What if changing the world starts at our dinner table?

How does a communal table turn into a community? And at what point does sitting side by side, eating alongside each other become turning to each other, talking to each other, and eating together?

I am sat in a coworking cafe as I write these words. It’s spacious, beautifully designed, and with coffee that tastes better than I knew coffee had any business tasting. Everyone here is on their own laptops — some people on video calls, many with headphones on, everyone engaged entirely with the universe on their screen.

I sit at a communal table. Every time I exist in collective spaces, I find myself moving in the direction of openness, of curiosity and ‘let me try an experiment.’ I want to maximise the ways the world can meet me, to see when and if it does. To understand how we can engineer it better so we can all meet each other.

I’ve been here an hour and haven’t encountered anyone talking to each other at the cafe. We are all here for the feeling of being around other people without having to engage with other people. I would get frustrated if every work session was interrupted with strangers talking to me, but I’m struck by how even sitting side by side, we are entirely apart.

So often, we need permission, a reason to turn to each other. A problem to be solved, a question to be asked: what’s the wifi password? can you watch my stuff while I run to the bathroom? I just started reading that book - is it any good? Even as spaces reduce the physical distance between us, we need a situation or a prompt to reduce the emotional and existential distance between us.

What if, also, we need to learn to flex this muscle? Perhaps the infrastructure for community and belonging needed, then, is also an infrastructure that helps us get in the practice of extending toward each other, of finding the shared experiences that reduce the distance between each other?

Talking to strangers with ease is a learned skill. Finding a reason to reach for someone else, finding common ground across what might be perceived difference, having both the curiosity and openness to have a conversation that might take an unexpected turn. It’s a skill I fortunately picked up in my years as a reporter and with many moves across borders and continents.

A couple of weeks ago, Chin Ru Foo of Crew & Riot reached out to me. In fact, she slid into my DMs on Substack and invited me to a dinner in her home with five other strangers. I live on another continent or I would have happily joined the dinner, because it turns out that this invitation was part of a deeper line of inquiry into questions of community and belonging that I have also been obsessed with.

Because we couldn’t make it to a dinner table together, last week, Chin Ru and I had a long conversation about her work and mine and our shared curiosity about how we build and cultivate a world made for and full of a sense of belonging and community.

Listen to the full conversation here.

The dinner Chin Ru invited me to is part of an experiment she’s been running for three years now, inviting strangers into her kitchen, cooking a one-pot meal, and letting magic unfold. Her hypothesis? That changing the world starts at the dinner table. Specifically, by inviting people into her home and learning to listen and talk to each other.

I’ve written often about how one-offs don’t make for community, how true community requires ritual, repetition, not another app that promises to introduce us to strangers at a dinner table. I still hold all those beliefs, but my conversation with Chin Ru complicates my understanding of what’s necessary.

When I sat down to talk to Chin Ru, I expected to hear about the importance of community and of bringing strangers together, of how many friends she’s made and how many friendships she’s enabled. We talked about all of this, yes, but the idea that stayed with me is that what she’s built is a version of a type of infrastructure we desperately need, the kind that helps people learn to exercise the muscle of talking to strangers. It’s like a gym, for collective existence.

She and I are both people who talk to strangers with ease, who think endlessly about how we bring people together, how we bridge gaps between us. But in our conversation, we kept returning to the idea that maybe inviting people into her kitchen was also a way for her to cultivate that sense of ease with strangers for everyone who was offered a seat at the table.

Because around the world, we have got increasingly out of the habit of being at ease with people who we do not know and people we are not already in community with.

A recent survey found that 70% of people around the world are unwilling or hesitant to trust people who are different from them, whether that’s difference in lifestyle or interests or nationality or ethnicity. This makes living together in a society much harder, if a majority of us operate with the understanding that our difference supersedes our commonality, if we constantly have to rebuild a baseline of trust with every single person we engage with.

I can’t stop thinking about this data point, because it’s so illustrative of how far apart from each other people feel, even if they aren’t actually physically far apart from each other.

And perhaps, that is the what Chin Ru’s dinners are trying to tackle: not the long-term work of building community, but the regular work of giving strangers a reason to turn to each other, listen to each other, and find something that they share with each other.

What works here, as well, and what’s different from the slew of apps and commercialised supper clubs is the intimacy of being invited into someone’s home, to sit in their kitchen, to eat food they’ve made for you. There’s a level of vulnerability involved on both sides: inviting a stranger into your home and walking into a stranger’s home. No money exchanges hands, but instead there is hospitality. The act of letting someone who you don’t know care for you, make a meal for you, invite you in. In our often too-insular world, this feels like a radical act of trust-building. Of fighting away pervasive insularity. Of saying our world could be different, why don’t you have a seat at my kitchen table, and let’s imagine it together.