Welcome to Dear Prudence. I'm your Prudence, Jeney Desmond Harris. Today we'll be talking about

how to handle a person who tastes food in an unsanitary fashion and deeply annoys you while you're

trying to cook in a tiny kitchen, what to do when your dinner party invitations

are never reciprocated, and whether two people

with extremely different eating habits

can have a happy life together.

Here to help me out is Dan Pashman.

He's the founder and host of the two times

James Beard Award-winning podcast, The Sporkful,

where he obsesses about food to learn more about people. He's also the author of the new cookbook, Anything's Possible. Welcome, Dan. Hey, Janae. How are you? I'm great. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So before we get started, I want to ask you something we ask all of our guests, which is for one piece of unsolicited advice. It doesn't have to be about food, but it can, or it can just be about anything. Oh, geez. Well, you've caught me in a reflective mood because we've been doing this whole series on the Sporkful podcast about the making of my cookbook. And I think a lot of people, even who buy a lot of cookbooks, don't actually know how they're made. So I thought, let's tell a story about how they're made. People think it's interesting. It ended up sort of being like a reflection on like living a creative life. So I've been sort of pondering that a lot lately. And I guess my unsolicited advice that I was just thinking about this this morning is that I think that most people like your greatest strength and your greatest weakness are actually tied up in the same personality traits.

So a lot of like finding your way in life is about just sort of identifying what that personality trait is and then learning how to harness it for good.

Do you feel comfortable saying what your greatest strength slash greatest weakness personality trait is? Yeah, I mean, I don't know, maybe greatest is the wrong word. I'm kind of like a high-strung person, you know. I'm not ever going to be lying on a blanket on a beach all day. My wife can lie on a blanket on a beach and read all day. I can do that for

about 45 minutes. And then I'm like, I'm going for a walk. I'm going to go swim. I'm going to go do something. So sometimes that's annoying. People don't always want to be with somebody who's like constantly, you know, let's go, let's go, let's go. On the other hand, like you need to have a certain level of intensity to accomplish big things.

And so like when I try to sort of set that personality trait,

and I throw that into like, let's make a cookbook and spend three years trying to pull off this what turned out to be like a Herculean task, then I'm like, oh, that's the trait being used for good instead of just sort of like being the annoying guy that won't chill out.

That makes so much sense.

You don't have to sit there and think,

God, I'm so annoying.

I can't sit still.

You can think I'm someone who's able to stay up until 3 o'clock in the morning writing my cookbook, and that's a good thing.

So it makes you love yourself more.

There you go.

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