Omnivore - Remembering our meals
Is food - and the taste of it - something people easily forget?
NPR recently published an article on our memories of food — or lack of them — and one man’s slightly over-the-top attempt to get people to remember what they’ve eaten.
The article explains how food is an element of life that people tend to forget — a claim that frankly shocked me. The article’s main source began his quest to commit food to people’s memory because he couldn’t remember what he had eaten at an important dinner with his aunt 10 years ago.
A memory expert in the article explains this phenomenon:
Cooke says taste is the trickiest of all the senses to pin down because it is fleeting and hard to describe.
‘You can remember basic attributes of the taste like sweet or sour, crunch and so on, but to actually reproduce it in your memory is a very elusive thing,’ says Cooke.
We also have a poor vocabulary to describe taste, and have to rely a lot on metaphors to describe it — the pudding was a cloud of chocolate, and so on.