some food got BAGGAGE 🍝😭

On the relationship between memory, emotion, upbringings, and what we ate.

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The goodness of the ingredients—the fine chocolate, the freshest lemons—seemed like a cover over something larger and darker, and the taste of what was underneath was beginning to push up from the bite. I could absolutely taste the chocolate, but in drifts and traces, in an unfurling, or an opening, it seemed that my mouth was also filling with the taste of smallness, the sensation of shrinking, of upset, tasting a distance I somehow knew was connected to my mother, tasting a crowded sense of her thinking, a spiral, like I could almost even taste the grit in her jaw that had created the headache that meant she had to take as many aspirins as were necessary, a white dotted line of them in a row on the nightstand like an ellipsis to her comment: I’m just going to lie down.... None of it was a bad taste, so much, but there was a kind of lack of wholeness to the flavors that made it taste hollow, like the lemon and chocolate were just surrounding a hollowness. My mother’s able hands had made the cake, and her mind had known how to balance the ingredients, but she was not there, in it.

Bender, Aimee. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. 2010. Doubleday, pp. 9 - 10.

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There was a debate in the 1990s between pasta sauce brands Prego and RAGÚ, to see which brand had the thicker sauce, the sauce that stuck to your pasta, making for a more satisfying home meal.

“Somebody’s saying they’re thicker than one of the RAGÚ sauces,” a RAGÚ commercial from 1990 went, before pouring both sauces onto noodles to show how RAGÚ offered thicker, richer taste for your pasta. Prego didn’t take this sitting down, releasing a commercial in 1991 where two pots of sauces took the slotted spoon test, where Prego sauce spoon stayed in the spoon as RAGÚ sauce leaked through the slats, back into the pot. The debate continued and continued, RAGÚ insisting that it offered more authentic, “old world” sauce while Prego asserted “old world” didn’t mean traditional, which is to say: their recipe included diced tomato instead of tomato paste. The competition was a fierce one but ultimately ended with a take that Prego had been hammering since the late eighties, which was captured most directly in a 1995 commercial including colanders: two heaps of spaghetti sit in silver bowls with holes at the bottom, both placed on white plates. “Why does Prego taste better than RAGÚ old world style?” the narrator asks. Sauce is poured over the pasta. “It probably has a lot to do with all Prego goes through to make sure it’s thicker and more delicious,” the voice continues. Hands pull back the bowls, revealing what could be seen as one of the most damning images in food advertising: the plate beneath the bowl of Prego was clean and white while RAGÚ’s plate was red and watery as all the sauce was leaking to the bottom of the plate.

But did the competition really matter? By 1992 RAGÚ had realized this battle was over and had released what was arguably a more iconic commercial: the jingle “I Feel Like Chicken Tonight.”