The Pessimistic Chef
I am a professional chef. My passion is for food, cooking, eating, and watching other people eat, as well. But I work in a hot, steamy, and loud kitchen. My meals at work are hurried bites of what is cheap or leftover, snatched in a spare minute, eaten over a trash can. Eating food used to be a pleasurable community activity; now it is refueling.
I have read of an era when people took time to eat; I have rarely experienced this in public. Only in privacy, with friends and loved ones, do I see food savored, succored, enjoyed. This is not about etiquette or manners, but a sense of sharing, of communal well-being.
The family dinner, though, is all but dead. Others have lamented its death, due to conflicting schedules and many varied excuses. It is also from a lack of desire, tiredness due to the overwhelming pressure to work, to achieve. The pastoral image of our past is a memory; some may enjoy it, but most don't even know it existed.
Nonetheless, food is still the king of memories. Taste and, especially, smell are huge triggers. They fire neurons and bring back images, ideas, and feelings you would not be able to dredge up without them.
For me, the smell of fresh-baked cookies evokes memories of creaming butter, cracking eggs, checking the quality of the chocolate. But I feel as though mine was the last generation to bake cookies from scratch.
Now those warm cookie smells will evoke memories of opening a package of Nestle Tollhouse cookie dough. Not making cookies, just opening a package.
What a memory: my mom was the best package-opener.