Food Associations

            Food can mean different things to different people.  Sometimes, certain foods can bring back painful memories, while other times, it can remind you so vividly of a happy time that you almost feel like you are there again.  Some people associate different foods with different events or times of year, like pumpkin seeds with fall, and candy canes with Christmas.  Personally, I feel like I associate food with locations I am fond of.  For instance, every time I go to Los Angeles to visit my cousin, I eat breakfast at a small place in Santa Monica called Main Street Bagels.  I get two poppy seed bagels and fresh squeezed orange juice.  These are no ordinary bagels, they are some of the freshest, most savory bagels I’ve ever had.  Even eating a bagel that good is enough to bring me back to a time when I was relaxing on the beach in Santa Monica. 

Another thing that has this effect on me is fried dough.  Any time I eat fried dough I think back to spending time in Salisbury, Massachusetts.  The sea breeze blowing through the town center while my friends and I wait for our delicacies to be ready.  I love these memories because they are from a time when none of us had much on our minds, no responsibilities, no commitments to attend to.  I think that food should be regarded a vessel for memories, the rich flavors transcending sensory boundaries and turning into vivid memories in our minds.  I can’t smell fried dough without thinking back to the summer of 2012 sitting on Salisbury Beach. 

            I also think that the reverse of this happens.  Certain things can bring back memories of places, and can leave you with a lingering flavor on your tongue.  For me, any time I talk to my friend Geoffrey, I can’t help but remember a time when many of my friends were at his cabin on a lake, eating barbeque.  I can almost feel the juices of the meat trickling down my throat, and I can always taste the red meat, peppery and hot. 

I think food is overlooked sometimes as an important detail when describing an event.  The connections between food, memories, and other senses are too overwhelming to think of food simply as nutrition.  Food can set the mood of many interactions, soaking up all of the emotions flying around in the moment and cementing certain feelings in your memory.  I associate many fond memories with the food that was eaten at the time.  I believe that more often than not it is a subconscious association and that may be the reason that many people don’t consider food to be any more than a conversation piece.