memory

Most people have favorite food memories—maybe a favorite holiday dish or fresh local fruit at its peak. Sociologist Jennifer Jordan talks to The Lake Effect about her new book Edible Memory, all about how food shapes culture, culture shapes food, and collective memory forms around what we grow, cook, and eat.

Jordan says that collective memories come from pieces of the material world, and that food memories are both personal and social. A personal memory about kitchens, food, and gardens often speaks to broader patterns of those things at a particular point in history or regional/local space because food is so often communal. Large groups may share similar food memories, revealing how food brings people together (and sometimes divides).

Tastes in foods change over time, too. Jordan says just as the broccoli florets people tried to feed to the dog as children become adulthood favorites, a similar phenomenon occurs on a much grander scale. The tomato, for instance, is technically a “new world” food from South America. When it reached Europe in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, people feared the fruit was toxic. Only recently has it become an essential part of the identity of food cultures including Italian and Spanish fare.

Meanwhile, in United States and elsewhere, we see the standardization of foods and genetic strains of produce. Instead of highly local heirloom tomato, a more mass-produced “beefsteak” variety better lends itself to feeding whole populations because of its hardiness during transport. Food, thus, becomes more homogenous on a national level, while, on the regional and local level there remains a more vibrant array of products: individual families and small-scale farmers preserve older genetic strains of plants and older family recipes that use regional produce. Consider okra in the American South, rhubarb in the upper Midwest, springtime fiddlehead ferns in the Northeast, or fresh avocados right off a Southern California tree—can’t you just taste them now?

No matter who you are today, you’ll likely be a pretty different person in ten years.

Don’t agree?  According to a recent study conducted by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, you’d be in the majority.  Most people generally fail to appreciate how much their personality and values will change in the upcoming years, even if they recognize how much they’ve changed in the past.

“I have this deep sense that although I will physically age—I’ll have even less hair than I do and probably a few more pounds—that by and large the core of me, my identity, my values, my personality, my deepest preferences, are not going to change from here on out,” says Gilbert, who is 55.

As NPR reported, Gilbert wanted to see if others felt the same.  So, he and his colleagues Jordi Quoidbach and Timothy Wilson analyzed data from over 19,000 surveys and found that people, whether they are teenagers or middle-aged, underestimate how much they will change in the future.  Life is a process of growing and changing that never really stops, but people of a variety of ages seem to think it does.

Personality changes do take place faster when people are younger,  says Gilbert, so “a person who says I’ve changed more in the past decade than I expect to change in the future is not wrong.”  But that doesn’t mean they fully understand what’s still to come. “Their estimates of how much they’ll change in the future are underestimates,” says Gilbert. “They are going to change more than they realize. Change does slow; it just doesn’t slow as much as we think it will.”

Gilbert and his colleagues don’t yet know why many of us seem to have an “end of history illusion.”  It might be really difficult to imagine a different future, or it might be difficult to think of unknown change.

When Kelly Clarkson recently explained that she loves Ron Paul because he believes in states having rights, she had no idea the phrase “states’ rights” would stir so many negative memories.  As Fox News explained,

Even before the Civil War, “states’ rights” had become a byword for the protection of black slavery. And since the late Sen. Strom Thurmond ran for president in 1948 as a States’ Rights Democrat, or “Dixiecrat,” the phrase has sometimes been labeled a “dog whistle” for racist elements in the electorate.

Sociologist John Shelton Reed (UNC-Chapel Hill) wasn’t surprised that someone Clarkson’s age didn’t recognize the baggage “states rights’” carried.  Similarly, University of Georgia historian James Cobb noted,

“Any time I hear it, I get this sort of little twitch, because I associate it with Ross Barnett or George Wallace,” …referring to the governors of Mississippi and Alabama who, five decades ago, defied efforts to integrate their states’ flagship universities. “But members of the younger generation, it doesn’t have that kind of connotation to them at all. And whether this is to some extent the fault of those of us who are supposed to be educating the younger generations about their past, I can’t say.”

Both Ron Paul and Rick Perry (before he left the race) have used the loaded phrase recently.  Other candidates make a point to avoid it.

 Whatever reaction it evokes, Cobb, the Georgia historian, said the term has clearly lost much of its sting.  “It’s just become part of the lexicon, without any particular meaning,” he says. “It’s been historically decontextualized to the point that it can be thrown around by a lot of people without a second thought.”

Reed, the UNC sociologist, said that’s not necessarily bad.  “I do believe states’ rights was a sound doctrine that got hijacked by some unsavory customers for a while — like, 150 years or so…I’m professionally obliged to believe that knowledge is better than ignorance, but some kinds of forgetting are OK with me.”

Who gets remembered, and how we remember them, isn’t left to chance.  Images of the past are malleable, and memories are often altered and changed based on present-day events and actors.

 Today, many are remembering Martin Luther King Jr.  And as CNN points out, some ways of remembering, like the new Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, are quite controversial.

The man himself was controversial, notes LaSalle University sociology professor Charles Gallagher. King — bound up with issues of racial and economic inequality that spotlight America’s worst sins — is a “Rorschach test,” Gallagher says, that people see in King what they want to see.

Still, few of the organizers of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial in Washington may have expected that every little detail would be so scrutinized, criticism that has continued right up to the first Martin Luther King Jr. Day since it opened last fall.

Just last Friday, the Department of the Interior announced that a quotation on the memorial would be changed.  The quotation, which was paraphrased from one of his sermons, reads “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”  The longer passage was premised on a conditional that began, “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice.”  Critics argued that the quote was taken out of context and makes King appear arrogant.

Indeed, King isn’t the first luminary to have a quotation misused. The Jefferson Memorial, across the Tidal Basin “juxtaposes fragments (of Jefferson’s writings) … to create the impression that he was very nearly an abolitionist,” writes historian James Loewen, author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me.”

The memorial was also criticized for freezing a person in stone, something that certainly isn’t unique to this memorial.

Sculptor Daniel Chester French’s Abraham Lincoln, across the Mall, is a gorgeous work, but he is now brooding for all eternity. Franklin D. Roosevelt, nearby, was originally represented by a statue apparently based on the weary president at Yalta; a second FDR, showing him in a wheelchair, was added after protests.

So how is King remembered, and why does it matter?  Check out the complete CNN article for a thoughtful discussion that draws on the insights of sociologists, public health professors, and historians.