The Empathy Behind a Salty Cookie (and Other Holiday Surprises)

It looked perfect. It smelled perfect. And then Rob Volpe bit into it and tasted an unmistakable hit of iodized salt. He was deep in fieldwork at a holiday cookie exchange, surrounded by family heirloom recipes and refrigerated dough, and suddenly faced with a very real empathy challenge: how do you respond to someone's proudly offered creation when your face is already doing something you didn't ask it to do?

What that moment taught him goes well beyond holiday baking. When someone hands you something they made, they are offering a piece of their history and hoping you will receive it with generosity. Food is one of the fastest ways we reveal who we are, our heritage, our nostalgia, our pride, our quirks. And it is also one of the fastest ways our snap judgments get exposed. The cookie wasn't the point. The person offering it was.

This connects directly to one of the most talked-about chapters in Rob's book, Tell Me More About That, where a morning of fieldwork involving a moldy pancake became a masterclass in dismantling judgment in real time. Whether you are navigating a cookie exchange, a potluck, or a family dinner where Aunt Rita insists her casserole is better than you remember, the empathy moves are the same.

In this edition of Reading Between the Lines, Rob shares the story behind the salty cookie, a book excerpt from the Moldy Pancake chapter, and four practical ways to stay warm, curious, and connected when someone puts their heart on a plate and hands it to you.

👉 Read the full newsletter or watch the You Tube video to go deeper. And you can read the book excerpt here.