Taste is not the same as true

Put six friends around a table in Jeddah and the argument will start before the food arrives. Which rice dish is the real one, which city does it best, whether the meat should fall off the bone or hold together, whether raisins belong anywhere near it.

Nobody wins and nobody needs to. The argument is the point. It says where each person is from, which family kitchen they grew up near, which side of the table they belong to. Everyone leaves a little more attached to their own opinion and a little fonder of the others for having fought about it.

This is good. Taste is supposed to divide us into happy little camps. It gives us something to defend that costs nothing to lose.

The same table can go wrong, though, and it usually goes wrong by carrying the habit too far.

Someone asks whether the dish has nuts in it, because a child at the table cannot eat them. Someone wonders whether the yoghurt left out in the sun for two hours is still fine. Someone says the old remedy their grandmother used works better than the medicine the doctor gave them.

These are not questions of taste, even if they are argued in the same tone of voice. There is an answer. It can be checked. Whoever claims something should be willing to say how they know, and what would prove them wrong.

Treating every question as a matter of preference feels generous and open-minded. It is not. It is how a child ends up eating a sauce nobody bothered to ask about.

Keep the arguments about rice. They are some of the best parts of eating together. Just notice when the table has moved, without anyone saying so, from what we like to what is so.