Food is a powerful stimulant. Food is so important to the human machine that simply viewing a picture of food or a television advertisement can cause a psychological stimulant so potent that the individual is seemingly powerless to overcome the urge to eat that particular food right then and now. While I have never fallen prey to the actual consumption of certain food(s) from seeing them either in print or on the "little" screen, I have frequently thought to myself, "Ooh, I would love thus-and-such right now!"
Food can also carry with it reminiscent associations to people, places or things. I still remember eating stick pretzels as a two-year old - not only the sitting-on-the-floor part but the taste, as well. I will always associate tomato bisque with my Aunt Dorothy, morel mushrooms with Uncle Loy, soy crumbles with my Down-the-Hill friend, Saint Patrick's Day with the one dish my family asked me to never make again - green creamed asparagus on toast (It tasted great....they just didn't like the color, I guess.), Bananas Foster with our New Orleans trip, peanut butter and jelly on sourdough bread with our first San Francisco trip, and frosted grapes with our Tulsa, Oklahoma visit.
My father elicits the most food memories, although I'm not certain why. To this day, I cannot eat canned tomatoes, bananas, bone-in chicken, bone-in meat of any kind - for that matter, venison, popcorn, radishes with a salt shaker, Spy apples, peanut-butter milk shakes, black walnuts, dandelion-green salad, or hominy without visioning my dad right next to me, eating the same thing.
My dad never met a piece of bone-in meat that he didn't like. He never left any bone - whether fowl, beef, pork or venison - with a scrap of meat, fat, sinew, tendon or joint on it. His meat bones were hardly fit to toss to the family dog without the dog ignoring the bone simply because there was nothing left to gnaw upon.
Food - it connects us to the present and to the past in ways that little else does. Family recipes, family gatherings, family traditions.......they all involve food of some sort. Food makes the good times better and the sad times a little less fragile.
Let's all get cookin'!
Ancora imparo
