TW: Starvation and binging
In preparation for writing, I woke up this morning and whipped up a large portion of pancake batter: eggs, flour, fresh milk, a bit of sugar, salt, and baking powder. I let the mixture rest until the ingredients had time to meet– shake each other’s hands, hug even. I placed a generous amount of butter in the pan and waited until it browned just a bit. I carefully portioned the batter into round, 6-inch diameter mounds. I waited until the bubbles rose and there was no wetness on the surface. I flipped it, waiting much less time on this side, just enough until it was golden. I placed it on my plate, repeating the process until I had a 3-stack (as they call it), with butter in between every layer and again on the top.
When the time came, I opened my cabinet and reached up high to where we keep maple syrup reserves. It was so high that my hand turned into my eyes, and the sense of touch became ever so needed as I felt around for the fat, round jug. Seeing as I live in Italy, I must ration the sweet, silky nectar that I ask relatives to bring whenever one visits. Naturally, I keep it up high and out of sight to avoid temptation.
Anyways, back to the pancakes. I put a generous amount of said nectar on top, which is the final step before digging in. Generous because when one wants to do something in life, it should be done right, not excessively, but right. And pancakes, with this river of sucrose, are right.
This leads me to the point of this paper. I slice my stack, revealing the perfect three fluffy cake layers, dip the portion into the syrup, and place it in my mouth. And there it is. Instant nostalgia–manufactured by yours truly. An experience as common as eating itself. The triggering of memories while consuming foods from the past is a universal experience, whether one chooses to manufacture it or not. As someone who studies this phenomenon, I find it more and more necessary to turn off my analytical mind in such moments and simply feel what comes up. Today, it was joy and angst, with a hint of jealousy, taking me back to the ages of six to fourteen to be precise.
During this time, I had attended many sleepovers. I was lucky to have a strong group of friends, grown out of the stronger bonds of our parents, who had replaced everyone’s extended family that had lived so far away. To be fair to the hosts of six to seven screaming girls, sleepovers rotated, and even if one would not admit it at the time, all of us waited patiently until the rotation returned to one friend’s house. Why, might you ask? Well, if it was not enough foreshadowing, I guess I must tell you: pancakes.
Specifically, our friend’s mom, Linda, made these pancakes. In a plastic jar or deli container, she whisked everything perfectly with a fork. Now, what was so special about these pancakes, though? Regardless of the fact that the 2000s seemed riddled with cases of salmonella, our friend’s mom would allow us to indulge in the delicacy of “the runny pancake.” Some liked theirs more “runny” than others, but no matter what, each of us would jump for joy at the mere idea of Linda’s special melted chocolate-filled runny pancake. Perfectly crisped around the edges and yet runny on the inside was a sign of high heat and lots of oil, the necessary strategy to obtain the desired result.
But time went on, and things changed. When we turned 10, we were shocked to discover, in art class, that this friend’s parents were separating. We gathered around our table, and as we heard the news, we were sad for our friend. She was the first in the group (but definitely not the last) to have this happen to her, but we were also sad for ourselves. What would this drastic change do to our monthly pancake rituals?
Luckily for us, that was not the end of Linda’s runny pancakes, but things were never quite the same since then. When we would have sleepovers at our friend’s dad’s house after Linda moved out, we would wake up and come into the kitchen to find that daunting yellow bottle of Bisquick, pre-mixed pancake batter. Her dad would say, “just add water.” We would oblige; his efforts to try and maintain normality were not lost on us, but I think we all knew we must just give in more for him and less for us.
These stories of the pancake highlight an essential point this piece will make: the idea of the body as an archive. The experience of consuming food is a multifaceted process. First, the body takes an active role in food creation; in the modernization of agriculture, the human body learned to cultivate and turn energy into more energy that would feed and sustain. Later, this food becomes a part of us as it transforms into the cells that make up our bodies; we become the material we decide (or are forced) to consume. But this is simply the past and the present. The future body remembers; we can rely on the material used in the present always to trigger the past, but not just the material itself; the entire environment that surrounds you plays a role in the phenomenon of taste.
Taste combines senses that expand beyond the physical body or tongue. Taste hones in on all senses, resulting in an overwhelming recollection of the past. This is the archive. Through the experience or mere topic of food, the mouth can water, shudder, or become nauseated. For some, it brings you back to your childhood, a marriage, or a death perhaps. This is to say that although we are raised to believe that there are five distinct senses, taste, as has been argued by many, is far more intricate. “Taste constitutes… a complex perceptual system,” one that “always involves the sense of smell and…all the other senses” depending on the context (Perullo, 2016, p. 5). It is not simply a response to stimuli but rather a dynamic process shaped by culture, memory, and the intricate editing of sensory data. Taste, then, is a sensory gateway, filtered through the medium of the body, to the past, intimately linking us to deeply personal experiences and emotions.
I am able to enter the past through specific channels of remembrance. My body remembers fresh ripe strawberries in the summertime, sprinkled so softly with white sugar, bleeding a precious juice so red that they stained my hands. My body remembers unsalted meatloaf, which triggered my father to shout, creating chaos around my mother not living up to the standards he had set for her as a housewife with a job. My body remembers the taste of chocolate bars, snuck in the night that I hoped would shield the shame of the daylight.
It is essential to point out that the process of a material (food in this case) does not simply bring up an emotion, but it allows for a transportation; that is why the body is a deep archive that holds history inside of it. The body deeply remembers, but one must not mix this experience with the scientific idea of remembrance or the traditional idea of an archive, which bases itself on the colonial concept of the written–instead it is an embodied archive. One that comes from storytelling, trust building, and the context of the situation. And what is the credibility of a story, one might ask?
Let me explain with an example. I live in a small Italian village with 35 other people. The average age of the village is 75 years old. The other day, I went to my yard to get my sheets from the line and saw a group of anziani (elderly people) sitting around. I greeted them and stayed for some conversation. After a while, the topic of our yard came up; given that everyone else here does not have a job, people tend to have a lot of time on their hands, so the two things people do are grooming their gardens and gossiping about others. The topic of my garden was the perfect mixture of these two. One man mentioned he saw we had some rosa canina (rose hips) there. I said, “Yes, we have a large plant,” and asked them when they thought they would be ripe. From this topic, each person remembered exactly when the rose hips in the village got ripe; they told me a precise timeline from when they were children of how the months of ripening have changed. From here, they explained how they used to eat them, how their mothers used to go out to collect and come home to do the laborious tasks of turning the seed-filled fruit into jam. Each person “ooo”-ed at the idea–remembering the taste. “Buono, buono,” (tasty, tasty) each said in unison. The following neighbor told me that his mother would soak the rose hips in fresh olive oil and let it sit for a year minimum. She would use this as a salve to put over hurting joints or cuts. Each person remembered something new, some other herb their mother would use to make medicine. The afternoon chatting session went on like this: a process of patience, remembering, triggering, and sharing–creating a small archive at that moment that touched on tradition, climate, ailments, and cures.
How credible are these stories? Some say that memory is faulty or people lie, but my point concerns something bigger than facts. These stories that people shared with me shed new light on an expert area of the daily life of the non-hegemonic classes. Their memories are credible but with a different credibility. We must remember that the importance of oral testimony may lie not in its adherence to fact but in its departure from it as imagination, symbolism, and desire emerge (Portelli, 2016, p. 36).
In this piece, I will examine this process and the body as an archive and trace food memories to make history. I will tell the story of the mundane, the every day, the trauma and the tribulations, the joy and the pain, and everything in between.
—
Ripe red strawberries with Bleach white Caster Sugar
JOY
We are now on the border of Chapel Hill and Durham County, North Carolina, at my maternal grandmother’s house. My grandmother could have been described as a quirky woman. She was a germaphobe hoarder with, in my non-medical opinion, many signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Closets were filled with enough Kleenex to last her easily until the age of 150, and meals were very strict; the same bowl of chicken and rice was eaten for at least 45 years straight, without fail. Since my grandmother lived in North Carolina and we were in the tropical islands of Florida, when school got out every year, we drove the 18 hours North. Walking into the house, a few things stuck to you. Your nose was bombarded with the smells of vinegar and baking soda, so avidly used to clean every crevice and Dial bright orange dish soap that was required to be used upon entering the house or touching any of the “forbidden dirty items” such as money, shoes, or practically anything that had been outside. And your sight was bombarded by, well, stuff. Lots of stuff everywhere, but as a child, this excited me; I felt like I was going through a store, yet everything was free. My grandma was very particular and tough. She was a military woman raised in harsh conditions, but she was generous, especially to her grandchildren. We knew that all we had to do was mention we liked something once, and it would show up the next, in multiples at that. My favorite things to mention to her were always fancy food items such as fresh, thick cold chocolate milk in the glass bottle, freshly baked bagels, and whipped cream cheese. She was always good at providing the best.
But my favorite thing that my grandmother would do was wash and cut up ripe, in-season, organic strawberries, put them in her iconic bright cobalt China bowls, and sprinkle just a little white caster sugar on top. The water left over from washing them would melt the sugar, but a little bit would stay so that you could feel the crystals on your teeth crunch as you bit into the strawberries.
So much joy and care in each bite, you felt the generational trauma of my mother never hearing “I love you” coming through the juicy red berries. That sugar-crusted layer of strawberries would always taste so sweet, but the depth beneath it was unspoken, with my grandmother’s love shown through action and routine and otherwise unsaid. It was not a warm, chatty love, but it could be found in my perfectly constructed snack. Her love came through the supplies, in those things that kept us never wanting — from endless bottles of hand soap or fridge fulls of treats still palpable today in each bite.
Unsalted meatloaf
FEAR
For those who might not be familiar, I grew up eating something called meatloaf. It is exactly as it sounds, ground beef with some spices, onions, and breadcrumbs, baked in the oven with a sweet ketchup-like substance on the top. Usually served with some form of potato, meatloaf was the meal you tended to eat for sustenance rather than pleasure in my house. Regardless, though, it was on the weekly rotation of dinners my mom threw together after coming home from work, picking us up from school, and taking us to sports practice while managing the rest of the household.
I grew up on an island, a tiny island. In my neighborhood, each house had a street in front and a canal in the back. Imagine Venice, Italy, but tropical, suburban, and less magical. Although my mom managed virtually everything in our house, there still remained an aura of ingratitude from my father. Expectations that she should be even more of a magician than she already was, creating hours out of thin air. These expectations manifested in anger from my father over everything. We woke up and walked on eggshells, hoping the next moment was not the moment.
The moment refers to an outburst of rage triggered by whatever he felt the day’s injustice was. One night that happened to be the meatloaf. Even though my mom had mixed the meat the same way for over ten years, he decided it was not adequately salted on this very day, which led to the attempt to salt it. The absolute rage was built as he shook the salt shaker over his plate.
On this island of ours, the air always felt as though it could be sliced–100 percent humidity, 24/7. This meant that rice should be kept in a salt shaker to avoid the ultimate fate of clumpy, unshakable salt. But my mom never found the time, in her very open schedule, to implement such a trick, and my father was obviously incapable. He had enough of it. What is the solution to such an issue? According to my father, it was to step 1: aggressively push the table away from him (and subsequently into me), step 2: run outside, and step 3: chuck the salt shaker, as hard as possible, into the canal.
What I felt in that moment was pure fear, nothing else. Fear that the anger might one day shift from a salt shaker to me. Fear that the rage might be contagious, lurking inside me, waiting for the right moment to erupt. Although I no longer eat unsalted meatloaf, the real issue isn’t about the food. The salt shaker, still submerged in that canal, is more than just an object—it symbolizes how our bodies hold onto history. Like the salt dissolving in the water, the contents of that night seeped into my skin and settled there, leaving behind a residue of unresolved fear that I still carry. My body remembers storing these tangible markers of the past and translating them into present-day reactions. What seems buried in objects like a salt shaker is never entirely gone; instead, it resurfaces in the body, reminding us that the past persists in the everyday.
Snickers from the Vending Machine
SHAME
It was when I turned 14 that I first began to understand the connection between food and the body, but at the time, I didn’t grasp that food had the power to heal, energize, and bring joy. Instead, my teenage self clung to the belief that food had the power to destroy—destroy relationships, joy, and confidence. During this period, as I navigated the pressures of adolescence and transitioned to a new school, I was consumed by body consciousness and the persistent feeling of being “too big.” Only looking back now do I realize how distorted that perspective was.
I am a big person—tall and broad; I always have been. I was among the tallest in my class, even up until high school, and by far the tallest girl. As a child, I felt free in this identity; I felt powerful. I could jump high, beat people in tetherball, and reach things when people needed help. I saw nothing wrong with this trait of mine. But like so many people in the world, society creeps up on you; it rots your brain into thinking you are wrong for being different. When I turned 14, I began to watch how eating seemed to change my body. I was no longer just tall but also wide, in a world that told me I could be neither. I didn’t know what to do.
This new self-consciousness was paired with the newfound freedom—and isolation—of boarding school. Long story short, I escaped from home, got a scholarship to a private school, and somehow ended up surrounded by wealthy kids who had only eaten organic green apples their whole lives. They came from a world I didn’t belong to, where they casually talked about detoxes, cleanses, and how carbs were the enemy. On top of that, boarding schools seemed to love feeding people—maybe to keep us entertained. We went from breakfast to break cake, lunch, snack, dinner, and then to a late-night snack.
I watched how the girls at my school would subtly police their eating. They’d pick small black bowls instead of plates, not just to eat less, but to appear delicate. A petite girl eating from a petite bowl—what more could a man want? It wasn’t just about food; it was a performance, an identity. And here I was, tall and broad, feeling like the complete opposite of what I was “supposed” to be.
All this pressure spun me into a world I didn’t know how to handle. I tried everything to shrink myself—strange teas, fad diets, endless miles running on the cross-country team, and sometimes just good ol’ starvation. I was chasing an ideal that was never meant for me. At the end of it all, though, I’d consistently find myself giving in to one ritual:
Every other night, I’d put on a black hoodie and walk into the darkness toward the computer lab where there was a vending machine—and, more importantly, no one around. I’d slip a dollar into the slot and type E34: Snickers. I’d head back to my room, unwrap it like it was a guilty secret, and savor every bite. But I never kept the wrapper in my room—I’d toss it immediately in the hallway trash can so no one would suspect it could be from me.
To this day, eating chocolate of any kind triggers a deep sense of shame. It’s not about the present anymore—it’s a relic of the past, a ghost of those years when I felt so wrong for simply existing in my body. It took a lot of time and healing to distance myself from that mindset–realizing the body is not to be mistreated, and food is not meant to be a weapon. Now, when that shame creeps up, I recognize it for what it is: a residual feeling I don’t need to carry anymore.
While each of these stories exudes an overarching emotion, I would like to conclude this piece with the interconnectedness of these experiences. There is no way to feel only one emotion when you trigger a memory. If I were to wash and slice some strawberries, sprinkle some castor sugar over them, and take a bite, I would not be able to isolate the joy. This is because I am triggering the memory in the present, the person I am now, and the experiences I have had up until this point, allow me to look back on the feeling with various layers. I now know the copious dynamics at play in those moments that add stains to that joy. I know now what will happen many summers later, the pain I will feel, the hardships that will come. And yet the joy does not get lost; it does not get erased but instead layered, and as the memory is triggered, it fights its way up and somehow remains strong.
Writing about that story now makes me cry—sometimes small tears and sometimes many, thoroughly wetting my face, making my nose blocked. When it came time to choose where to go to college, I chose a school close to my grandma. For so long, I had lived my life only being able to see my grandma for some weeks out of the year, and now I choose to see her whenever I deem fit. I spent the first two years of college going back and forth to my grandma’s house on the weekends or before the holidays.
I got the call as school was ending, and strawberries were coming into the season that my grandma had been transferred to a hospice center; I spent every day leaving work early and driving to the center to see her. Unfortunately, she didn’t even make it through strawberry season. The fridge remained empty, and I realized only then how beautiful it was to have a magical fridge appearing with treats, treats you had asked for and treats you adored so profoundly.
These experiences call for the need to understand that our food connections are not just about taste or custom but rather an amalgamation of personal history, emotion, and identity. Each bite, each memory comes together as a collection rich in joy, pain, and everything in between, interspersing our past with the present.
In this way, pancakes, meatloaf, or strawberries behave as outstanding displays of how our bodies act like living deposits for lived life. According to them, memories are layers we cannot separate but contribute to who we are. A favorite food’s taste or a treasured dish’s smell can take us back down comfort paths, conflict zones, or connection streets, all making the mundane profound.
Authors note:
This piece was an exercise in expression. Removing the boundaries that academia has set for me and experiencing the method and state that I put other people in as a researcher asking about food memory. The process of thinking and stepping into that space allowed me to gain more empathy and understanding for what recalling past dishes could do to a person, as well as, how storytelling works in my own brain—sometimes, feeling the need to exaggerate or fill in pieces of information, not out of deceit, but to articulate our feelings and experiences better.
My hope for this piece is that everyone takes the time to reflect on the foods that have left a visceral, meaningful impact on them—whether they’ve been forgotten or overlooked. The body is a powerful storage space, and pulling these things out is a deep form of therapy I think we can all benefit from. If you participate in this practice and want to share, I would love to hear about your process. Thank you for engaging.
References
Perullo N., Taste as experience: the philosophy and aesthetics of food. American edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Portelli A., What Makes Oral History Different, in R. Perks and A. Thomson (eds) The Oral History Reader. London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 32–42, 2016.
Mallory Cerkleski (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in History at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. She holds an M.A. in Food Innovation and Management from the University of Gastronomic Sciences and dual B.A. degrees in Sustainable Food Systems and Political Science from Guilford College. Her doctoral project consists of a comparative history of the lived experiences of communist food systems in Cuba and Kerala using oral history and archival methodologies.
Mallory’s research on food justice and sovereignty has been published in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development and the Journal of Gastronomic Sciences. She also authored the essay “Resolver and Rebusque: The State of Cuban Land and Food Sovereignty” in the book Food Sovereignty and Land Grabbing. She is a board member of the Research Network for Postsocialist Cultural Studies (SOYUZ) and the Graduate Association for Food Studies and leads the “Culinary Chronicles” project, which explores cultural heritage through oral histories using food as a tool and lens.
Her extensive fieldwork includes projects in Cuba, India, Malawi, and the U.S., and she has presented her research at various international conferences.