Taste and How Memory Works
"When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection." ~Marcel Proust
Humans, as I say so often, are made for connection. It is true—we belong to each other, and yet so often this is forgotten. And what then—living in disconnect produces longings of all sort, anger and judgements of all sort.
I see a purpose in my work: to participate in creating connection within ourselves and among one another. Long my husband has told me one of the quintessential ways to do such a thing is around a meal. It’s true—sharing a meal can make for the ultimate connection. Breaking bread together can be a holy and whole-making experience. And, in part, I think this is from the connected memory we build around the meal.
Taste and smell, as Proust writes, do “remain poised…ready to remind us” of life—even after the people, the place, the time is all gone, the smell and taste of it all remain.
So, one of the things my husband loves to do on these trips we take, is to create a memory through food, through trying the tastes that an area has to offer. Taste can be absolutely delightful, unappealing, or just plain awful. And enjoyment produces a wonderful connected memory, but the memory of the just plain awful can produce just as much connection.
This week, I cultivated a meditation on delight around taste and noticed that so often it was the simplest, and most common foods that stood out the most—the complexity of flavor when I paid attention to butter on sourdough bread, of a strawberry, the nuanced layers from one cappuccino to another depending on coffee shop and even barista. It’s those nuances that help build memory and it takes the art of attention, the slowing down of attention to notice and build a moment of delight.
My husband and I spent some time ruminating—our top cappuccinos on this trip. As we did, we reflected on the coffee itself, the flavor from the beans, the flavor of the milk (I like almond so there’s so much difference from one brand to another), the way the milk was frothed and the flavor it produces from this, the person who’d made it, the time spent in the shop. And again I noticed, delight was not just in the taste alone but the taste became part of a whole experience. The experience included my husband and the memory of it all after.
So over a picnic table meal of burgers and fries, I asked my family members about their memories of food, of taste, from various periods of life. I was fascinated to discover that my teens, asked separately without knowledge of one another’s answers, share many of the same memories, connecting their taste buds to one another and our shared family story.
For both my daughter and son, their family meal at home memory was of my husband’s vegetable stir-fry. Both said, “gramma’s pies” when asked about a food memory at my own mother’s house and when asked about vacation at Grammy’s house (my husband’s mother) both said her chocolate chip pecan cookies and their Grampy’s ribs. When asked about a taste memory from a childhood restaurant, both said the Skinny Monkey (a banana smoothie) from my brother’s former restaurant, Mellow Moods. My daughter added a Mellow Moods blueberry muffin as well and my son said Miso soup from the local Asian restaurant.
My husband and I had our own taste memories from childhood and throughout various periods of life, from college to more recent times. Memories of foods our families made to restaurants we visited with our family or with one another. My father’s “Italian Stallion Casserole”, my mother’s meatballs and her apple cream pie, my grandmother’s pasta and salad, my grandfather’s wine, fried clams and Hushpuppies as a kid in South Carolina, a vegan meal eaten in San Francisco on my honeymoon, strawberry margaritas on the beach in Cape Cod, a blackened Mahi-Mahi sandwich in Ocracoke Island, the leftover scraps of my kids’ scrambled eggs and of fresh picked strawberries when they were little, and the taste of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches dipped in soy milk when I was pregnant with my daughter. I’ll add to it after this trip: fried chicken and collard greens in Memphis, TN, and margarita pizza in Fayetteville, WVa.
Each of us had our “totally awful” memory too—the taste of “American Chop Suey” for him and the taste of soured orange juice at my grandfather’s home on a visit there with my brothers after my grandmother had died. I will never forget that flavor and how my brothers and I sneaked off to the bathroom to pour the juice in the toilet so we’d not hurt our grandfather’s feelings.
Ah, yes, taste memories come back as ghosts to remind us of people and places and times that are gone in one way or another. What has gone still lingers waiting for its time to be recalled. And so it is that we create the flavor of our life.
Take a moment, friends, and recall your childhood taste memories, maybe your college-age memories, taste memories from your own children’s childhood, tastes of today. What tastes define you and your life, what memories of taste sit waiting to be recalled and to bring back a time in life that connects you to yourself and to others? Once you’ve had a chance to recall your own, gather someone or a group of someones and ask them about their taste memories. Discover how many you share, discover something new about someone you love. Then savor the experience of connection.
I return home today, friends, from this two week road trip with my family. and I’m almost at the end of the month of daily sensory delight posts. If you haven’t yet, be sure to download the Substack app so you can receive this final week and add your own reflections. I would love to hear back from you and start our own connection of a community noticing delight. I’ll be adding to my offerings here for paid subscribers in the next couple of weeks as well. And Friday noontime yoga is back on this week, in person or online options. Reach out to me if you’d like to join in any of this and need help doing so.