Cold Baked Beans

Humans are, it's an understatement to say, complex beings.

The true source of our motivations and preferences is, I think, almost completely opaque to us. If we had a greater understanding of how our motivations and preferences are formed, we might have a better opportunity to create the world we want to live in.

Let's talk about cold baked beans.

Mish, my wife, is an absolute inspiration to me. She’s the most successful Australian ultimate frisbee player of all time. She runs a successful book publishing company with her brother Ben. She’s an even more exceptional parent than I expected her to be, and I expected her to be the equal of my mum, who was (and remains) absolutely incredible.

And, Mish is… weird

She’s weird in many ways honestly, but principally for the fact that she likes her baked beans cold. Baked beans! Cold! She likes the toast hot, with the butter melted through it (as she should), but she likes to pour the beans over the top straight out of the can! It’s horrendous! It’s a crime against humanity!

I find the very idea so repugnant that it took a number of years for me to raise the courage to bring it up with her, and even then, I only did so because of the advice my dad gave me as a kid, which was to never get married to a woman you haven’t gone canoeing with.

Great marital advice, by the way (Mish and I canoe together like champions), and I simply assumed that were my dad still alive, he’d also suggest that you never marry someone who eats their baked beans cold unless they have a really, really good reason why.

So, with great trepidation, I finally plucked up the courage to ask Mish why she preferred her baked beans cold.

It turns out, when her mother was pregnant with her fourth child, she suffered from awful morning sickness. Apparently, for months on end she could do little but lay on the floor all day to avoid constantly throwing up.

As a result, her three existing children (Ben, Mish, and James) had to, in large part, look after themselves.

Fortunately, young Ben was a very capable and responsible pre-schooler, and he took charge of managing his younger siblings, including preparing them breakfast.

It turns out, as a four-year-old, Ben knew how to use a toaster, but wasn’t yet permitted to operate a stove. So when he made baked beans and toast, the baked beans were served cold.

For three or four months, the Phillips children ate cold baked beans.

When their mother finally came out the far side of the worst morning sickness I’ve ever heard described, her kids protested if she tried to warm the baked beans. Their habits had been set. To their minds, baked beans were supposed to be cold, and they’ve continued to believe this ever since.

This revelation led me to thinking about Mish’s culpability in preferring baked beans cold. It seemed pretty clear that she wasn’t, in fact, wholly and directly responsible for this most heinous crime. Circumstances conspired to implant this abominable ‘preference’ in a way that, it could be argued, was entirely outside of her control.

It was on the basis that I decided I would marry her, despite this obvious flaw in her character.

Now, obviously I’m taking the piss, but the point I’m making about the true source of our preferences is a serious one.

We often think that our desires, opinions, and preferences come from our ‘true self’ (as if such a thing exists), as though there is some inner homunculus holding a stone tablet upon which said preferences are immutably carved.

There is no such homunculus, and our preferences are much more flexible than we might believe.

This has implications in ethical spaces (do Islamic women really prefer wearing the niqab, for example?), but it’s also useful when you think about who you want to be, and how you want to act.

“Oh, I don’t like going outside in the rain”, you might say to a person who’s invited you for a bushwalk on a day of slightly inclement weather.

Are you sure about that?

Are you certain that the smell of petrichor and the sight of glimmering wet green leaves might not be exactly what you need right now? Because I’d wager your stated preference that you ‘don’t like going outside in the rain’, has much more to do with your parents’ desire not to have to clean up after a puddle-obsessed three-year-old than any innate resistance you might have to getting slightly wet.

(As the parent of a three-year-old in the wettest postcode in Victoria in a La Niña year, I have to fight instilling this resistance into my son on a daily basis!)

All’s that to say - stop believing your preferences so much. Try some new stuff. You might discover warm baked beans. They’re much better.