I love to cook. I feed my people crazy food. In my pantry at this exact moment, I have fish sauce, ghee, Garam Masala and berbere. I make spicy food and sour food, I pickle radishes, I douse our stuff with curry. I feed my family bold, flavorful, ethnic food that sets their mouths on fire. They have been exposed to every sort of recipe. They have assimilated a super wide range of flavors and textures because I want them to love good food.
And every single time we go out to eat, my daughter Remy orders chicken and French fries.
Every.
Single.
Time.
This child eats peppery food with the heat of a thousand suns at home. She eats onions, peppers, garlic, curry, broccoli, fennel, quinoa, roasted red peppers, salmon. She gobbles it up like a skinny little carnivore. At a restaurant? Chicken and fries. They were some of the first American foods she was able to stomach, and her psyche has snagged on them. She can pull no other option out of her culinary satchel when forced to make her own decision.
She just goes back to the same predictable flavor.
I get this on a very human level. Sometimes I just want more of the same. I want the same thinkers, the same cacophony, the same groupthink. I assemble and invite a niche brand of religion, worldview, moral outrage and theology into my ears. I like what I like and I like other people to like the same things.
I watch this with regularity in the weird online world where niche tribes have formed, creating something of a group identity. An issue comes up, the tribe gathers and formulates, then the responses start flying with predictable homogeny. The group machine feeds the outrage or dissidence or full throttle approval or cynicism, and people go public with cemented opinions formed back in the echo chamber without any tempering from different sources.
It’s tricky, because in so many ways, our niche tribes are life-giving and meaningful, as they should be. They offer likeminded community and a place to belong. These are wonderful outcomes in a noisy, lonely world.
But when we invite no other flavors into the mix, the chicken and fries has a downside. When the same views are bandied around the group endlessly, it causes ideas to seize when they should remain fluid. It inadvertently (or advertently) silences opposing or even just differing perspectives, assuring each other that we are right and they are wrong; the echo chamber has spoken. Ironically, opposing tribes operate the exact same way and come to the exact same conclusions; they simply swap the winner and loser blanks.
I know this is my tendency. I recognize my instinct to reach for a familiar flavor to affirm my own ideals. So I have some best practices to save me from myself and maybe they will be helpful for you. Let’s break it down into two categories:
