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Food as a Placemaker

Imagine your favourite meal, is it tied to a favourite place?

By Jude KeefePublished 6 years ago 2 min read
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Sunset suppers + serenades have led me down a serendipitous path

My favourite meal? The smell of anticipation as the stew simmers before a Sunday evening meal. The comfort of dipping a homemade biscuit in the leftover juices. Paired with a favourite wine and a chocolate cookie for dessert. This, and so many others, can transport me to another time and place. A comfortable memory, a feature of home enriched with haptic dimensions in more ways than I can count. But it is, as we adult our way past childhood homes, difficult to recreate in the same way. These recipes have built community in many places—as products of local resources, a way to survive another day. And with proper nutrition, thrive too. When a building can be transformed by sharing the love of food, the layers of story keep the place standing into legacy status.

Haptic Memories of Youth Include This One

Even when the people leave and the place has to change, the memory remains in silence, an empty grave because the memory lives in hearts. What sounds like a metaphor used in Easter allegory is apparently also true for a small town restaurant struggling to survive, and dying of a cancerous attitude, of systems change. A time before internet and cell phone takeover, unfortunately all the memories existed before instagram. But film camera and Friday cakes defined a time of coming-of-age in more dimensions than I ever could understand at the time. But I knew it was special. And I'm glad, now, to have it to hold onto. More importantly, in some ways, I must also remember it is gone. So that I am reminded I can (and have to) enrich my new realities with as much of these memories' goodness as I can.

"Favourite" is just the tip of the soup-spoon iceberg.

Food reminds me to be a good person, the same way a beautiful playlist resets my mood. In eating well, either for pleasure or nutrition, the effect is more than a lottery can sustain. I can smell a fresh baking carrot cake if I tap into the memory bank long enough. The only thing I'd ask the lotto to do is build me another Riverhouse, on my terms this time. I owe it to the people who raised me, and to the recipes too. And of course, the view.

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