Illustration by Lars Leetaru
The human mind is crazy fascinating, especially memory. Why do we recall tiny episodes from our childhood, many of them negative, more easily than years and decades of daily routines and accomplishments? I’m not talking about truly life-altering events, which of course live on in our heads, but seemingly innocuous details that revisit us again and again.
Here’s one of mine: I’m about 10 years old and having dinner at a school friend’s house. His mom serves a green vegetable I’ve never seen in my life. It kind of looks like a little tree or cactus on my plate, and I watch my friend and his parents eat the artichoke and try to copy them, but I just can’t. I still recall my embarrassment at not knowing what to do and not eating what was a regular dish in their house. My friend’s mom didn’t judge or criticize me. The memory is all my own inner feelings, still resonant 50 years later.
The brief memory resurfaced as I read through this month’s “Soul Food” section, Senior Editor Aiesha D. Little’s and her writers’ loving ode to specific dishes from their lives. It’s said that taste and smell trigger clearer emotions than sight or sound can, so maybe that’s why memories around food are so strong. And why food can carry so many cultural and relationship meanings across time.
I love Little’s recall in her opening essay of family interactions around food, from great-grandparents and grandparents to mother, aunts, and cousins. Her memory of “my mother and her sisters cackling over childhood stories in the kitchen around bowls of black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day” strikes me as both personal and universal. I think (and hope) most of us have fond memories of laughs and joy around the family dinner table on a big holiday or a random Sunday night, cherishing the emotions more than the actual food we shared. And yet her New Year’s Day memory references a specific dish and moment that carries meaning across generations and migrations, something unique to her and to some of you.
Food does more than feed us. It nourishes our body, soul, and memory.
