an Anthropology of Food and Memory
published by Berg:
by David Sutton
"Food and memory? Why would anyone want to remember anything they had eaten?" This sardonic comment, made by an Oxford Don, seemed to sum up the response when I presented a paper on the topic in 1996 in the Department of Anthropology at England's Oxford University. Indeed, as I sat with my fellow gowned colleagues surrounded by all manner of fork and spoon, and experienced for myself the extreme emphasis on form over substance at Oxford High Table, where a profusion of potatoes and overboiled vegetables was presented and just as quickly whisked away, I realized that this comment was not at all out of place.
Yet on the Greek island of Kalymnos things were different. From the first time I visited Kalymnos as a high school senior on a study-abroad program, clues abounded to the connection that existed on the island between food and strategies of remembering. Kalymnian friends noted and continually mentioned my dislikes (my complaints about the predominance of eggs in our daily meals), as well as my penchant for their Kalymnian version of beef stew. But they not only noted, they remembered these likes and dislikes, and brought them up again on my return trips two and eight years later. So it was not a total surprise when I began fieldwork to hear the frequently phrased injunction: "eat, in order to remember Kalymnos." I had my own ideas of what this meant, and collected fieldwork stories in the exotic mode for the folks back home: from the sea urchins that I watched Kalymnians collect with their bare hands, open with a fork and eat live, to the octopus, pounded on the rocks and eaten fresh off the grill, to the roasted goat, whose severed head was dangled over mine when someone decided to "playfully" wake me from an afternoon nap. But there was a difference here, because my friends did not have such, from my perspective, "exotic" foods in mind. Any meal could potentially be the object of this injunction. And as the comment was repeated, I began to realize that this was not simply a suggestion made to a foreigner to take back culinary souvenirs of his stay along with the photographs, postcards, and in the case of Kalymnos, the ubiquitous sponges which are the more common objects of tourist expropriation from the island. In telling me to use the transitory and repetitive act of eating as a medium for the more enduring act of remembering, they were, in fact, telling me to act like a Kalymnian. As I listened to their own stories about the past I began to realize the extent that ordinary foods inform their memories. Evident in 50-year-old tales of plump purple figs served to a returned migrant from the United States, as well as in more mundane stories which began: "it was during the German occupation on Rhodes. I was eating a bag of apricots, when my friend Yiorgos came by and suggested we investigate the abandoned Jewish synagogue..." Did Kalymnians really remember such far off incidental details of their lives as a bag of apricots?
Read Introduction
Read Chapter 3
Read Chapter 5