some food got BAGGAGE đđ
On the relationship between memory, emotion, upbringings, and what we ate.
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The goodness of the ingredientsâthe fine chocolate, the freshest lemonsâseemed 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: Iâm 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 motherâs 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.
There was a debate in the 1990s between pasta sauce brands Prego and RAGĂ, to see which brand had the thicker sauce, the sauce that stuck to your pasta, making for a more satisfying home meal.
âSomebodyâs saying theyâre thicker than one of the RAGĂ sauces,â a RAGĂ commercial from 1990 went, before pouring both sauces onto noodles to show how RAGĂ offered thicker, richer taste for your pasta. Prego didnât 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 RAGĂ sauce leaked through the slats, back into the pot. The debate continued and continued, RAGĂ insisting that it offered more authentic, âold worldâ sauce while Prego asserted âold worldâ didnât 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. âWhy does Prego taste better than RAGĂ old world style?â the narrator asks. Sauce is poured over the pasta. âIt probably has a lot to do with all Prego goes through to make sure itâs thicker and more delicious,â 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 RAGĂâs 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 RAGĂ had realized this battle was over and had released what was arguably a more iconic commercial: the jingle âI Feel Like Chicken Tonight.â
John S. Allenâs The Omnivoreâs Mind addresses food as a form of memory, pushing and pulling us toward certain dishes in response to experience. He explains â
For a child, candies and candy bars are often a special treat. This alone could make eating them a memorable experience. But beyond that, those candies that are associated with special childhood occasions, such as driving trips, visiting a friend or relative, or holidays, are often especially memory-richâŚA Bit-O-Honey bar or a Pearson's Salted Nut Roll or a package of Necco Wafers does not a feast make. However, under the right circumstances, a childhood candy resampled years later can unleash a cornucopia of memories. Candy and food in general are of course not unique in their ability to promote a mnemonic cascade. However, our evolved psychology may make food one of the more likely things in the environment around which memories are formed and focused.
Food in many ways is a time capsule, able to travel us back to the good in our lives. Grandmaâs cookies, your uncleâs famous guacamole, the apple butter you made every October to commemorate the fall: food absorbs memories, creating cravings not only for specific nourishments but for moments, for times.
By this logic, there are foods that are bad, that invoke times weâd like to forget. The burnt toast that got you scolded by a parent, the egg salad that inspired a night in the ER, the vodka Fresca that you vomited out of the backseat of a friendâs car: these foods youâd like to forget as they inspire tastes of regret, of pain. Anti-cravings, you could say.
It was always wet, always like they were fish that were recently caught, these piles of glistening pale seaworms piled onto chipped plates with Prego sauce that â Somehow. â pooled thin red water to the bottom of the plate. Small orange circles of oil floated atop, this site of what I assumed was a science experiment happening underneath the understory of noodles. There were always seven noodles that formed together, a bizarre septuplet that offered a satisfying chew, as if a candy whose taste was nothing, perhaps the predecessor to some inventive Japanese candy designed to be a taste vacuum. There was never salt, not that I ever had the idea to put salt on anything. If things were good, we did have the green cardboard tube of cheese dust to sprinkle atop of the pile â but it was infrequent that we did, not at least until I was a teenager, when prices when both down and up. It was often just the chewy wet noodles and the sauce, the Prego, made quickly because there were three boys and a baby girl and one mother and someone was fighting or this one had to go to an after school activity and dinner had to be on the table at a certain time. But that pasta was on the plate. It was food, it was easy, and we survived off of it. We survived off of it until people in the house were too busy, when we had saved enough money to buy our own cars or take longer walks, able to sneak away to buy Burger King or Chick-Fil-A with the money from our after school jobs. No matter how good the pasta is, no matter how many stars the restaurant has, it will always taste of water and chewiness, the slight char from being boiled too long at the bottom of a pot. Not without joy, no, but certainly not without struggle.
A 2013 study of rats and alcohol posited that, if we could delete memories and experiences from the mind, we would have a novel solution to help those who suffer from alcohol use disorder.
âAs with other forms of addiction, environmental cues linked to drinking â such as the smell of beer â can trigger the urge to consume alcohol and increase the risk of a relapse into abuse,â the study says. âOver time, these learned associations can be maddeningly difficult to break.â
The experiment involved giving rats alcohol at the push of a lever, enough to develop a preference. After some days of offering the substance, it was removed for ten days â then reintroduced as drops, to reawaken memories. Certain rats were given a drug called rapamycin while others were not. The rats went back to the levers, pushing for alcohol after being reintroduced to drops of the substance â but the rats that were given rapamycin? They were less inclined to push the lever again.
âRapamycin does not seem to affect memory formation, but instead disrupts the reconsolidation of existing memories into long-term storage after they have been reactivated,â the study explained. âPreliminary tests suggest that the drugâs effects can be quite specific, and do not affect the animalsâ consumption of other desirable substances such as sugar-water.â
This solution has been continually studied over the years, with some seeing this as an effective way to curb some mental functions while rewarding others. As UCSF reported in 2021, use of rapamycin could ease addiction to myriad substances but also diseases like Parkinsonâs, by getting the brain to block certain actions while rewarding others.
âThe food part paralleled something going on culturally with a lot of food stuff I was in,â the writer Aimee Bender told the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2012 regarding her 2010 book The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. âI think I was just affected by that so was writing about it.â
âIt wasn't a plan to sort of play into the food culture stuff going on but I also, you know, am interested in all that,â she said. âIt fed into the book and I think that's been interesting too because some people then have expectations of the bookâŚThere were people that were dismayed that there weren't recipes in the book and that it wasn't more of like a cookbook or a more friendly fun book about people and food.â
âIt's really not about food at all,â she said. âI mean really it's a book about family and relationships and food is a way for that to be containedâŚThat's been interesting too.â
The Atlantic, 2015: âThe trauma of sexual abuse often manifests through a preoccupation with food, dieting, and a drive to feel uncomfortably full. One analysis of 57,000 women in 2013 found that those who experienced physical or sexual abuse as children were twice as likely to be addicted to food than those who did not.â
The Swaddle, 2021: âPublished in the Journal of Eating Disorders, the study is based on a survey of more than 1,000 adults being treated for different eating disorders at two private treatment facilities in the U.S. Upon comparing the prevalence of childhood trauma among the participants â with a nationally representative sample of over 200,000 adults â the researchers found people with eating disorders to have reported higher rates of sexual abuse, parental divorce, or living with an individual who struggles with one form of mental illness or another.â
There was always bologna, the kind that was sliced, these fleshy wheels you had to peel a red rind off of, to ensure it was fully naked before eating. There were never any other options: only bologna, always glistening, always raw and thick and chewy despite there never being much to the meat but process. We ate them with white bread, maybe a little bit of mayonnaise and mustard. Eventually we had peanut butter and typically jelly as the alternative, one that I always took because the bologna always smelled funny, tasted funny, haunting your mouth for days like a hot dog flavored balloon was filling your mouth. Years and years later we started buying ham. The ham was always rectangular, as if the meat was grown in a box. They too were wet, slimy, thick â but there was no rind. This was preferable but I opted for the peanut butter still. For years, I was a vegetarian. I donât remember what I ate except for raw celery and raw carrots. The peanut butter, the jelly, the white bread too. Bobby teases me all the time about my never wanting to eat mortadella when its on menus. Its pinkness, its shine, the way it folds over itself like an arm with too many elbows: I canât do it. My family sometimes still ask if Iâm vegetarian.
A woman sits at a table holding a pink bowl, diving a fork into it. She wears a gray shirt with gray letters that spell âNYC.â
âItâs currently my fourth day eating spaghetti,â she says, her voice cracking. She sucks in a breath, pulling up a forkful of orange, broken noodles. She exhales, moving her face forward, the dried streak of a tear on her face. She takes a bite and chews, dropping her head to the side. Her eyes are closed. She sniffs. âIâm just imagining that itâs Wingstop.â
The text âspaghetti lasts for weeks when you're black" overlays the image.
There is a trend of comparing food prices over the years, of doing a grocery haul and posing with you purchases as if treats you picked yourself.
A wife in 1947 poses with her $12.50 of groceries. Two stalks of celery, tomatoes, multiple canned items, wrapped meat, eggs, sugar. She sits, side saddle, looking up to the camera. A bounty.
âThis Is What Groceries Cost the Year You Were Born,â Taste of Home proclaimed, listing the prices of key food staples by half-decade. In 1995? Milk: $2.50 per gallon. Eggs: 92¢ per dozen. Bread: 89¢. Ground beef: $1.49 per pound.
In 2005, photographer Peter Menzel and writer Faith DâAluisio released the iconic book Hungry Planet, which featured the groceries and foods from families in 24 countries. In the pictures, husbands and wives and their children stand behind spreads of food, surrounded by boxes and cans and fresh meats. In Norway, a family looks over two tables of fresh exotic fruits and canned items in their kitchen: it costs them 4265.89 Norwegian Kroner, or $731.71. In Chad, a family sit on a mat outside a tent with three large bags of legumes and an assortment of smaller bags: it costs them 685 Francs, or $1.23.
Every holiday, a story goes around to bring these ideas together: how much would Kevin McAllisterâs Home Alone grocery store visit from 1989 cost today? In the scene, he picks up a âhalf-gallon of milk, half-gallon of orange juice, TV dinner, a loaf of Wonderbread, frozen mac and cheese, liquid detergent, saran wrap, a bag of toy soldiers, Snuggle dryer sheets and toilet paperâ for $19.83, according to USA Today. In 2023, he would have spent $53.94.
