On Memory, Peanuts and a Juicy Orange.

food writing 01

“The weather that day was the kind that sticks to your skin long after you’ve retreated inside. A weighted blanket of thick, breathable water. It was a typical Florida afternoon spent with my grandmother sipping cola with peanuts inside. I’d learn deacdes later that the snack is called “ farmer’s Coke”. Perhaps it was the sizzling mouthfeel of the carbonation playing doubles with the starchy, chalk like nature of the goobers nudging against my teeth, that converted me into the peanut-snacking adult I am today. Like an infant needs to nurse every few hours, I am latched to the peanut, as it is now my life force.”

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The afromentioned excerpt is the result of a seven minute writing excerise with the prompt focusing on snacks. According to our kind, talented and generous food writing teacher for the evening, the class could take any approach to the work. Be it say a criticism, an instructional piece, review, report or in the style of memory. The path was truly ours to lay hold of. And so I set my iPhone timer and went to work in my notes app — click clacking away. I mean, I was really feeling it. From the confines of my shabby, barely furnished office, condensation welled in my palm. To sooth the fresh mosquito bites on the nape of my neck, I dabbed the welts with the now damp, cool hand. My relief was but short lived. Florida summer sun has no favorites. In an attempt to not burn my young corneas, I squint up at my grandmother. The peanuts in her Coke bottle are swimming at half-mast now. She casts a playful smile my way and I catch a glimpse of her gold tooth. Suddenly, my seven minutes are up.

As of late, I’ve been ruminating on the benefit of food memory for a food lover who has much she doesn’t want to remember. I live with PTSD from surviving abuse and I knew I was depressed by the age of 15. I carry grief and death in my body like a hip replacement. Disassociation is step three in my morning routine. You see where I’m going here? However, with all of these barriers to my ability to retain and recall, how is it that the memories centering food, shatter the hazy windows of my fragmented mind?

This conflict of my mind may be the reason I’m so deeply attracted to culinary memoirs. Currently I’m reading If I Can Cook/ You Know God Can by the late Ntozake Shange. I implore those of you reading this to seek out a copy of your own. She boasts such a mastery of memory; Creating a living archival of her worldy travels by weaving in her present with the past, showing that memory is actually a loop formed by our collective experiences. The memories of those before us lives within, and so on and so forth.

In the chapter named “what we don’t say in public”, she speaks about a time in Cuba where she saw a man performing in blackface.

“From the beginning he had supported the Revolution, its passionate rejection of racsim and poverty. What was a little blackface to him? But I couldn’t grasp it. All I saw/felt was an affront to my idea of La Revolución, my idea of my beloved La Habana Vieja, which did not include burnt cork on the faces of black people in the twentieth century. I wanted to run back to America, stepping over the Florida Keys, to the mainland where I knew jocular racism as a ‘harmless part of the culture.’ Drinking sangria, munching on some of the most beautiful avocados and oranges I’ve ever seen.”

Though I have never stepped foot in Cuba, I know this experience. I know the stomach spasms that arise when you’re viscerally assaulted with racism. I went to Olympia High School, smack dab in Windermere. Like, I get it. I also know the strange comfort of that “jocular racism” that you’re willing to bypass for the joy of fruit laced sangrias, butter-like avocado and the juuuuuciest, most incredible oranges on the face of the Earth. Now I smell the salty winds of the Atlantic Coast and I’m probing my mind for the first time I ever had an avocado. Was I in middle school by then? Ah, who knows. I remember hating my body in middle school but I don’t recall avocados. I’m now in the backseat of our family SUV, staring out the window the way depressed teens harboring painful secrets do, counting the orange trees that line the highway. Why did we never stop at the highway citrus stands with massive, worn out signs that said “ INDIAN RIVER FRUIT $1.00 A BAG. JUMBO PAPERSHELL PECANS.”? I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, on the off chance my parents notice my sullen face. They may ask me what’s wrong and then my secrets will pour out.

As said before, there’s much I would rather not remember, but as a student of Floridian culinary history, a chef, and now food writer, the progession of my work depends on my willingness to recollect. I’ve made my peace and have come to accept that food is a salve to memory — though I have no desire to remember all at once nor will I try. But I am open to the way that food will take me there, prepared or not, with a firm grip.