A seat at the (virtual) table
Filmmaker’s idea of dinner diplomacy, first hatched in Santa Fe, has worldwide reach
If you want to get to know someone, the obvious thing to do is to have them over for dinner. Having dinner is how you woo a future mate or a potential investor, how you reconnect with your family after a long day, how you reinforce bonds with your tribe, pride or flock. It is interaction at its most primal, mammals performing a basic bodily function together, intimate and ordinary and still somehow profound.
“I have found that when other people put food in front of me, it disarms me,” says Eric Maddox, founder of the Virtual Dinner Project, an innovative filmmaking/diplomacy/interpersonal connection project that uses modern technology (specifically, Skype) to bring people from two sides of a conflict together to connect face to face in the most human way possible — over a meal. “It’s hard to be judgmental or dismissive of someone who is feeding you.”
The project has been going on since 2009, and since then, Maddox has personally facilitated more than 70 of these dinners. Ideally, each side of the meal cooks a recipe from the community they are connecting to so that, as he puts it, “Each side is literally being nourished by the other’s culture.”
“But sometimes we are in a hurry and just order falafel or pizza,” he adds.
Maddox is not a food guy, necessarily, but he’s many other things, including a filmmaker. He has a long connection to Santa Fe — he graduated from St. John’s College in 2001 and then did graduate research in international conflict resolution in the West Bank.
“I got the New Visions Grant from the New Mexico Film Office, back when it still had funding under Bill Richardson. The grant was based largely on the short documentary film I had completed in the West Bank and Israel as a grad student — the same one that was screened in the 2009 Santa Fe Film Festival.”
Maddox used the New Visions award to do another ambitious film project on the U.S.-Mexico border.
“I spent about a year racing back and forth between Santa Fe and different points on both sides of the border, from El Paso, Las Cruces, Juárez, Nogales … and places out in the Arizona desert.” Maddox interviewed everyone he could find: the Minutemen Militia people, priests, undocumented immigrants, human rights workers, immigration attorneys, retired FBI, even people in the red-light district in Juárez.
“At a certain point I realized that I had taken on a story that was too big,” he says. “I neither had the financial means nor the manpower to do justice to the question of how the border, and the policies around it, was impacting people’s lives. … I decided that I needed to remove myself from the editorial role and just let people talk to each other directly. … I needed a universal forum for connecting people, one that didn’t reinforce power disparities, or cultural, political or sectarian divisions.”
The first virtual dinner involved burritos made by a local chef on the Santa Fe side and menudo on the Mexican side. The second one was again a connection to Juárez, and in Santa Fe, Maddox and his companions were having dinner at the (nowclosed) fine dining Mexican restaurant Epazote, helmed by chef Fernando Olea, now head chef and owner of Sazón.
“He came in to just table some food, and ended up joining and delivering this really moving speech to the Mexican side,” Maddox says.
The informal nature of the setup is the polar opposite of the often rarified atmosphere of conferences, forums or roundtables that people engage in to discuss these questions, where the weight of the subject matter can lead to ponderous manners and artificial formality. A video Skype call between two smallish groups of people forces them to deal with each other like humans.
“We are doing a video call, and I think people see each other differently, and I think that has a massive psychological effect,” Maddox says. “The virtual nature of the project means that everyone has the benefit of familiar surroundings. And all people understand the experience of creating community around food. The dinner table is the world’s oldest and most universal social forum.”
The current state of the project is that Maddox, who currently lives in Spain, attends every dinner on one side or the other to moderate questions and make sure the conversation stays productively and safely on track. Ideally, he wants the project to expand, to create a wider community that can facilitate these dinners themselves.
The project has some builtin paradoxes and flaws, largely because the people who participate in this kind of project self-select from a subgroup that is willing to even have such conversations.
Those who wish to set up one
of these virtual dinners, or to at least participate in one, can contact Maddox directly, either via email or on his website, because it takes a bit of money, a bit of finagling and a lot of work to put one together. He usually organizes them through institutions like universities or civil society organizations, and ideally anyone should be able to participate. In a political climate where civilized discourse seems to be a dying art, the simple act of having dinner with someone from a place that has never been experienced can be profound.
“If you only have people participating from the left end of the political spectrum, or who are of a class that has access to an Englishlanguage education, you’re sort of kidding yourself if you think you are really addressing the true fault lines of a conflict,” he admits. “This is why I introduced the filmmaking component.”
This involves the requirement that participants in these dinners exchange questions at the end of the dinner and then go out and ask those questions of people in their communities who, crucially, they may not regularly talk to or necessarily agree with.
“My main rule for the filmmaking and interview element of the project is that if everyone you’ve been interviewing with agrees with you, then you’re doing it wrong,” he says.
Maddox recently launched a spinoff, the “Virtual Iftar Project.” Iftar is the meal eaten by Muslims to break the daily fast just after sunset during Ramadan.
“It’s profound to see someone from some community that we’ve been conditioned to see as ‘other’ engaging in the routines of daily life that are familiar to us, sitting with their children at the table, stuffing their faces,” he says. “On some level, people have to contend with the realization that, ‘Hey, they eat, too! They are human like me, not some onedimensional security threat.’ ”