Manifestos of a Meal Maniac

Living on a college campus means we brush past each other constantly—on Cross Campus, interaction between SSS and Commons, in dining lines.

We exchange quick hellos, maybe a "how are you?" that neither of us really answers. But I want more than that. I want to know their inner selves. Meals are the low-stakes way to do that.

This manifesto is simple: maximize the moments that matter. One meal, one conversation, one interaction, one person at a time.

Look, I know I can't be close with everyone. But there's something I hope for: leaving a warm impression upon the people here. Years from now, when most people forget the exact details of our conversation, I hope they remember how they felt talking to me. That I cared. That I listened. That I was genuinely interested in who they are and what makes their internal gears turn.

Is this desire selfish? Maybe. This is the selfish gene of cross-pollinator.

Not a meme-vector in the internet sense, but a meme-vector in the Dawkinsian sense—an organism whose role in the ecosystem is to carry ideas, insights, stories, wisdom, intellectual fodder from one to another.

Cross-pollinators don’t stay put. They drift. They hover. They move between flowers, picking up what each one offers and dropping it off somewhere new. Cross-pollination only works if I actually move and meet folks! Connecting people—through ideas, opportunities, or resources—feels like second nature, ever since I met a fellow cross-pollinator, who gave me the language to voice this desire, at a youth organization dinner (shoutout to CivicsUnplugged for organizing Democracy Over Dinner, and inviting me ).

The paths I’ve mapped as cross-pollinator within Yale shouldn’t end at campus borders; I want them to stretch outward, opening new destinations where I can glimpse people’s inner selves in their natural habitats and origins. ᨒ ོ ☼ ⛫↟ 𖠰𖥧˚

Meeting people from all corners of the globe, I’d love to have a friend I can crash with in their city or town, and learn about their “hometown” experience (Yale’s tradition of learning about a person’s life story). Others have opened their generous doors to me (shout to my SoCal 𓂃 ོ☼𓂃 friends who let me crash and share the best foods and your childhoods); I’d do the same. And I have—people have stayed with me when catching flights out of JFK or LGA. ᯓ ✈︎

It is a big ask, and it’s very kèqì (客气)— the Chinese cultural habit of being extra polite and never wanting to burden or inconvenience anyone. But this is an aspiration across my lifetime to have friends all over, so I have to over the sense of kèqì if I want to deepen our friendships. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗᕕ( ᐕ )ᕗ

I ask people for meals because I am hunting for good conversations. The kind of conversations that help you learn something about yourself and the world.

One of my life goals is to become conversational in almost any topic, which means being exposed to the biodiversity of ideas that exist beyond the liberal arts education of Yale. I feel the world expand with each question I probe from the person sitting across from me, watching their eyes light up and diving into their mental rabbit holes 🐇🕳. Every response opens into more strange and niche questions. I love following people into those fractal edges of the infinitely interesting ❄‏𖦹⚛ (see here).

At the time, I didn't realize my effort was trying to exceed Dunbar's Number—the cognitive threshold of people you can maintain a stable relationship with—by trying to befriend as many people as possible. While this appears quantity-oriented, you can only elevate a person to close friend if it is a quality conversation.

It's never because I am not content with my friends—I cherish my friends dearly—it's the fact that there's infinitely interesting things about interesting people that I hope to uncover. Admittedly, I am tempted by the alternative of having a tight-knit friend group at times, but I love meeting new people.

Not to mention, I’m aware of the limitations of meals as a means to get to know people. By meeting people primarily one-on-one, I miss the dynamics of seeing how they function within a group, like their rhythms and riffing along with others.

And if I'm being honest, even maps for cross-pollination need tools to track routes, revisit paths, and remember coordinates. My way of doing that is much less mystical than the metaphor suggests, but it works.

The spreadsheet itself is simple, low-tech: it's a list of names in alphabetical order, the date we last got a meal, a running list of people I want to meet, the people I'm waiting to hear back from.

I had to disabuse myself of the idea that using Google Calendar makes things transactional. It's a tool for my organization so I have control over my schedule, and it empowers me to meet as many people as possible. I made the spreadsheet because my brain is not a reliable storage system despite my enthusiasm. In my first semester, I'd tell people "Let's get a meal!" way before I had any ability to follow through. Now I end each day noting who I crossed paths with and who I want to reach back out to—a gentle reminder of the people I haven't seen in a while.