luck. I want to eat with someone, sure, but I also want to learn something of who they are, and show something of who I am, and see what comes out of that.[2] Often the answer is “nothing.” In my life, the most common outcome of extending myself and working to make things happen is the relationship ceasing the moment I cease putting forth effort. Despite the median and even mode effort at a relationship not working out, trying still seems better to me than not trying. Romantic relationships are tremendously important, even though most attempts at kindling one don’t work. The people who wind up with the best relationships, romantic and platonic, seem to be the people who try hard, create lots of opportunities, and focus on the relatively rare big winners.

Geography may play a role in the different social outcomes of group dinners. New Yorkers are more social and less skeptical of new connections than Arizonans. I met many people and made many friends when I lived in Massachusetts, Seattle, and New York. When I went to grad school in Tucson, I met many people, but only one true friend came out of period, despite extensive attempts at friendship. Before going to grad school, I’d imagined meeting a community of striving intellectuals who were constantly trying to better understand the world, and with whom I’d be able to trade papers, get and give interesting feedback, and create mutually beneficial idea exchanges.

Instead, I found that most of my peers were going to grad school in English as a way of pointlessly avoiding the real world, and if they had any ideas, hid those ideas carefully.[3] In retrospect, my decision to go at all is baffling. At the time, my whole model of the world was wrong, and I aspired towards the wrong things. Also, while I lived in Tucson, three guys independently threatened to kill me (a neighbor when I asked him to turn down his music, a landlord who illegally kept a deposit, and a guy who pounded on my door in the middle of the night), so I wondered: is something wrong with me? Then I moved to New York and the death threats ceased, making me think that, instead, there’s something wrong with Arizona.

Since Bess and I moved to Phoenix in 2020, we’ve been trying, and mostly failing, to make friends. Paul Graham is right in “Cities and ambition:” “In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message.” Phoenix’s message is: “sit alone at home and watch TV.” The lack of aspiration is palpable and, to me, depressing. Phoenix feels like a city bereft of anyone who thinks. I know that’s not true—it can’t be true—and I know there are exceptions, but the main current of complacency is so strong that I’ve not been able to overcome it.

I moved to Seattle right after finishing undergrad, and at the time I was trying to be a novelist, so the “inexpensive, relative to takeout” element of cooking at home was important. I’m not the first to observe or realize that the “starving” part of “starving artist” is more easily achievable than the “artist” part. With so many things in life, doing it right means learning to do it yourself, and so it was with me and cooking. Cooking for four or five requires about the same time and effort as cooking for one or two, so I was happy to try and make the apartment I shared with my roommate a hub. And I succeeded! Cooking for others was and is fun. Ideas are a form of exploration, as is food. What I made then differs from what I make now; without a tongue, I can’t chew or swallow normal food, and what I “eat” has to be blended into a slurry first. Out: almost any kind of wheat product, which turns into a glutinous mess, or anything that depends heavily on texture. In: braises, soups, stews.

Food can be done well or poorly, as an art or as an inconvenience; it can border the sublime or be simply terrible. One purpose of “art” is to show off: dinner can function similarly. Food is one of capitalism’s many glories, since the impulse and demand for better food drives producers to find and offer better ingredients. The Internet enhances the quality of some foods: beans from Rancho Gordo, fermented soy sauce from Amazon, spices from Burlap and Barrel, chile peppers from Kalustyan’s and The Chile Shop and many other places (let me know your favorite dried peppers vendor). Fresh food is more available, too: fresh turmeric is available in places it wasn’t a few years ago. Not long ago, I’m told, it was rare to find coconut milk in stores. Now, basic grocery stores stock once-exotic ingredients like lemongrass, Thai basil, or kaffir lime leaves. In Arizona, many salsas are marked as being made locally. The locals may be dull but the salsas are bright and complex. I’m partial to salsas since beans, avocado, cojita cheese, and salsa blend well together in the Vitamix.

Because I rely on the tastebuds in my cheeks, hard palate and esophagus, how I taste and when I taste—primarily via the esophagus when I swallow—has altered the way I layer flavors, as well as what heat and acid profiles I can tolerate. I wish I still had the finer gradations of taste that having a tongue grants, but I don’t, though I can still distinguish between, say, salsa bases: those that start with tomatillo, or guajillo, or ancho, or habanero: each imparts a different flavor. I should order Mark Miller’s salsa book.

Food as an art is like any art, in that it’s infinite from a human perspective. As tools, technologies, and ingredients change, so too does what gets made. I never made fresh beans until I bought an Instant Pot, and the Instant Pot unlocked the ability to easily stop eating mushy, slightly metallic canned beans in favor of dried beans. Better beans in turn unlocked a panoply of bean flavors, which can relatively quickly go from dried to cooked in 10-30 minutes under high pressure—and with fresh beans, a bunch of possible recipes were unlocked in turn. It’s both annoying and useful that the number of recipes is effectively infinite, although many aren’t great, and almost every site that gathers recipes also includes a bunch of crap at the start to game Google’s search algorithms.

Once one develops a sense of how flavors go together, it’s easy to use recipes as inspiration rather than strict algorithms. I’ve learned, for example, how anchovy fillets or paste impart umami depth to many dishes, and so anchovies hide in a surprising number of my soups and stews. Many Indian slow cooker recipes benefit from a can of lager in lieu of water. Food can be a puzzle, and the more techniques one understands, the greater one’s ability to intelligently and deliciously solve the puzzle. The best programmers are always learning new languages, new algorithms, new math, because they know they’ll be able to bring the ideas they learn to bear on the problems they face. Same with cooking, or writing, or doing anything interesting, novel, creative, or special.

This essay is about food, yes, but it’s also about how to think about mastery of any subject. Growth depends on nurturing curiosity, which then nurtures connection, which leads to new things to be curious about. Food fosters friendships, and those friendships, in turn, influence the way I cook and the novel ingredients I try.

Have you mastered any fields? If not, why not? If so, which ones, and why, and how?

If you’ve gotten this far, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing care. Part II is here. And Part III is here.

[1] This can especially be a problem when there are flights involved, and people think that they have to “make the most” of what time they have together. But what if making the most of the time is about the quality of time, not the quantity? What if quantity detracts from quality? What if parallel play is good?

[2] There’s a similarity to reading widely while I’m writing, during which I often unexpectedly find passages and opinions that I can quote and respond to. For example, I was struggling with “Trying to be human, and other mistakes,” but then I read the Noam Dworman interview, and that showed me the way to the completed work.  Without reading promiscuously, those connections would never have been made. Promiscuous friendships can also lead to connections, but that’s another topic.

[3] Those ideas, if they exist, are still well hidden today, from what I can tell.

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