We all know that eating is a very emotional endeavor. When we talk about “emotional eating,” we ordinarily mean eating more when we’re upset, bored, or stressed. These are worthy matters to discuss, but today I would like to talk about the way food emotionally connects us to the past.
One of the Audible books I’m listening to these days, The Golden Orchard, approaches time travel in a unique way. Instead of boarding a time machine or fiddling with an artifact, a grandmother makes traditional Korean dishes and the flavor pulls her and her granddaughter back to a point in the past in which that dish was previously enjoyed. While it’s a fantastical tale, I think the premise is spot-on with one of the most enduring truths about food and memory: food has the power to connect us to the past. As I have been listening to this book, I’ve thought about the dishes that connect me to the past. The most obvious one, of course, is the taco salad my parents make that I associate with pleasant warm evenings at home after a good day’s work at school. The traditional Ukrainian foods my grandmother and aunt make don’t just connect me to prior memories with them, but with the feisty great-grandmother who illegally immigrated from Canada and taught her daughter and granddaughter how to prepare these foods. These are trying times, and in the crisis of the present moment it can be hard to remember that things weren’t always like this. It can even get easier to forget the people we love that we no longer have access to because of these circumstances. For this reason, I would like to challenge you: find one thing to eat this week that connects you to a good memory or a person you miss. Some of your first thoughts on this may not be worth pursuing, of course. Every October 1, I deliberately find one of my brother’s favorite things to enjoy. For a long time, it was either a caramel macchiato from Starbucks or a white mocha. One year, I forgot to order the coffee decaf, and because my body wasn’t used to caffeine anymore, I ended up a jittery mess. I actually thought you had to be on controlled substances to feel so terrible. The last two years, I have pursued a safer course that accomplish the same thing. I get Coldstone ice cream in memory of the times my brother and I would go there, just the two of us, while on our way to do whatever our parents had actually asked us to do. Even better, I’ve had the pleasure of doing this with one of my brother’s best friends growing up. It’s easy to think of the more elaborate special occasion foods. The Walla Walla loaf from my college graduation party. The Mother Lode cake from Claim Jumper on my 18th birthday right before leaving for PUC. Grandma Anabel’s white chocolate almond bark each Christmas. Grandma Spencer’s Thanksgiving stuffing. The paella the cafeteria served every Sunday in Spain, which I considered the one excellent meal they were capable of making. (Spanish food in general is fairly delicious, but this cafeteria is infamously bad.) There are two problems with these foods: they tend to be more elaborate than you can prepare on your own and they tend to be somewhat unhealthy to eat more often than on special occasions. Because of this, I invite you to dig deeper into the more prosaic stuff of daily life with people you miss. In college, my friends and I brought in the Sabbath each Friday with a shared bar of good chocolate and a bottle of Martinelli’s. Easy, but special. At Camp Wawona, I tried going vegan for a while and discovered the joys of oatmeal and peanut butter. I eat that nearly every day now, and nearly every day I remember the wry humor of one of my co-workers when she first saw me do that: “Are you pregnant or something?” Various kinds of popcorn bring me back to different people. One of the kids in my junior high Bible class really loves my kettle corn, and I think of him every time I make it. Movie theater popcorn is all about my parents and me enjoying a rare Sunday off. Air popped popcorn with nutritional yeast transports me to Saturday nights with my in-laws who so quickly and lovingly welcomed me into the family. Food tells a story. The black tea I’m drinking in fancy china as I write this is now associated with a lovely conversation I had with an old friend several weeks ago. We had to cancel an outing to the Huntington Library, so I did this set-up instead. I may not think about that conversation explicitly while I’m drinking it, but it’s there in the background as I write, quietly making me smile. We all need more excuses to smile. Find a good food memory, and enjoy it.
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AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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