The Potluck Parable

This post began as an in-joke between me and my husband, who was the one who came up with the analogy of ambrosia salad .  The rest just kind of grew from there; this is the end result.  Enjoy!

Imagine any given season of anime as a potluck dinner.  Some of them are bigger or more diverse than others, but there's always a spread of dishes to pick from.

Every once in a while you get a truly exquisite entree, the equivalent of a wonderfully roasted turkey or a perfectly cooked slab of prime rib.  It's substantial, flavorful, and complex.  It's the sort of dish that people not only devour when it's fresh but pine for in the months, maybe even years to come.  It might even become one of their favorites of all time, a standard by which they judge other dishes of that type.

That only happens every so often, though.  Further down the line you find less remarkable entrees mixed in with more middle-of-the-road fare, the equivalents of your average casserole, pasta salad, or rows of slow-cookers filled with hot dishes.  The best of these can still be very enjoyable and often become very popular with the crowds.  Most aren't that good - if anything, their flavor tends to fade from your mind the moment you finish your serving.  Still, it's hearty food that's enjoyable enough in the moment.

Then you get to the desserts at the end of the table.  Like all desserts, they mostly serve as a vehicle for sugar and empty calories.  That doesn't mean that they can't be delicious.  Sometimes you get one that's particularly well-made, the equivalent of a homemade pie or a really great batch of cookies or brownies.  It's still an indulgence, but there's enough effort and substance put into to it to make it appealing to others.

Then there's the ambrosia salad.

This ambrosia salad exists only as a vehicle for cheap, artificial sweetness.  It's a pile of Cool Whip, food coloring, and jumbo marshmallows thrown together.  The only thing that keeps it from being nothing but a pile of air and corn syrup is the handful of canned fruit that was sloppily thrown in an attempt to call it a "salad."  The changes made to that ambrosia salad over time are minimal.  Maybe they throw in a different sort of fruit.  Maybe they use mini marshmallows instead of jumbo-sized ones.  Maybe they add crushed Oreos or a different shade of food coloring.  It is still, at its heart, just ambrosia salad.

Yet there's a group of diners that love that ambrosia salad.  More often than not, it's what brought them to that potluck in the first place and it's the reason they keep showing up.  Those folks proudly pile that ambrosia salad onto their plates.  Some end up eating nothing but ambrosia salad at potluck after potluck.  It doesn't matter if they end up feeling a little sick afterwards or end up hungry for more junk food afterwards.  So long as that ambrosia salad is chock full of the kind of marshmallows they like, they will keep eating it.

That's not enough for some of them, though.  For some, their love of ambrosia salad isn't just a preference, but an identity.  They are That Ambrosia Salad Guy.  They proudly plaster their homes in pictures of ambrosia salad.  Their conversations online are full of nothing but ambrosia salad.  In their minds, dissing that ambrosia salad is like dissing them as a person and that simply will Not Be Allowed.

So they take it personally when other diners suggest that the ambrosia salad isn't very good.  They are offended if someone states that it's poorly assembled and exists mostly as a vehicle for marshmallows.  They get positively angry if you suggest that maybe it's not healthy for them to eat nothing but ambrosia salad.  How dare you suggest that the pulled pork is better than that ambrosia salad! How dare you scorn them for skipping straight to the desserts! They should be allowed to indulge in their marshmallow madness at every single potluck without judgement!  In fact, the host should be forced to put the ambrosia salad at the front of the line, right alongside the pot roast and the baked mac 'n' cheese!  Those critics are just too stupid to understand that ambrosia salad!  They don't understand the complexities of its sweetness and softness!  They can't comprehend the texture of those marshmallows!  THEY'RE NOTHING BUT BIGOTS WHO HATE ALL DESSERTS!

A select few will even go so far as to harass the other folks at the potluck over it.  They'll try to harass the people who criticized the ambrosia salad or the hosts of the potluck who invited them.  They'll wear shirts covered in goopy pictures of ambrosia salad in an attempt to antagonize the other diners and get a reaction.  They'll even try to start a food fight, decency be damned.  Sometimes they can be thrown out of the potluck altogether or at least forced to sit in a corner away from the others, but all too often they will try to skirt around the rules or exploit the more lenient hosts so that they can stay, in spite of the outcry of the diners they harass.  

Thankfully, those Ambrosia Salad Guys are few and far between (no matter what they may believe), and even the most lenient hosts will get sick of their nonsense after enough time and noise.  Most of them won't make that much of a fuss.  They'll just continue to devour that ambrosia salad, never wondering why they feel kind of nauseous afterwards, why only the other Ambrosia Salad Guys hang out with them, or why that sugar high never seems to last no matter how much of it they eat.

The rest of the diners are (thankfully) much more reasonable.  Even if they don't all agree on what the best dishes may be, they still enjoy what the potluck has to offer.  They'll take a bit of everything (yes, even the desserts), come back for seconds for the really good ones, and enjoy discussing the details of the meal with others and share feedback with the cooks in the hopes of getting new and improved recipes.  Those folks will be the ones who walk away full and fairly satisfied, regardless of what was offered, and they will be the ones who will be better prepared the next time someone brings that amazing prime rib.