I arrive a few minutes late to my lunch with Abhijit Banerjee, carrying a bottle of chilled Indian rosé and feeling a bit exposed.
Banerjee, an avid home cook and keen observer of human behaviour, will be sitting with me for that rare beast: a Lunch with the FT in which the interviewee cooks. One of the ironclad rules of the column, I explain before we meet, is that the FT pays. So throughout the morning, my phone has been pinging with invoices for ingredients: fresh coconut milk, green grapes, radish, coriander, tahini, which I promptly settle.
It feels wrong to be served home-cooked food by an interview subject: an upending of the power dynamic of what Janet Malcolm called my “morally indefensible” profession, where any self-respecting journalist pays his own way, but always prevails by getting the last word. So to level the playing field — and in hope that some booze might loosen my subject’s tongue — I grab wine from my fridge on the way out.