Eating your way to a true friendship

MANILA, Philippines - The idea of carbs and friends is not new. I actually got the idea by overanalyzing the Spanish word “compañero,” which can be broken down to mean someone you eat bread with.

Friendship is one of life’s most beautiful social contracts. It happens when two people decide, usually after a couple of chance meetings, that they are willing to stomach the pitfalls of one another’s personalities to enjoy each other’s company. Usually it’s based on the flimsy criteria of shared interests, such as binge-watching old episodes of bad TV or low-key listening to early 2000s screamo (or Britney, or Aegis, but that’s beside the point).

Allow me to borrow a quote about friendship that I think reveals a certain truth that cannot be denied:

“Aye, yo. How do you ever expect to make friends with that attitude? Everyone’s a stranger until you give them a chance.”

(Dave Franco’s character in 21 Jump Street, 2012)

I find that the concept of “chance” in friendship is pretty much accurate in the sense that all contracts involve some sort of mutual risk where the reward only becomes evident through the duration of the enterprise. Friendship relies on a dynamic set of multiple “chances” that evolve as your friendship grows. To begin this possible analogy-fest of an article, let me draw a comparison between friendship and gardening.

Take the seed, for example, as a “chance at friendship” between gardener and soil. Gardener initiates interaction and plants the seed. The soil agrees to submit to the mutual effort after an agreeable initial acquaintance. Over time, the seed becomes a seedling and the eventual success that is the plant (a.k.a. friendship, if I have lost you already in the thickets of my analogy). Through the experience, both gardener and soil come to know well the requirements of prolonging this relationship. Gardener tends; soil allows seed to grow in an exercise of horticultural camaraderie. If the interaction is a smashing success, the soil might even allow the gardener to dump shit all over it so the plant can grow better much like a newly-minted friend letting you spout your existential melodramas.

Figures 1.1 and 1.2 below serve as an illustration of a one-sided friendship, wherein the gardener ends up being the a-hole and the soil an unwavering support system. But let’s take this concept of seed as initial chance at friendship and grow it into something easier to swallow: carbs (I am operating in a world where carbs come from seeds — a concept not completely untrue).

Let me begin off-point and say, I think carbs are the best.

Returning to point, I think carbs and the environment and the frequency at which they are consumed is a great determiner of your status as stranger-acquaintance until ultimately becoming friends. I believe that if you consume multiple kinds of carbs in a particular place with a certain person while acknowledging each other’s existence, this establishes “acquaintance-hood” (I know the correct term is “acquaintanceship” but I like a lot of hip-hop so I’m all about the hood). When you consume carbs in varied forms in different places and times, this is what can convert acquaintance-hood into friendship. The more solid the carbs shared, the more solid the friendship becomes.

Acquaintance is a strange concept. When I was a kid, I wasn’t aware that there was a distinction between a “friend” and an “acquaintance.” I guess being routinely stuck in the same environment with a set group of people months out of the year makes understanding the notion of acquaintance-hood tricky. It created more of a “friends” and “friends who are allowed to borrow my shit” type of segregation, all depending on who I ate food with or, more honestly, who let me eat their food. This phenomenon probably ran until I reached high school where I started to vary the locations I was in. I started having classroom friends, those who I covertly ate instant noodles with underneath desks. Then there was the lunch barkada. Then I had people who I played softball with. I never really knew them that well, because — you guessed it — we didn’t eat a bunch of carbs together.

As I grew older things became stranger. There were a lot more types of carbs to deal with, a lot more places to eat them at and a lot more types of people to eat them with. These variables can even be affected by the time of day. The permutations are endless.

Above you find the equation of how to make location-specific friends. These people are your bar friends, your gig friends, your workout friends, your work friends, friends you’ve made and only see at company-sponsored events, ladies who lunch, or my favorite, Millennials who Maginhawa. And then you have “friends who cross fit” — an entirely different set of people and an issue all its own. The distinction between location-specific acquaintance and friend rests solely on the number of reoccurrences after your initial meeting.

As you can see, I’ve deliberately left out the variable of “online” acquaintances and friends from the equation. In online friendships, time and environment are skewed and there’s hardly any risk involved. So okay, you know each other’s name online. You sometimes chat, like Facebook/Instagram posts. But let’s face it: you’re not friends, at least not yet. You share the same relationship as someone on the end of tech support, but in time, and if you will it, that can change.

The idea of carbs and friends is not new. I actually got the idea by overanalyzing the Spanish word “compañero,” which can be broken down to mean someone you eat bread with. And how can we forget Jesus, the definitive guide to breaking bread and friendship? We all know that if Jesus has done it, it’s probably the right way to do things.