The Eggplant Principle

Or, What Don't You Do?

Recently, I commented on Facebook that I don’t much like eggplant. My generous chef friends immediately sent me a huge array of eggplant recipes, including recipes from India, France, and Italy, as well as a recipe for pickled, stuffed eggplant. Always game to test out new recipes, I cooked them all. And readers, I am sorry to report . . . that I still don’t much like eggplant.

Eggplants sure are pretty, though.

Part of the problem is that it takes an enormous amount of effort to make most eggplant dishes compared with other foods I like (all that salting, draining, breading, frying, blotting-on-paper-towels, and splatter-cleaning-up), and eggplant isn’t even nutritious. (OK, eggplant does supply some fiber and traces of manganese and a couple of other minerals, as well as a bit of nicotine—for real!—but other than that, they are basically sponges for soaking up oil.) If you enjoy eggplant, you won’t mind the effort, and it is of course always fine to eat non-nutritious foods. Case in point: I love baba ganoush (which I view as a vehicle for tahini and olive oil) when someone else prepares it for me. But because I don’t otherwise enjoy eggplant, and because it isn’t healthy anyway, I’m giving myself permission to give up on it.

In fact, my eggplant experience prompted me to create a simple diagnostic test for whether we should fulfill others’ demands. I’m calling it the Eggplant Principle. If people expect you to do something but you aren’t sure whether you should, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Do you enjoy it?

2. Is it cheap and/or easy?

3. Is it good for you and/or the world?

Ideally, you will say yes to at least two of these questions, but if your answer to all three questions about the proposed action is no, you are allowed to refuse. Put another way, try answering this question for yourself: What don’t you do? And why?

And if you are employing the Eggplant Principle in your own life, bravo! It takes courage to live this way, because three personal and cultural impulses push back against our efforts to act according to what’s best for us and our families.

We Want to Fit in and Be Cool

We humans are social creatures—we evolved to live and work together in tightly-knit, interdependent groups—so it makes sense that it can be difficult for us to flout convention. Even more, we want other people to admire us and pay us compliments. This is normal! But sometimes conventional expectations don’t work for us. Take shoes. Seemingly every magazine, book, and show targeted at women tells us that normal women are really into shoes and enjoy strutting around feeling sexy in high heels.¹ And, my fellow women, if you genuinely love fancy shoes—YOU, not the media and not other people—then you go girl!

But, as the owner of size-eleven feet that have been chafed and maimed by ill-fitting shoes and high heels, I am done with sexy shoes and heels. Done, I say! For one thing, I have found out the hard way that salespeople who say that painful shoes just need to be broken in are lying: if they hurt in the store, they will hurt forever. For another, I like walking, and I can’t walk in high heels. Several years ago I realized that I had a choice: I could wear shoes that other people admired, or I could walk. Walking won.

Here are my hiking shoes, which are the only shoes I ever wear now.² They have taken me to fancy concerts and parties, on myriad errands, through hundreds of kilometers of hikes, and to the summits of sixteen mountains (so far). For me, sexy shoes violate the Eggplant Principle; forget style—give me my comfy hiking shoes!

My second example of something I don’t do because of the Eggplant Principle is a bit tougher for me to admit, because it is deeply uncool. At the risk of sounding like Jerry Seinfeld’s parents, I prefer to start dinner by 6pm, and not later. There. I said it.

I do have my reasons! I’m naturally both an insomniac and an extreme morning lark—most days I’m awake by 5am—and if I eat dinner after 7pm, I have trouble getting to sleep before midnight. In addition, I grew up eating dinner at 5pm every night because my dad, a middle-school principal, left for work around 6:30am most days and spent the lunch hour not eating but instead supervising and hanging out with his students. He would arrive home at 5pm, ravenous. More often than not, he’d return to school right after dinner to see a performance, attend a meeting, or preside over an event. So our early dinners allowed my dad to be there for thousands of kids.

And at the risk of sounding defensive, I think the cachet for eating late is misplaced. Late diners aren’t intrinsically superior to early diners; both groups are responding pragmatically to their circumstances. In Spain and Latin American countries, for example, people dine as late as midnight not because they’re so much cooler than the rest of us, but because their weather is so much hotter. Similarly, people in the New York City area likely eat very late because of work hours and long commutes.

It takes courage to choose what’s right for us when we know we will come off as weird and uncool, but it is also freeing—and I can attest that healthy feet and better sleep are well worth the loss of status.

Others Say the Action is Good, But in Fact It Isn’t

We all can come up with numerous examples of things that experts once said were healthy that later turn out not to be. Remember how eggs used to be dangerous but are now good for us? Or how we all started eating margarine because it was allegedly better than butter,³ until we discovered that trans fats were about as safe as asbestos? Or how researchers like Dean Ornish told us that a high-carb, low-fat, and low-protein diet was the healthiest—and millions of Americans followed that advice and gained weight and developed Type 2 diabetes?

Experts’ childrearing advice poses particular challenges for us parents who want to listen to our inner voices but are bombarded with messages that we’re doing it wrong. As just one example, beginning in the 1970s, a moral panic about kidnapping swept through the United States, and as a result, parents who let their kids walk home alone from school or play outside unsupervised have been reported to the police. Our culture, in protecting kids from the vanishingly small risk of stranger kidnapping, denies kids the opportunity to develop independence and problem-solving and social skills through unsupervised play. This lack of free play may also have contributed to the increased anxiety and obesity currently afflicting American kids. Thankfully, a movement for free-range kids, founded by Lenore Skenazy,⁴ is resisting this pressure. Constantly hovering over our kids is neither fun for us parents nor good for our kids.

I offer a personal experience on this topic, even though it does me no credit. Educational experts tell us that good parents get involved in their kids’ schooling, check homework, give advice, and monitor grades. Accordingly, I diligently logged on to the grade portal every day—until, that is, my son, then in ninth grade, ordered me off the portal permanently. Why? Well, I am a perfectionist, and I was freaking out about any assignment that was late or received a grade lower than an A. (I told you that this story does me no credit.) My son quite rightly informed me that school was his job, and that he would take responsibility for getting his assignments in on time and doing his best on them. And you know what? He did, even without my “help”! In this case the experts were wrong, and it only took me a couple of years, and some prompting, to discover it.

We Have Always Done It This Way

A particularly powerful source of pressure to conform comes from tradition. Even if we don’t enjoy a cultural or familial practice, even if it is costly to us, and even if it is bad for us or the world, we may have a tough time resisting the demand that we just go along with it. The Culture Study blog recently hosted a discussion on “What ran in your family until it ran into you?” featuring this terrific line: “Tradition is peer pressure from dead people.” The Eggplant Principle allows us to question these ingrained practices if they no longer work for us. Below are two stories to support this point, one comic and one tragic.

The comedy: There’s a (possibly apocryphal) story about a mom preparing roast beef for a family dinner while her little daughter watches. The mom lays the roast on a cutting board, slices off both ends, and throws them in the trash. Confused, the daughter asks why her mom throws away part of the roast. “Oh, my mother always did it this way,” says the mother. Later, at the family dinner, the little girl asks her grandma, “Why do you cut off both ends of the roast and throw them away?” “Oh, my mother always did it that way,” replies the grandma. Finally, the little girl asks her great-grandmother why she cuts off the ends and throws them away, and the great-grandmother starts laughing. “I used to do that because my pan was too small!”

Now the tragedy: The show Succession, which is about an abusive family of billionaires, demonstrates in every episode that “We have always done it this way” allows abuse to continue unchecked. In the clip below, the patriarch, Logan, hits Roman, his youngest son, hard enough to knock out a tooth. Of the many people in the room, only Roman’s brother Kendall speaks up; everyone else tries to minimize the abuse, treat it as normal, or pretend it didn’t happen, because they have always done it that way. (The slap occurs just after the one-minute mark. Warning: the violence is upsetting, and there are F-bombs, so please skip the scene if you’d prefer.)

I began this essay with an amusing story about cooking, but as you can see my point is in fact quite serious. In matters large and small, we have a right to live our lives according to our own needs and principles. Unless brave souls (like Kendall in the scene above) ask themselves, “Do I enjoy this? Is it cheap and/or easy? Is it good for me and/or the world?” and then act, injustice and unhappiness will persist, in our lives and in the world. Or, as the Lorax says, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

How about you, readers? What don’t you do, and why? What ran in your family until it ran into you? Please share your thoughts in the comments, and, again, bravo for your courage!

The Tidbit

As it happens, my husband absolutely adores eggplant, and it seems unfair that he should always be denied it just because I am not a fan. So I do sometimes cook the following recipe, which meets criterion two of the Eggplant Principle because it is quick and easy. You can serve it as an appetizer, or it makes a light meal if you serve it with a side salad. The version here is my adaptation of a more basic recipe from Jeanne Lemlin’s terrific book Quick Vegetarian Pleasures.

Eggplant Caviar

1/4c olive oil

1 small onion, very finely chopped

1 small clove garlic, minced with 1tsp salt to make a paste

salt, freshly-ground black pepper, dried oregano, and red pepper flakes, to taste

about 2T tomato paste (sundried tomato paste if you can find it)

1 bell pepper (I like yellow best, but you can use any color), finely chopped

1 15-oz can diced tomatoes

1 eggplant, peeled and cut into 1cm-square pieces

a squeeze of lemon

your favorite whole wheat bread, toasted

1. Heat the oil in a very large skillet and saute the onion until it is translucent (don’t let it brown). Add in the garlic, tomato paste, and the spices and briefly saute.

2. Add in the bell pepper and cook for a few minutes, tossing occasionally, until it softens, and then dump in the canned tomatoes. Stir and heat through.

3. Mix in the eggplant, lower the heat to low, cover the pan, and cook for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. The eggplant will shrink way down and become mushy. Remove the cover and let some of the juices cook off.

4. Remove half the mixture, puree it in the food processor, and return it to the pan. You want the texture to be a bit lumpy (which I think is supposed to make it look like real caviar?). Squeeze a lemon over everything to brighten the flavors, stir, and adjust seasonings if necessary.

5. Serve at room temperature on toast.

1. Looking at you, Sex and the City.

2. I love these shoes so much that I have three pairs: beat-up ones for knocking around in, newish ones for hiking, and brand-new ones waiting in the wings.

3. I feel a bit smug about this one. I LOVE butter and continued eating it throughout the 80s and 90s. I was pleased to be vindicated!

4. Skenazy first rose to prominence because she allowed her then-nine-year-old to ride the New York subway alone, to the shock and horror of seemingly the entire country. I found this reaction amusing, because at the time I lived in Prague, where it is totally normal for children as young as six to ride public transportation without their parents.