The truth, all the truth

Every time I hear the witness' oath to "tell the truth, all the truth, and nothing but the truth" I cannot avoid an ominous feeling considering that lawyers, regardless of which side they are on, frequently work to limit the amount of truth that gets revealed, thereby undermining the principle of "all the truth". When the district attorney office asks if the accused looked agitated, the witness will feel compelled to say that they were, but also to make the precision that it was only because they had just stumbled on the sidewalk. The counselor will restate the question as "were they agitated, yes or no?" pulling a blanket over any further details that the witness might want to provide. It is true that the cause of the agitation is an interpretation of the witness and it might as well be that the accused was already agitated before they stumbled on the sidewalk, but it could also be the other way around. As I mentioned last week, only one of the options can be factually true, but it might be impossible to tell which one.

This problem with the whole truth folds back to the complexities of telling stories. A spectator will only be able to grasp a fraction of the events in a situation, they will discard some of the details as irrelevant, the memory will wipe blank some of the details and, when telling the story again, their own abilities will naturally limit the accuracy of the recount of a set of recollections that are already only a shadow of what really happened. This degradation, which is unavoidable, is the base for, among other effects, the Fundamental Attribution Error: if we "forget" that we made a questionable choice in a risky situation, we might blame bad luck for the disaster; similarly if we ignore the support that our family has provided us during all the time that we were trying to set up a business, we might truly believe that it is all our own doing. And it will be true that it is our doing, but it is not all the truth: the truth is that without all that support all our efforts might have not been successful. Since we cannot travel back in time and re-live the situation with different conditions, it is impossible to know what the actual contribution of this support is, but I would still consider it a "faulty omission" if we do not acknowledge that support.

Photo: Seth Anderson

Over the weekend we watched on Netflix the second season of the documentary series Street Food, which this times takes us two six cities in South America to tell us about their gastronomic culture and how it is implemented in the street vendors. The basic nature of cooking, alongside with the informal regulation to which this activity is subject, makes it a particularly viable option for women who find themselves in situations of poverty or abandonment: most women are taught how to cook and they are expected to cook for their families anyway, so they might as well sell the product of their hands to somebody else. Their limitation of resources also means that these cooks cannot afford looking for exotic materials and instead are forced to resort to the staples of the regions where they live, so many of the dishes are heavily grounded on cheap and widely available agricultural products such as corn, beans, rice, yams or potatoes, often supported with whatever animal foods are at hand, such as fish (mostly in coastal locations), cheese, eggs, meat, or sausages. As a matter of statistics, these are naturally popular dishes both in the literal and in the figurative sense: they are consumed by many people and most of them happen to be on the lower end of the income range.

But the reason why I have decided to write about this today is because this season seemed to be just too focused on stories of self development, people who faced hardship and fought on to get to a better life. This narrative has two main negative effects: the first one is that it detracts from the details in the food itself, its story, the methods of preparation and the alternative varieties. In sum, it is less interesting as food journalism. The second effect, and that is what disappoints me the most, is that, by centering the story on those who succeed, they fail to account for all those who failed along the way. The series falls repeatedly in the reductionist narrative that their protagonists "persevered, until they finally succeeded". While this is probably true from the factual point of view, this story fails to mention two aspects that are essential: first of all that there were a number of contributors that helped, if not the success, the perseverance, from the child that cheered up the dejected mother to the next-door stall owner that praised their food or offered a shoulder where they could cry on a bad day. The other resounding absence are all those who did not manage to succeed: the partner who could not take it anymore and decided to move back with their parents, the stall owner who went bankrupt because of a dip in their sales, and so many more cases that also strove for success as much as they could but did not see their efforts rewarded.

Of course, having the whole story would not make the series a better food program, but at least would make it more faithful to the reality of these impromptu entrepreneurs. On the other hand, there is the question of how truthful the producer intended the series to be: if the goal was to create an entertaining, emotional and even aspirational tale, they did a fairly good job. It is just as a piece of journalism where it patently falls short. One might think that these products are made to help us in believing in the power of perseverance in front of the adversity. But who gets to benefit from this belief? That is a question that I will try to reflect on another day. Have a nice week.