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I love eating with other people - in my job, I get to go out with lots of different people and I just love it. I was out this week with a friend of mine and we went to Red Robin. We both got the chophouse burger, which has onion straws on it. And as we were eating and talking, both of us had the same problem with the onion straws. We'd take a bite of burger, and then almost like really stringy cheese, a stray onion would stretch out from our mouths back to our burger and we'd keep pulling to get to the end of the onion but it was one of those 10-mile long onions. So he'd take a bite and have the long piece of onion and eventually get it in his mouth, then apologize. Then I'd take a bite - same thing.We both had a good laugh about it, but that's the funny thing about eating with other people: it can get pretty awkward. In fact, eating with other people can get pretty stressful.
Everyone knows not to go out for Italian on a first date - why? Because it's messy! And you want to make a great first impression!
But it's not just dates where we think about what we'll eat. Why? Well, consider how socially vulnerable we all are during a meal. Who hasn't spilled something on themselves, dribbled food? If you've never laughed so hard your drink came out your nose, you haven't really laughed. For that matter, when you stop to think about it (and we won't for very long, don't worry), the entire process of digestion is a very unglamorous activity.The only time we're more vulnerable than when we're eating is maybe when we're sleeping. At mealtimes, more than most other social spaces, we're not totally put together. Our carefully crafted persona exposed.
Our culture loves our facades.
I'm not sure exactly when it starts (though if Toddlers & Tiaras is any indication, it's basically from birth), but we learn early on that our value comes from external, quantifiable realities - athletic ability, academic achievement, how closely our bodies match up with airbrushed, photoshopped models, the price tag on our clothes, the balance of our bank accounts.So we create a Public Self for the world to see. Some of our Public Selves pretty closely resemble us. But we get trapped into creating a Public Self that's less and less representative of who we really are. And at some point, we have to ask if the Self I'm portraying to the world is really Me at all, or if it's become a false Persona, a Mask. If maybe we've become as false as Jacob was when he pretended to be Esau.
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