Red vines taste like theatre. Jalapeno Poppers taste like playing Spore on my Ninetendo DS Lite. Wild sage smells like the heat and high desert of Utah where neighbors burned unwanted sage in the summer. Wasabi Peas taste like writing, Andes mints taste like trips to Olive Garden.
These are strong sense memories for me. Nearly every time I taste these foods, I think of these events, or actions. They are strongly associated with each other. The only time I ever ate Red Vines were at dance lessons when I was young, and later during theatre programs when I was in high school. They accompanied the smell of sweat, dust, glitter, and hot lights.
I have a lot of these sense memories, and I don’t remember them until I’m hit with that scent, or taste, or sound. Not all of them are good, but many of them are. I think everyone has them, consciously or not. The traditions of eating certain foods, or certain smells can make you feel a certain way. Maybe that’s part of what it means when it ‘feels like christmas’ or another holiday, the smells and sights are there, and they trigger past memories and feelings.
You long for food you haven’t tasted in a long time, food that reminds you of happy times, of family, or special memories.
Sense memories make up or supplement traditions surrounding food and scents.
It’s really fascinating to think that a simple whiff of a certain smell of a food can bring you in your mind to an entirely different place in time.
This was brought up in class briefly during on of the tea tastings over the last two weeks, and I thought it was a really interesting dynamic to explore. Some of my sense memories are so strong and immediate they’re startling, some are subtler. When I’ve smelled the different teas, I’ve been brought back to being a child with my dad and smelling his tea. It smelled so familiar and comforting, but at the same time, when I tasted the tea itself, it only tasted like that scent for a moment.
My dad drinks a lot of tea, and has for as long as I can remember. But the way he made tea is very different than the way the tea we have been tasting is made. I don’t know the chemistry of it, but I know it’s a lot less precise, but very precisely the way my dad wants it to be. There’s a much smaller amount of tea to water and it’s typically brewed longer. My dad knows which teas can be left in the water and which ones will get bitter if they’re steeped to long. When I drank tea when I was little it was almost always half and half with goat milk, but never any kind of sweetener. Just milky tea.
With the tea we are tasting in class, it smells so familiar, but the taste is so quickly more bitter than what I am used to that after one or two sips my body feels a little shaky.
Thinking about these differences can certainly bring up questions of authenticity and what you really taste when you taste things.
Do you drink things that taste bad in your mouth and like them because they are very healthy? Are you tasting the idea of the food’s authenticity or history of labor and place of origin rather than the taste of the food itself?
To consider all the variables in tasting food, memories, knowledge, bodily chemical reactions, at once would be impossible. But perhaps it is also impossible to separate any one variable from the rest.
I am content with enjoying the taste of the food itself. When I can take into consideration knowledge about a food and its sustainability, about its ethical origins, I will. When I can make the effort to make something myself from a form that has been processed as little as possible, I will.
I will also enjoy the certain foods that bring up strong sense memories. And I will work on figuring out what balance of healthy, ethical, and good tasting that I need in my life.
And for now, portabello mushrooms fried in butter with Italian spices smell like Roche Harbor at Sunset, on a balcony, overlooking the harbor.
Hey Zoe, Shani here
Nice post. Very pleasant. I think Sarah can shed more light on what you’re talking about- which is terroir. I’m not sure if y’all have talked about it in class. Basically terroir is the taste of the land and climate translated through the food. Like the taste of wine pressed from un-irrigated grapes. Or coffee from one location vs another and their difference in flavors. People are like that too (or so I’ve seen). I can tell someone who’s nutritionally impaired and thus very unhappy vs those who get their needed nutrients and don’t require as much food volume. You know, you are what you eat.
I’d like to add to your mention of food and smells and their roles in a ritual. I’m in the middle of Cure: A Journey Into the Science of Mind Over Body and I’m finding it very interesting. You know, read it and make your own opinions. What the author is basically saying is that…placebos could help America get off its chemical medicine kick. Giving a placebo to a cancer patient with the intent to heal them is unethical because there’s a chance it wont work and the patient didn’t know it was a placebo, so thus didn’t consent to that risk. However, studies have shown that if the placebo is made as uniquely as possible (lavender scented fish oil with green food dye or something) and taken with the medicine consistantly, the brain will associate that unique placebo with the effects of the chemical medicine. The goal, eventually becomes to lower the chemical dosage but get the same results, because the brain manufactures those results just based on the placebo stimulus. Mind you, this is with the patient KNOWING that they’re taking a placebo – thus an ethical procedure. Of course some stipulations are at work here, but you get the idea. And it’s worked.
So how about that for smells and memory? Cool stuff.
Thanks for sharing.
Shani A
There’s definitely a lot more to the dynamics of taste and memory and such than I covered in the post. I really appreciate your suggestions for further research as well, I’ll definitely keep them in mind.
Thanks!