Do you have a favorite food from your childhood? What memories are connected to it?
One of mine is a Hostess Twinkie® in my grade school lunch, which meant mom was giving me a rare treat (a good thing, since it has negative food value). Another is homemade tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for Friday night dinners. This meal is charged with happy thoughts of the family being together. And it is loaded with lots of other associations as well: the modest little house and middle class simplicity of our lives, the early 1960’s innocence and of the time when authority was not questioned, my Catholic upbringing with its major and minor pluses and minuses, which I would spend decades coming to grips with as an adult.
My guess is you have foods like that, a lot of them, in your memory bank. Here is a thought. Journal about them if you keep one. Or tell a friend or spouse about them and have a conversation. This is a way to recall your yesterdays and reclaim the positives, the ones that are still defining you. And you can re-cast the associations that are not all that positive as well. Like being forced to clean your plate and having portion control problems to this day as an adult watching your weight.
And just so you know: these terms—recall, reclaim, and recast—are central to my new book, The Power of Your Past: the art of recalling, reclaiming and recasting for a major reason. When we practice working with our memories this way, we stay in tune with our originality and roots.
More on this as we go. Happy food memories.
