My wife and I recently decided to conduct an experiment: to see if people with different political views could find common ground by making and eating Italian food together.
And no night turns into a tongue war.
The idea for this dinner arose out of a breakfast conversation two years ago when I mentioned to my wife that communication problems between red-leaning and blue-leaning people seemed to be getting worse, not better, and she gave I “look”
This look meant I nearly violated one of our check-in rules, which states: Unless you are already do something.
After some research, I found a way to follow the Raede family code in the form of Braver Angels.
Braver Angels is an organization founded on the idea that it could bring red and blue-leaning individuals together for peaceful, meaningful discussions on today’s topics.
Braver Angels started six years ago and now has 89 chapters in 49 states and continues to grow. Now we have a Braver Angels chapter in Santa Barbara.
So, we thought, if our goal is to bring people together to find common ground, what could be more fundamentally common than eating?
My wife and I are lucky enough to spend part of each year in Italy and we have become friends with an Italian family who own a culinary school there. Learning from them, we’ve become fairly well versed in the basics of Italian cooking. We even occasionally help teach there.
At the suggestion of another Italian friend, we combined our interest in Italian food with our interest in bridging the political divide with the Red/Blue Italian Cooking Classes and Dinners series.
For the inauguration, we invited two red-leaning couples and two blue-leaning couples. We didn’t identify who was who in any of the emails, or when people arrived.
We simply handed out wine glasses and aprons, asked everyone to wash their hands and introduce themselves, and started making pasta. While the pasta was taking a break (very important), we each took a few minutes to share a little bit about ourselves.
Many of us have spoken about our families and our upbringing: some have internalized and inherited what they learned at the childhood dinner table, while others have completely rejected the family consensus and gone in a different direction .
Those few minutes of sharing made the later political conversations much calmer and more empathetic. And at the risk of sounding crazy…even funny.
Our guests seemed to be having a great time, no one wanted to leave and our dinner lasted over five hours.
Maybe it’s the act of making, cooking, and eating food together that breaks down barriers. Maybe it’s decent wine.
Or people may simply be looking for the right vibe to share the pent-up sentiment that everything seems to have been politicized over the past few years.
With permission, we filmed people posting their thoughts after dinner. Some samples:
“When I got the confirmation email, I looked at the names, but I didn’t know who was who. Then I thought, doesn’t it really matter? We should be able to sit at a table and talk. And we’re doing that .”
“I love it. The fact that we ended up talking about it is a major achievement.”
“Anytime you’re ready to do it again, I’m open to discuss politics with you. Anytime.”
Will this work with other communities/other cuisines? Would it do the trick to invite Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to join Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell in their aprons and rolled up their sleeves? No idea, although that might seem like fun.
More importantly, would it hurt to try?
