"A Cook's Tour" (Ch. 1-6) Response

Last week, Marie shared Julian Baggini's article, "The Madeleine Effect," in which Baggini discusses, among other things, the difference between memory and recollection. Baggini (paraphrasing Søren Kierkegaard), says memory is about "factual recollection," while recollection is about "the creation and maintenance of emotional links with the past." This distinction seems to explain Baggini's disappointment with the food of his childhood - the emotions attached to the food are stronger than its flavor.

Baggini's experience is strikingly similar to Anthony Bourdain's description of his return to the French sea-side village where he spent summers with his family as a child. Bourdain and his brother visit the same bakery they used to go to, and find that "the baked goods...[are] identical in taste and appearance" to the ones they use to eat (35). The bakery even "smell[s] just as it [did] twenty-eight years ago. But something [is] missing" (35). As with Baggini, the food satisfies Bourdain's memory, but disappoints his recollection. Likewise, he is disappointed by the soup de poisson he gets which, though unchanged and still "delicious," is not as good as the soup he makes himself (35). His tastes have changed, and so he finds his old favorites lacking, just as Baggini's childhood comfort food is bland to his now-experienced taste buds.

In Bourdain's writing we see Baggini's experiment duplicated with almost scientific precision, and his theory is clearly borne out by the results. The difference is where they go from there. Baggini's take is largely philosophical, which is hardly surprising given that he is drawing from Kierkegaard. Bourdain, on the other hand, makes it personal: "I hadn't," he says, "returned to France, to this beach, my old town, for the oysters.... I'd come to find my father. And he wasn't there" (46). Had I read this before last week, it probably would have tugged at my heartstrings just as it's intended to (I say 'probably' because I'm unpredictably cynical). Based on Baggini's theory, however, his meals would likely have been just as disappointing had his father been right there with him. Just in the previous paragraph, Bourdain hits the proverbial nail on the equally proverbial head: "[Y]ou can never be ten years old again - or even truly feel like ten years old" (45). Yes, it makes sense that he would miss his father more in a place primarily associated with him. But that has less to do with the food, and more to do with death.

This isn't to say I don't understand the temptation to try a culinary resurrection. On the last day of spring break, I asked my mom to make the stuffed shells recipe she inherited from my aunt. I don't know what I expected to get from the meal, emotionally. It tasted good - better, maybe, since my mom added a little spinach, giving it a less fluffy, empty texture; just the idea of spinach would have appalled me as a kid. And maybe that's why we shouldn't attach people to food. Our taste in food changes, but our taste in people, if we truly care about them, shouldn't.