PARADISE LOST/REGAINED: ON FOOD AND MEMORY

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
— William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

When writing about food, there is hardly a deader horse to beat than Proust and his damn madeleines — yet here we are. The madeleine scene in Swann’s Way is arguably the most quoted piece of literature dealing with food in general, and definitely so when it comes to the topic of food as it relates to memory. A madeleine, dipped into a cup of tea, is what brings back a flurry of memories to the book’s first-person narrator and sets off Proust’s search for meaning and truth in his quintessential modern novel-in-seven-parts Remembrance of Things Past. Involuntary memories are memories that are triggered by sensory experiences and have come to be known as ‘madeleine moments’ after Proust’s narrator had his moment with the little cakes. Most of us have experienced something along these lines, and there seems to be general consensus on a particularly strong link between food and memory. These memories can be involuntary (Proust) or sought after: Much like top 40 songs can be used as a gateway to bring back the feeling of summer loving and soft sand between our toes, a glass of pastis or sweet vermouth can bring us back to that sweet little restaurant on the Côte d’Azur that one night in July many moons ago. Still, these rather forced recreations of dear memories often turn into something of a disappointment — as M.F.K. Fisher put it, discussing her father’s beautiful recollections of gooseberry pies: “in truth, a gooseberry pie can be a horror (those pale beady acid fruits, the sugar never masking their mean acidity, the crust sogging…).” Some food is better uneaten.

But the big question remains: Why do so many of us have such strong memories of particular meals? What is it about them that can make us so emotional? As real as the feelings are, talking or writing about our grandmother’s cooking often feels cheesy, a little easy and overly sentimental. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that the mere suggestion of a potentially intrinsic link between food and our memory is often an overt simplification of two deeply complicated concepts: food and memory. At the risk of sounding pretentious, we have to ask ourselves what we mean when we say memory, when we say food. Now, admittedly, part of the beauty of our memory lies exactly in the fact that there is room for sentimentality. History, although it is an empirical field of study, claims a certain authority over truth. Our memories are freed of this and are allowed to roll around in endless fields of subjectivity. But what is past is not over: Our memories play a big role in our perception and construction of the present, and in our decision-making. And this goes beyond our personal recollection of walks around frozen lakes (or whatever), so it is only right to treat this topic with the gravity it deserves. The term ‘memory’, as defined by anthropologist Jon D. Holtzman, describes “experience or meaning in reference to the past.” This meaning and experience are also what informs our present, shapes social processes, lends validity to tradition and its re-enactment, gives us an idea of where we’re from and where we belong. If one loses this, one would undoubtedly feel what Joan Didion so beautifully described in The White Album’s titular essay:

I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.

What Proust described in Remembrance of Things Past — that our memories play an important part in our construction of self — also goes for us as a people, as members of one society or another. And food plays an important role in this. For one thing, although we might not realise it, it helps to structure our sense of time: Maybe you swear by three meals a day and two built-in snacks, strawberries in June and pumpkin in October, serve pasta with tomato sauce for children and truffles for grown-ups, have cakes on birthdays and beers on Friday night. This is one reason why food and our memories have a strong link: meals add structure to our timeline and thereby function as markers. Another reason food memories are particularly vivid, Jon D. Holtzman argues in his paper on the topic, is that eating is an experience that triggers multiple senses at once, most notably taste, smell and touch. For this reason, the memories we have of food are not only cognitive but also emotional and, to a large extent, physical: They become ingrained in our bodies. Anthropologist Luce Giard has argued that cooking and eating — even shed of their cultural meaning — are immensely important to our understanding of self, because as a practice, they make the relationship between us as people and the world around us more concrete than anything else. They root us firmly in space and time. 

Still, it would be very hard to consider food outside of its cultural landscape, and it would even be harmful to do so. All the items previously listed (pumpkin, strawberries, cakes and beer) are obviously food and drink, and the understanding of time and rituals in this example (breakfast, lunch, dinner; weekdays versus weekends) makes sense  — to a Western palate. Frankly, a lot of the available writing and thinking about food, whether done in a journalistic context or in anthropology, food science and other academic disciplines, views this topic through a very Eurocentric lens. So we really do need to go back to that seemingly irritating question: What even is food? In the broadest sense of the word, anything that’s edible is potential food. Obviously, humans have always refused to eat certain ingredients for a myriad of reasons, and the list of reasons keeps growing due to expanding scientific knowledge, allergy rates rising and the ever more urgent threat of climate disaster, among many other factors. Where we draw the line between food and non-food can be personal, but mostly has to do with culture at large. People have a hard time respecting ingredients, techniques and rituals they did not grow up with. This became abundantly clear when blatant racism against the Chinese and people of Asian descent found its supposed justification in a photo of bat soup earlier this year. Even though bats are a species most Western tongues do not appreciate, we’re still talking about soup here — a concept that is easy to grasp. But to understand what the potential of sensual experiences with food (and the strong memories they create) really is, we have to steer a little further away from a Western understanding of food. What about the passing of saliva from grandmother’s to child’s mouth along with chewed bread? Or the sorcery-induced diarrhoea that plays a big role at mortuary feasts for the people of the Lelet Plateau in Papua New Guinea: We’re far away from madeleines now, and not just geographically. Food is a big part of our identity, and our memories can help us re-learn and understand the structures and rituals that make up our social identity, helping us to understand ourselves in relationship to others and the world around us. 

(Food and memories attached to it often play a strong role in communities of people that have left their native lands. An account of a family’s diaspora and the role of food in performing and maintaining cultural identity, written by Vicky Truong, can be found on our website here.)

While we sometimes try to recapture the magic of certain moments through food (and often fail to do so), certain food, by its very nature, is factually lost to memory or accounts thereof. One example is a now almost mythical banana by the name of Gros Michel, which was the first banana produced on an industrial scale before it was wiped out by the fungal Panama disease. Practically every banana sold in the West until the nineteen-sixties was a Gros Michel, and by all accounts, it was superior to the Cavendish that replaced it, with a flavour more reminiscent of the musky sweetness of banana candies and a softer, more custard-like texture. Food memories that are impossible to recreate grow to mythical sensations in our minds. But since the glorified cultivar is not technically extinct and still grows in some small-scale operations, many accounts on the internet can be found of people travelling far and wide in hope of tasting the banana again — or for the first time. This is not possible for many other species and cultivars humans used to eat. In her book Lost Feast, Lenore Newman traces the history of species humans ate into extinction. Newman explains the importance of food to culture and identity, and the issue of losing it, like this:

Cuisine is a language. Languages have two central properties, and the language of food is no different. Primarily, a language allows us to communicate, permitting us to pass on what we have learned to future generations, no matter how remote. (…) Each language contains concepts that do not translate, and if a language is lost, those ways of seeing the world are lost too. 

With this in mind, we can only imagine the shock felt by the ancient Romans when their favourite ingredient, a herb called silphium, disappeared — never to return again. The wild herb, which was enjoyed in the Mediterranean region for thousands of years, was so popular with the Romans that it appears in almost every single recipe in the Apicius, the most important collection of Roman recipes. When it became harder to find, the highly valued herb began to be used as currency, which turned out to be the last nail on its coffin: If money grew out in the field, who would leave it unpicked? While silphium was the first species humans knowingly ate into extinction, it was by all means not the first or the last suffering this same fate. In fact, culinary extinction was one of the pillars of our modern food system. After early humans ate most of the megafauna, including mammoths, into extinction, we were already too many to live solely off berries and smaller prey, so the revolution of farming began. The juicy meat of mammoths was lost to memory, and a new language had to be learned to replace it. But with the industrialisation of that new language, farming, in the last couple of hundreds of years, we lost a lot of vocabulary again. While fruits and vegetables from across the globe can now land on our plates, many cultivars of native species have gone extinct. Once upon a time, cross-breeding pears in order to obtain the most perfect specimen was such a fashionable hobby that humans managed to create a pear with flesh so white and creamy, one could spread it on bread like butter. And then managed to let that dreamy Ansault pear go extinct in favour of efficiency. We’ve seen the thing about having one cultivar of a species in the case of bananas: it’s dangerous. The thing about extinction is that it’s irreversible, as is much of the other damage we are currently doing to our planet. If the thing about memory is that it helps us shape our present, we should really try to remember more. Remember what we lost and make sure it won’t happen again because this time, it might just be your favourite ingredients. How would you like your morning without coffee and orange juice, your toast without avocado, your smoothie without banana, your ice cream without vanilla and your munchies without chocolate? All of these ingredients are currently on the line. Imagine the useless cookbooks their extinction would leave behind. 

Learn more about the Gros Michel, what to do with it and how to get hold of it here.

This essay owes a great debt to Jon D. Holtzman’s article Food and Memory. Highly recommended reading is Lenore Newman’s book Lost Feast. Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food.

Text: Yannic Moeken
Copy editing: Charlotte Faltas
Photography and set design: Tabea Mathern

Sources:

Marcel Proust: Swann’s Way. 1913
M.F.K Fisher: Once a Tramp, Always… In: The New Yorker, 31.08.1968
Jon D. Holtzman: Food and Memory. In: The Annual Review of Anthropology, 2006
Joan Didion: The White Album. In: The White Album, 1979
William Faulkner: Requiem for a Nun, 1951
Luce Giard: Part II: Doing-cooking. In: The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 2., 1980
Lenore Newman: Lost Feast. Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food, 2019
Gastropod Episode November 4, 2019: Of Ghost Foods and Culinary Extinction
Claire Rosenkilde: Foods that might become extinct in your lifetime
Valencia Baker: The Power of Food Memories in Identity Formation