A musing on toothpaste and bland food...

I was having a conversation with a colleague today about the origins of spicy food. She made the observation that historically, people in warm climates put spices in their meat to "cure" it, so that it didn't go bad. I'd heard that before, and it made sense, so I really didn't give it another thought.

It was only later that I wondered: why do we ask the question "Why do Asians eat spicy food?", rather than asking "Why do North Americans eat bland food?". I found it interesting to note that embedded within these rather benign questions, lies assumptions about what is normative, versus what is the "other". We expose our bias of what demands justification, versus what can be simply accepted as legitimate and "baseline".

The example above can be explained through cultural familiarity. But there are other things in our lives that we simply accept as "correct" or "better" just because they are normative. For example, noone asks a meat-eater why they eat meat. But a vegetarian cannot count the number of times they have had to answer this question. Someone who decides not to have kids is questioned as to their reasons - but noone ever asks people why they chose to have kids. In short, we assume that normative behaviours are lacking in choice and hence are passive actions, while we assume that alternative behaviours are borne of active choice - and therefore we seek to understand one's reason's for making such a choice.

Now perhaps if we switched it around, and looked at every action as a choice. Discarded the assumption that normative behaviour is without choice, but rather recognized that inherant within every action there lies a choice. What if we each went through an entire day and questioned (not rejected, but just questioned) every single normative action we participated in. Starting with "why do I use toothpaste on my toothbrush?" and ending with "why do I sleep in a bed, rather than on the floor?".

It would be an intellectually exhausting day, but it may just begin to open up our minds enough to recognize how many possibilities are out there, if we took nothing for granted! We might realize that being politically apathetic is as much an active-choice as being politically engaged; we might realize that driving our cars to work is as much an active-choice as choosing to go by public transit. We would recognize that even in doing what is normal and what appears to be passive, we are still making active choices, and that it is within our control to choose otherwise. Most exciting however is that once we remove the veils of assumption and normalcy, and look at the world afresh, the solutions to our major societal problems may even become startlingly clear.

Or perhaps we'll just realize that we really do prefer bland food..