61. Fourteen Flashbulb Food Memories

This podcast treats a phenomenon that has always intrigued me:   human memory, which is a gift thatt differentiates us from other life forms.   The most enduring type of memory is called the “flashbulb memory”,  using photography as a metaphor to highlight its enduring nature.

Memories of food, perhaps our greatest passion, entrain five sensory aspects:  taste, aroma, texture, vision, and sound.  And it is these five senses combined with emotions that make flashbulb food memories so durable and interesting.

In this podcast, number 61, I have described fourteen food memories that have endured in my brain.  I hope you enjoy hearing them.  

Please join PH&F in its efforts to empower the Ivorian cocoa farmer!  Tom Neuhaus

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:42

That was prelude number twenty one in B Flat Major by Johann Sebastian Bach as part of his book of well-tempered clavier preludes. Well, today's podcast, number sixty-one, is entitled Flash Bulb Food Memories. What is a flashbulb memory? It is a memory linked to a particularly strong emotion, negative or positive. The attached emotion makes the memory particularly durable. Two examples often cited in cognitive psych books are the JFK assassination, if you are a boomer, or 911, if you are a Gen X or a millennial. Just to demonstrate the power of the flashbulb memory, I know exactly where I was when our social studies teacher came through the classroom door and made the announcement that President Kennedy had been shot and had died. But I do not remember if she was crying. In fact, I don't remember if anyone was crying. I do remember that she had whiskers on her upper lip, however. But what's interesting is the sheer power of emotion to burn in the memory. What's also interesting is the decreasing lack of detail as a memory ages. What was originally the memorial equivalent of a Van Gogh painting eventually turns into a sketch. The data that once was so vital and bright becomes increasingly dull and questionable. Long-term memories, recalled on countless occasions, deteriorate every time they are downloaded into working memory. Moods and other data can corrupt the memory a little bit more each time. My wife says that I have an impressive ability to recall past meals. Since I have a devil of a time recalling anything else, such as people's names, I wonder what it is about food that makes it easy for me to remember. Well, I do know that I've always been a foodie. I perused a couple of papers on how memory works, and here are some of the things I learned. Memories are most fragile within 24 hours of their formation. When you recall them 24 hours later, you strengthen them. This is called reconsolidation. It is a delicate time, however, as recalling new memories can also cause erasure. Researchers are especially interested in erasure as a method for dimming horrific memories of battles, rape, and other distressing personal events. Reconsolidation occurs in a specific region of the brain known as the medial temporal lobe. During this process, the memory is stored in various parts of the medial temporal lobe, which has two areas related to the formation of appetitive and aversive memories. Appetitive being of an enticing food such as cotton candy, and aversive being a memory of something particularly disgusting. Both of these memories are extremely powerful and long-lasting when combined with signals from the nearby amygdala, an important cerebral structure for processing emotions carried on the dopamine pathways. The two areas of the medial temporal lobe associated with appetitive and aversive memories are the hippocampus and the VTA or ventral tegmental area. Within each of those areas are neurons that bind dopamine, the chemical that helps us experience pleasure and retain pleasant memories. Okay, so enough of the science. Here are some pleasant food memories that come to mind, so to speak. The first one is a very early one, a candy store on Mack Avenue. Mack Avenue runs through St. Clair Shores, the suburb of Detroit where I grew up. I would ride my bike to the candy store, park next to the door, and go straight to the counter where the counterperson would serve me. I remember buying little dots of colored sugar glued to what seemed to be cash register tapes. I remember phosphates, which were chocolate syrup mixed with carbonated drink, carbonated water. One of the most popular candies were little wax bottles that you bid into in order to receive a shot of fruit-flavored sugar syrup. I detested those. Farther down Mac Avenue there was the Sicilian bakery at the corner of Mac and Avalon. It sold cannolis, which I never tried until much later in life. Italian kids would buy them, take a bite, and then throw the rest at the stop sign on the street corner where a pile of cannoli carcasses gradually accumulated. Years later, I made a cannoli recipe from the Time Life Cooking of Italy book using Marsala wine in the dough. It was so much better than what that bakery was selling. It was extraordinary. A third memory was the Franklin Apple Cider Mill, which was past Bloomfield Hills going out of Detroit. Sundays after church, my family would drive to this mill. It took an hour to get there because the two-lane road leaving Detroit was plugged with a long line of cars all going about 15 miles per hour and all headed out of town to experience apple cider and donuts. Once we reached the mill, we saw and smelled hundreds of donuts floating in vats of hot oil and apple pulp piles towering 15 feet, each pile topped with a cloud of millions of fruit flies. Needless to say, it was all well worth it, making for a very powerful memory. An Anisty Christmas. A month before Christmas, my mother would start baking anise cookies. She would drag out the old joy of cooking, thumb through it to page 656, pour a couple tablespoons of anise seeds into a mortar, and I would then grind them into a powder while she set the eggs to beating with sugar and finally adding the flour and the anise. I remember the aroma of anise, the taste of the batter, and the 12 hours of drying before they were baked. Once cooled, we would carefully lower them into old Kodak film canisters, which she had brought home from the hospital where she worked embedding the cancerous tissues in wax, microtoming them into slivers, dissolving the wax with xylene, and then dropping on cover slips and photographing the slides so that the surgeon could assess the state of the cancer. The memory represents a curious mixture of spice, luscious cookies, organic solvents, and disease. I should add one more memory detail. My mother liked to take cold split pea soup sandwiches enclosed uh each enclosing a gelatinous slab of uh of co cold split pea soup between two slices of bread. Then come lunchtime, she would heat the sandwich on the radiator. It needed attending to, though, as the soup would ooze out of its protective wrap and dribble down the front of the radiator. A fishy Christmas. Our family decorated the tree on Christmas Eve, lit candles, sang, went to bed so Santa could come, then opened our presents in the morning. On Christmas Day, we ate Ludafisk, which is cod filet dried on racks on one of the Lofoten Islands off of Lofoten, Norway. The fillets would be then soaked in lye and then in fresh water, boiled, and we would serve them with potatoes, lingenberries, bechamel sauce, and lots of grated nutmeg. I remember the soft, gelatinous texture of the fish, the fishy flavor combined with the milky sauce, the aroma of white roux, the pininess of grated nutmeg, and the sweet and sour lingenberries. All good memories of Newhouse family life. A chocolatey Christmas. Every December, a box of chocolates arrived from our relatives in Trier, Germany. These boxes were semi-permanent thank yous for the care packages my grandparents had sent our German relatives shortly after the Second World War, when the Deutsche Mark had no value, food was scarce, and they were living in the cellar, as the rest of the house had been burnt down by American bombs. Every Christmas, all three of the American Neuhaus families received these packages from the German Neuhauses. I grew to appreciate the flavors of lint chocolates, Osbach Uralt chocolates with brandy centers, and Balsen chocolate coated printing, a type of gingerbread. Any Osbach Uralt that broke and leaked in transit was mine, an arrangement graciously thought up by my father. Lobsters on Mount Desert Island When I was seven, we camped on Mount Desert Island in Maine. We drove to Bar Harbor and bought a few lobsters, drove back to the campground, lit a fire, boiled the lobsters in seawater, and served them with melted butter and boiled potatoes. Those lobsters were absolutely the best flavors I've ever had. I also remember the wild blueberry shrubs, which were maybe eight inches high, where and we picked blueberries for hours and hours, popping some in our mouths and the rest we put in a bucket. Boundary waters diet. In 1965, we went camping in the boundary waters, located on the boundary between the U.S. and Canada in northern Minnesota. We rented two 18-foot Grumman canoes, filled them with camping gear, and canned in dried grub, then paddled for 12 days, crossing lakes, portaging, making a giant circle back to our starting point in Ely, Minnesota. Every day we drank either coffee, not us kids, or hot tank, us kids. We ate blueberry cake, coat cooked in the cinders of the fire. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we ate fish, fish, and more fish, either northern pike or walleye, always baked in tinfoil with a rasher of bacon. For twelve days we rarely encountered another Homo sapiens, and although we were surrounded by Ursus Americanus, we never encountered a single one, despite aromas that would drive any black bear mad with desire. My father and I were in charge of fishing, not bringing home the bacon, which we already had plenty of anyway. My sharpest memory of the twelve days was of a moment when my father needed me to pull a northern pike in over the gunnel because the net was too small. I reached over the gunnel and grabbed the fish by the gills. But northern pikes are ex aggressive and strong. It flipped in the air, transferring the hook from its mouth deep into my palm. My father had to cut it out with a razor blade far, far from the nearest hospital. I was of course terrified, but I think I reacted more to my father's anguish than to the actual pain. I carried the scar for years. It's gone now. The memory, however, remains. Life aboard the SS Liberte In nineteen sixty one, Dad was awarded a one year sabbatic at the University of Lille in northern France. Mom and we kids took the SS Liberte to Le Havre, but Dad took a jet, first one I ever saw, to Moscow to attend a conference of biochemists where he delivered a paper on alpha 2U globulin, a protein that he had discovered in female rat urine. Meanwhile, mom, Carol, Joanne, and I took the train to New York City and then a taxi to Oceanliner Row. On the way to Pier 88, I looked through the windows of an Italian restaurant. Two betocked chefs were tossing circles of dough in the air. This was my first demonstration of pizza preparation. Vive la soupe. Once the ship was underway, we left our state room, which consisted of four bunk beds and one porthole, which was at most a foot in diameter. We proceeded to the dining room where we sat down to enjoy our dinner. The first course was a very French soup de Legume or vegetable soup. The bowls were set in round depressions in the table so that when the ship hit rough seas, our soup might sloth from side to side, but at least the bowl didn't crash to the floor. Tea by the prow. The next morning, after breakfast, mom and we kids enjoyed sitting on deck chairs right behind the ship's prow. As we ploughed through the violently forbidding North Atlantic, giant green waves shot straight into the air and crashed back down in front of us, but not on us. Each of us was cozily swaddled in a woolen blanket while we enjoyed the splashy spectacle. A waiter asked us for our order. Mom ordered a cup of tea and then taught me how. Puis j'avoir une tasse de te my first real French. Sardines in a can. Dad arrived at Le Havre driving our sea green VW bug. The five of us, plus our Aunt Marie and Cousin Anne, carefully inserted ourselves, the luggage staffed stacked masterfully on the roof rack. Carol and Joanne sat in the way back designed to fit a suitcase. We drove to Paris where Aunt Marie and Anne checked into a very fancy hotel. Their room was gilt everything mirror frames, picture frames, even the door frames. My father took one look at all this luxury and canceled our reservation. We went to another hotel that cost far less. Freedom fries. The next day we ate in the hotel's restaurant. My father ordered roast chicken, the skin of which glistened in its impressively brown skin. It sat pertly on a silver platter surrounded by the crispiest and creamiest French fries that I had ever seen or tasted. Tufts of deep green watercrust judiciously arranged, added color and a spicy herbal flavor. The chocolate cigarette. There were many other gastronomic adventures during that year in France. One that comes especially to mind is a chocolate store in Bruges, Belgium. Our parents allowed us each one chocolate. I chose a chocolate cigarette. As we left the store, an elderly woman, younger than I am now, entered. Ever the show off, I sucked on my cigarette, relishing the melting chocolate while inhaling and exhaling the crisp autumn air, which condensed to form smoke. The visual impression that I left was of an eleven year old puffing on a cigarette. The woman scowled and muttered, What irresponsible parenting. Well, anyway, aren't memories fun? Recalling them is a great way to entertain yourself and to appreciate the life that you have been given. There are so many facets to memory, the visual, auditory, taste, aroma, flavor, and textural facets that make one appreciate the gift of life, the richness of our planet, and the opportunities to love and to be loved. And the deeper the emotion, the stronger the memory. As always, I include a statement about where we are in our efforts to make the African cocoa farmer sustainable. This week is the beginning of two new and important changes to where we are going. First, I have developed a new assortment, which will be the subject of my next podcast, number sixty-two. And I I just learned five minutes ago that three of the five assortments that I had sold my neighbor, a very accomplished florist, just fifty feet from my door, uh, were sold yesterday afternoon. This is a very good sign. The second change is that a website development company has agreed to partner with me and they will uh foot a lot of the bill in development. Um they have uh made many dozens of websites across France and were recently acquired by someone with very deep pockets. Uh the website, which will feature a sales capability, will open up my store to all of Europe. Which means selling to many countries and not paying tariffs. I can't ship to the United States and I can't ship to the UK uh without having to pay tariff. Anyway, uh the website will be the subject of podcast number sixty-three. Well, that's the end of podcast number sixty one. Now we continue with Chopin's Prelude Number 21 in B flat major, and see you next time. Thanks for listening.