Food in individual and cultural memory

Abstract

In this article, the author refects on the interaction between food and memory, tries to trace the development of an individual gastronomical experience into a collective one, and to determine how this process affects the recollection of a food. It is well known that physical characteristics of food can trigger remembrances; at the same, food itself can be a subject of recollections. However, we usually remember not only the food, but the entire situation of its consumption. Apparently, the exceptional role that food plays in the memory processes is due to the emotional load of the gastronomical experience. Emotional experience of food can interact with the attendant event which results either in the superimposition of remembrances or in the displacement of one of them by the other. The so-called “gustatory nostalgia” is a particular case of such memory aberrations. It involves longing for a certain food tasted some time in the past. Gustatory nostalgia often becomes the common property of a group of people that share the same past; thus, quite paradoxically, the individual experience of food consumption turns out to be shareable. Acting as a marker of group membership, at the next stage gustatory nostalgia ceases to actually require the personal experience of a member of the group, since in fact it is the idea of such experience that is now shareable. Having turned into an inner stereotype, food becomes an effective instrument for constructing the cultural past of social and ethnic groups, and thereby such groups themselves.