Food

Abstract

‘Food is never “just food” and its significance can never be purely nutritional’ (Caplan 1997: 3). This sweeping statement by the anthropologist Pat Caplan also holds true for the intersection between food and memory. One of the most frequently quoted scenes involving the triggering of mémoire involontaire — involuntary memory — is the story of the madeleine in Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time, also translated as Remembrance of Things Past) (1913–27). Proust’s narrator dips the cake in his tea, tastes it, and suddenly nostalgic memories of his childhood overwhelm him. The experience of taste imparting memory is grounded in the physiology of the body itself: taste and smell are a joint oral sense that is directly connected to the limbic system, the area of the brain responsible for memories and emotions. Memories triggered by tastes and smells tend to be strong, characterized by an immediacy seldom achieved in other, less embodied forms of memory. As the anthropologist Jon D. Holtzman notes, ‘the sensuousness of food is central to understanding at least much of its power as a vehicle for memory’ (2006: 365). In this corpus, too, food and memory are closely connected and, as with all nodes of Second Generation memory work, they are linked to both the parents’ survival and the usable family past.