On Gazpacho and Identity

I have about an equal level of understanding of both the concept of identity and gazpacho.

That level is low, at best.

I went on a picnic with a friend last night, and we spent the better part of two hours talking about those topics. Though those things seem unrelated, we found ourselves asking the same question about both: what are they made of?

Gazpacho, it turns out, is a cold soup made of different vegetables. I fail to see how gazpacho is not a smoothie, but that’s a different hill for me to die on. The recipe I found listed tomatoes, red bell peppers, and bread as ingredients. No, I still don’t think that including bread disqualifies it from being a smoothie, especially because this recipe also said to use a blender.

Identity, of course, is a little trickier to compartmentalize.

“What do you think would happen if you actually woke up and you couldn’t remember anything about yourself?” My friend asked.

Unable to answer that, I offered another question: “well, on the other hand, what would happen if you woke up and everyone you knew forgot everything about you?”

Silence ensued. In both of these scenarios, there would be ways to supplement your own identity: if you have forgotten who you are, your friends and family would hopefully try to remind you. If your loved ones forgot who you are, you can hopefully re-introduce and re-acquaint yourself with them.

Either way, something is clearly lost.

But what?

“If I served you gazpacho without any tomatoes in it, would you know something was missing?” I asked.

“Well…. I might have a vague sense that something was off, but I guess I wouldn’t really know. I’m not exactly a gazpacho expert,” he responded.

“Would you say that you understand yourself more or less than you understand gazpacho?”

Another pause.

“I think I understand myself more than I understand gazpacho…but I’m also infinitely more complex than gazpacho,” he answered.

Maybe after a certain number of years of being alive, our identity becomes so blended together that it’s impossible to pull apart everything that goes into it. Gazpacho is like the human identity; it just gets blended a lot faster.

However, that still doesn’t answer those scenarios in which you lose your memory of yourself or your friends and family lose all memory of you. Naturally, there must be some sort of incongruity between your own perception of yourself and how your loved ones perceive you. So where do you fall? Somewhere within the dissonance? How much can you lose before you’re not really you anymore? How many ingredients can you take out of gazpacho before it’s no longer gazpacho? What are defining traits of these things, and what’s the extra stuff?

All of this is to say that I think identity and gazpacho are very similar…especially in that I do not particularly understand either of them.