Not too long ago, I was at Kristina’s for dinner, which was the usual motley assortment of expats and occasional real live French people. Kristina set a couple of boxes of ice cream on the table, and a young Chinese woman perked up. “I know this–that is the good brand, yes?” And I looked at the boxes and recognized the name of the brand that Nick always tells me to buy.
And I knew that someone had been talking.
See…okay; I’ll come back to the ice cream in a second. In the meantime, I mentioned the care packages our parents send us, and how they usually contain popcorn for Nick and M&M’s for me, because it’s really almost impossible to get those things here. Marie, our French representative for the night, cocked her head.
“Plain ones, I mean,” I explained. “The peanut kind is everywhere–it’s kind of weird, though. No plain.”
“Those are–what?” She really looked baffled now. “M&M’s are chocolate, and the coating, and peanuts. That’s what anyone means when they say ‘M&M’s’–they have peanuts in them normally.”
See? The rest of us? We really are nothing but amateurs here.
So…how does Nick know what the “good kind” of ice cream is–and how does Yan happen to know exactly the same piece of information? I doubt that either of them sat down to do a taste test. And I know for sure that they both didn’t. And even if they did, would they agree? It’s not obvious. The “good kind” only seems to have four flavors or so, and they generally aren’t all available in any one grocery store at any one time. And while one of those is beyond yummy…well…the mint chocolate chip is awfully peppermint-y, and the dark chocolate is so dark as to be hard to eat (unless you drizzle on some cinnamon syrup, which is a whole new kind of wonderful).
They know the same way we know everything about what we should like these days: some French person told them.
We are exceedingly lucky to have insiders among us. It’s taken me since March to develop a taste for any one type of pre-dinner snacks–I had to try dozens. I knew that I was on to something, though, when I got a generic version of the same snack and was genuinely disappointed with the taste. It was the first time I had been able to identify one brand as having an actual advantage over another; it was a real moment for me.
Even so, I don’t think that we really want to spend the additional months of taste testing that it would take for every little thing: ice cream, laundry detergent, butter, bagged salad, water filters, internet providers…it’s a whole new set of preferences that could literally take a lifetime, and I don’t really want to spend the rest of my life trying to decide how I feel about floor cleaners.
We need people around to tell us what’s normal, what’s done, what’s better, what’s special. And that will tide us along until–thing by thing–we begin to be able to judge for ourselves.