Eat, Memory

Eat, Memory. It is such an obvious title, and such a good one at the same time. Everyone has memories they associate with food, and so often it is the food which helps them remember the rest.

This is what New York Times food editor Amanda Hessler was counting on when she launched her Eat, Memory column in 2004. She knew the context food brings with it: history, place and understanding. 

More importantly, how a person approaches, eats and remembers food can tell a reader more about that character than a hundred other pages, written in Hardy-esque cinematic description, might.

Ok, that's overdoing it. but it really fucks me off when people say they don't like Hardy because his sentences are too long and he goes into too much detail. It's a huge, epic, cinematic novel, people, not a fucking tweet about who's winning X-Factor.

Eat, Memory is a collection of these columns. The Memory is italicised because Hessler wanted her writers to concentrate on the memory the food evoked, not to go all schmaltzy over why cherry pies make them cry whenever they see one now, because granma used to make granpa cherry pies before he has his tracheotomy, and nothing has ever tasted quite the same for him since, etc. Zzzzzz.

You have Kiran Desai remembering the amazing cook from her childhood, so protective of his kitchen she never learnt to cook herself. Yiyun Li tells how a rancid-sounding orange drink was the height of sophistication during her teens in China, as one of the first western products to gain popularity there. 

A magazine editor called Heidi Julavits describes how she went to Japan to work out what to do with her life after college, and ending up losing herself in adzuki bean cakes, and the rest. 'I remind myself of the Zen-like quotation: "Emotional freedom comes with being aware of the certainty of uncertainty." I will go to Japan, I will be certainly uncertain and I will reach a higher plane of existence while eating amazing food,' she writes.

So, you see, Julavits, and most of the other columnists, have failed in this attempt to not get all nostalgic over the food. Hessler says in the introduction, "The food doesn't matter, really. What it evokes does."

Bollocks. What complete bollocks! Of course the food matters. I mean yes: without the food there wouldn't be the memory. So it facilitates the memory. In much the same way as if I broke my leg falling over on the way to the bus stop, I would remember that walk to the bus stop better than the other several zillion times I've walked to a bus stop.

But the food really, really does matter, in and of itself. Not necessarily because it was good food or special food, or because the writer knows a lot about food, or whatever. But because it was that particular food or meal which enabled the feeling described in each story.

One guy never eats dessert because he worked in an ice cream parlour one summer, shovelled the stuff down his greedy neck, and hasn't been able to face another sweet dish since. Which means that at least several times a week, if not more often, the guy is reminded that once upon a time he adored ice cream, and of the joy that eating it brought him. And now that joy is lost forever - and he deals with this all the time. He says he's content - like he's simply had enough ice cream. If that's the case, why does he now have to avoid all desserts? And anyway, who has ever had enough ice cream?

Food brings things up and it swats them down. It is and has to be part of everyone's lives. I know people who aren't interested in food very much at all, but they can't just pretend it doesn't exist. Even the odd inclusion of the guy who doesn't eat at all, which is a nice conceit an'all but doesn't entirely work, is about how the author finds himself so angry at the general greed of others that he stops eating altogether. The food here, again, is so important by what he chooses not to eat: steak, lobster, eggs and cream - dream foods, which he feeds himself on by dreaming about them.

Even the story I like best is my favourite for a nostalgic reason: it is a story by the travel writer Pico Iyer, Our Lady of Lawson, about how he lived in Japan without eating Japanese food - preferring to buy packaged shit from the local convenience store, Lawson. 

I like it because I went to Japan recently (you are saved a Japanese cookbook post because I'm of the opinion that sushi is one of those foods you go out and buy, not buy some nancy kit and waste time and good fish trying to make yourself. And no, I'm not trying to sum up a whole cuisine with the word "sushi". I hope you know what I mean). 

Anyway, Dave, the friend in Japan, is obsessed with the vending machines you find all over the city. These vending machines are on every corner and serve milky, sugary tea in screwcap bottles and bright pink pop in glasses with crushed ice. Unlike Pico, Dave eats Japanese food. He loves it. But there is something about the vending machines - possibly the sheer number of them and the fact you don't have to converse with them to get what you want - that works as some sort of comfort blanket for him in Tokyo. For Pico, the same was true of the Lawson convenience store, and it also taught him, through what it sold and the family who ran it, lots of stuff about Japanese culture. He says it is precisely because he is not interested in food that he is able to eat twice a day from Lawson, but if he wasn't, why would he always go there and not elsewhere? For him, food is ritualistic, as it is for many. 

And now I'm going to have my ritualistic glass of wine in front of the telly on a Sunday night. I don't even feel like it tonight, so I've tried to argue myself out of having it. But I cant.

PS. This is a nice book, but don't buy it. All the columns are up there online