Knowing and Not Knowing

On citation, ongoing education, and not fearing failure

Clockwise from left: Makke di roti (cornflour chapatis), sarson da saag (mustard green saag), boondi ka raita (fried chickpea puffs in yogurt). Image courtesy of the author, meal courtesy of a dear friend and talented cook.

I don’t know if it’s a sign of parenthood, graduate school, or just my ever-advancing age, but lately I’ve found myself embracing the possibilities of the phrase “I don’t know.” It’s a useful acknowledgment when my toddler asks me to identify the origins of every item on her plate (“Who made the bread?” “I did.” “Who made the soup?” “Daddy did.” “Who made the yogurt?” “You know, I don’t know.”) It’s a genuine gift when someone asks me what I’d do with this PhD after I’m all done. (“So you’re not going into academia?” “Well…”) "And it really comes in handy when buffering for time in a feedback session on a dissertation chapter in progress. (“You know, that’s a really good question and I don’t know if I can answer that at this point.”) But I think it’s also an inevitable way of being in the world at this moment, neither total nihilism or nor total faith, but something hazily in between. Embracing the “I don’t know” feels like the best way out of claiming “I know everything,” and thus shooting oneself in the epistemological foot.

I’m taking the acceptance of the “I don’t know” as a sign of progress because, it seems, people in food (and in academia, for sure) are often constantly in a position of having to declare their knowledge. Too often I’ve heard scholars (both senior and junior) mutter that the point of citation is not to give credit to those who have genuinely enhanced your thinking about your subject, but to “check the box” that you’re aware of the works in the field, more of a performative shout-out than a genuine tip of the hat. I’ve bristled at that, but then again, I’ve also found myself wondering if a recipe that cites its inspirations (because, of course, what recipe is totally original?) is inherently derivative, and thus unoriginal. If the two poles offered are either A) to give the credit to others and B) claim it all for yourself, it can feel that anything in between is inherently a lack of a stance, the refusal to engage with one’s own positionality. (Disclosure: A colleague in academia once described me as “diffident,” a word I looked up to ensure I was interpreting it correctly. It means “modest or shy due to a generalized lack of self-confidence.” Thinking about it now, I don’t think it was an issue of self-confidence, but rather a deeply-held certainty that anything other than modesty would come off as unearned arrogance. Perhaps I hadn’t read the room…or the institution.)

Or perhaps my desire to cite, acknowledge, and hedge my bets comes from the lived experience of working in the food world, the place where I’ve found saying, “No, I’ve never had that,” or “No, I have no idea how to make that” has often opened up the most fruitful and flavorful doors imaginable. Despite having had the privilege of being well-fed, well-read, and well-traveled my whole life, there are simply some foods I have not encountered, geographies I have never learned about, practices and techniques that I have never attempted on my own. Though I make a decent loaf of homemade challah, I routinely delegate the braiding process to my partner. Despite having one owned a rice cooker, I have never made a batch of perfect steamed rice. I can roast a great chicken, but routinely do it upside down without realizing it. I admit these things not because they should endear me to those who think I’m an expert cook (though I find such admissions endearing myself), but as a way of acknowledging that my learning process is still very much ongoing. I pride myself on having a global palate, but am still routinely encountering dishes I do not know anything about, and am only recently learning to lean into my ignorance rather than retreat to what’s in my wheelhouse. Julia Child had to repeatedly remind people throughout her career that, despite her television platform, she was not “a chef; I’m a teacher and a cook.” She emphasized this because so many people still failed to take cooking seriously, especially if it was done by women, and she wanted them to take it seriously. She acknowledged the limits of her training because, as she said, “I was always learning.” Citation strikes me not only as the power of showing your work and sharing resources, but also as an acknowledgment that the reader, like the author, is always learning, and we have to facilitate that learning experience. We simply don’t know, and even when we do, we have to show that once we didn’t. I can only hope that, once this dissertation is done, I’ll be able to declare, without the slightest hint of diffidence, not only what I know, but how I came to know it.

In the first week of my course, I asked my students to set out some foundational best practices for how to make the workshop and learning space a collaborative, creative, and respectful one, and they gave some great answers. “Practice active listening,” “Don’t yuck someone’s yum,” and “don’t play defense (when receiving or giving feedback)” were just a few of the great insights. But I was especially pleased when someone raised the point “don’t be afraid to fail.” I’m taking that philosophy forward each time I admit what I don’t know, but with a slight revision, “don’t be afraid to admit what you don’t know,” and start from there.

Recommendation: An assigned text for my students this week, but one I really enjoyed: Alice McLean’s 2004 consideration of the aesthetic pleasures of the English food writer Elizabeth David in Food, Culture & Society. We’re reading the marginalia of David and Avis de Voto in the process of updating Italian Food (1954) for its American publication, and this gave me such wonderful insights into David’s prose.

The Perfect Bite: A spoonful of boondi ka raita, yogurt topped with deep-fried nuggets of spiced chickpea flour (pictured above, alongside some makke di roti—a corn-based chapati—and sarson da saag, prepared at the home of a friend who grew up in the Indian state of Punjab). I’m definitely on a savory yogurt kick, and these crunchy little boondi just sent this dish completely over the edge. Now I want to create a savory Rice Krispie-esque treat to put them to work…)

Cooked & Consumed: Winter always makes me crave hearty soups and stews, and so I went back to a dish I first learned about when I was 16 during a summer-abroad travel program to Ghana, mafe, also known as groundnut stew. (One of my major culinary blindspots is my only surface knowledge of West African cooking traditions, and I very much intend to rectify this.) This is essentially a richly seasoned peanut butter-based stew with chicken, garlic, ginger, sweet potatoes, and roasted tomatoes. I ended up mashing these two recipes together, stirring in some fresh spinach close to the end, replacing the fish with a few glugs of fish sauce, and seasoning heavily with coriander and cumin during the cooking and a bit of ground ghost pepper at the end for those craving heat. My 3-year-old loved it, even though she didn’t quite know what to do with the cassava fufu we served with it (besides pressing her hands into it.) There’s still time for her to learn.