On Things I Thought I Knew

Connecticut, January 2020.

I remember the worksheets we were assigned in the first or second grade. We had to identify whether a statement was fact or opinion. “The population of the world is 7 billion.” Fact. “Tuesday comes after Monday.” Fact. “Pink is a pretty color.” Opinion. As we grow up, the number of things that we know evolves and our opinions become more intricate and although the distinction between the two should become second nature, it seems as though the opposite is true. That never again will facts be as easy to discern as they once were on those worksheets from my childhood. That the line between fact and opinion overtime blurs, like trying to ascertain the original colors of paints that have been mixed. Somewhere, in the ever-narrowing gap between fact and opinion, the world becomes contorted and recolored, as if it is being viewed through the lens of a kaleidoscope until all that is left is series of our impressions. In this way, our accounts of the world become more like shadows, colorless outlines filled with the things we think we know.

I started noticing the fallacies in my own knowledge very early on in the pages of old, discarded journals, where I found myself titling entries: “Things I Know Now”. “I feel lonely.” Fact. “I want to be a lawyer when I grow up.” Fact. “I like to read.” Fact. Now, these same statements play more like the game two truths and a lie, than they do an accurate reflection of my own self-understanding. These are just some of the things I once thought I knew about myself. But it was to these “facts” that my sense of self began tethering, like weeds sprung out of cement climbing the rusted post of an old chain-link fence. “It's what we think we know that keeps us from learning.” (Claude Bernard) If my own self-judgment was this impaired, this reliant on facts distorted by some opinion—either my own or somebody else’s probably with regards to what success looked like or what popularity meant or what I “should be doing”-- then I could only begin to guess how impaired my sense of the world was.

How many times have I sat through a conversation preparing my response to a comment or story whose ending I thought I knew? How many arguments had I gotten into over the details of a history I thought I knew? Or, worse yet, how many conversations had I avoided completely because of my misconceptions of a person I thought I knew? How many times had I sat in solitude and deliberated or scrutinized a version of myself I thought I knew? What I have found is that the moment we become complacent in the things we think we know is the moment we concede our identities and those of others to certain ignorance.

Increasingly, my mind has been turning to a conversation that I had with a mentor, turned friend, a few years ago over coffee. I have decided that all good and honest conversations are had over coffee. Opinion. He was telling me a story about reciprocity, and its subversive significance in our everyday. Once, after a dinner party to which my friend was invited by a couple he knew from work (it would be important to mention here that this friend is 80 years old), he was struck by the couples’ deep and overt analysis of reciprocity over the course of the dinner. “In the conversation you had with Mrs. Smith, what do you think was the rate of reciprocity?”, the woman asked her husband from the passenger seat of their car, in which my friend sat in the back. “I think it was about 20-80” her husband replied, “I spoke about 20 percent of the time, mostly asking her questions, and she responded 80 percent of the time, mostly about herself.” And so on and so forth, the couple went down the list of the people with whom they spoke at dinner, quantifying reciprocity. I find myself returning to this story often, turning it over in the back of my mind in the moments before and after any conversation with anyone. Reciprocity is a vehicle by which we are no longer hindered by the things we think we know.

What place does any of this have on a blog that is primarily about food? Here I reiterate that you learn a lot about a person when you share a meal together, that reciprocity is most easily quantified over dinner or coffee. But there is also the argument to be made that food and knowledge serve the same purpose: to enhance our understandings of the world, to color within the lines of our impressions, to allow us to connect with one another well beyond the smokescreen of the things we think we know, to tether ourselves to something concrete and beautiful.