Intimate observers of my creative process know the combination of joy and panic that push a piece into the world. Though my goal is weekly for these, I often feel at the whim of the Muse, as they say aka sometimes can do 5 a month and sometimes 3 due to some combination of procrastination, inspiration, anxiety, business, and funny little focus. Also, famously the typos are in my style and intentional! I… swear!
The point is, I’ll sit on an idea for awhile, often waiting for a little push. I’ve learned to trust the timing, 1. Because no one is paying me to do this (though have at!!) and 2. because weirdly it ends up working out. My last take actually coincided in direct conversation with the Eater exposé, shall we say, of Blue Hill. !!
Anyway, this week I’ve really been in the push/pull of declaring to everyone who will listen “I have to do substack!” and then also not doing substack because somehow, I can’t until I can. But I learned why literally last night!
Friday afternoon, I had stumbled upon a flow but then had to go to dinner (love a meal as an excuse). At dinner, someone at the table behind me was having a birthday party. I swiveled around to survey the scene and locked eyes with a large doll at the table behind me. The birthday queen had brought her childhood doll with her to dinner to celebrate. Though the sentiment was sweet and pure, on the drive home, I did wonder if I might soon become possessed.
So far, no, I am just grateful. Things had connected. What I had been thinking about before leaving for dinner was: CAN FOOD BE HAUNTED?
This is a question I ask myself from time to time (don’t you??), but I am especially asking it this week. I write this from on a tiny island off the coast of Washington state, a place that I used to live (once to work on a vineyard and once to start a restaurant with an A-team of BFFs).
The island is the size of Manhattan and defined by Back to the Land and a sense of tradition. The beauty is cinematic, the elements unrelenting, and my memories run absolutely wild. The moment the ferry docks on island, they go where I go. Love, sadness, joy, sweetness, loss, beauty absolutely inundating me left, right, and CENTER! On every walk, through every song I sing while I drive, lying under each afternoon sun I am keeping these feelings company as they go truly bonkeys bananas, excited to be back On Island. I know myself enough to anticipate these little accompaniments, but their persistence through the quotien is always a wonder.
Anyway, the food here is really good, and there are not that many places to eat it. I do the food tour, reacquainting my body with what its known and celebrated. I eat the same cinnamon roll I’ve always loved, drinking coffee alongside, running myself high and low. I delight in blackberries as weeds on the side of the road. A Dungeness crab is offered up to me, cleaned and bright. I drink the first wine that really interested me, grown on vines I used to tend. I actively engage something of a memory loop, relishing each thing that I ingest, not just because it tastes good but because it ultimately tastes the same. Or at least holds the same silhouette. Sampling, I am forced to wonder if I actually do value consistency more than I thought. Lol.
I am such a nostalgic person that often it’s so intense it is funny. I also am a bit unnerved by the power of it all. As there are only so many hours in the day, and I hopefully have much more life to live, the goal is to temper it a bit. I have been training myself to discern which floods of nostalgia are useful and which are perhaps indulgent, aka me weeping at a piece of cake ‘just because’, with the emotional urgency of the old lady in Titanic.
I’ve decided I like revisiting these foods not only because it sparks some catharsis between past and present, but also because eating or drinking something usually affords me enough time to process my own nostalgia, which is inconvenient in and of itself to getting things done for the time and space it occupies. It helps to chew on it, shed a petit tear if I must, and move on.
Of course, in these little tizzies of this sentiment, we do love Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past”. He writes:
“I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.”
I love this passage for the conversation it acknowledges. When I am eating a cinnamon roll, in a way, I am submitting to a call for meaning. The passage talks about objects (and here I am thinking of the object of food) communicating with us the way that trauma specialists our bodies’ symptoms do: each ache is a message. The Body Keeps the Score! It feels validating to acknowledge the soul of a thing, even if it may be ourselves. Then Marcel talks about his favorite cookie.
This passage (and the subsequent recollections) asserts that these objects possess more than just their shape. Screaming to us, they are haunted. And while I love this passage, it also always spooks me a little bit. Memory is romantic, but haunted is a bit scary. Even scarier, a question of doubt. How many times does this ritual work? One day, I might bite into something, expecting remembered vitality, and it might taste different. Somehow, I would understand that the former life force isn’t in it, that time has passed. Something haunted isn’t necessarily a spirit that is stuck, but a visitation of what was.
One of my favorite things is when I am visited in dreams by people who have passed away. It is the biggest treat, particularly because all I have to do is be unconscious for its potential. If analysis is a question of freedom through revisitation, it makes sense that some clarity around past would come through returning to sensory. Food as medicine. It’s ironic that we use the phrase comfort food for what is familiar, because the sentiment that is evoked of these Food Tours of Mystical Memory – though of course sensorially pleasant – is actually a rush of vitality more than anything else. And being alive, though often delicious, is not always comfortable.
So, can food be haunted? It’s definitely possessed. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the submission to time’s passing. Consider how we let cheese rot and then eat it, how wine becomes more extraordinary as it lives its life. That we can pickle anything at all. There’s some interruption there which is audacious.
There’s no answer to these questions. They are simply dolls that I will carry around at the dinner table.
Here are some things that make me think about food and possession and haunting and love.
-Food with Threatening Auras : an iconic Instagram
- Cabbage Patch Kids when they are made to eat. Their food goes into their… backpack?
-This dish at Pujol, which is Mole Madre (aged 2500+ days) surrounding around Mole Nuevo (made new). Olvera calls it a “living, breathing being.
-I’ve recently been reading some books about the haunting that food occupies. They have been a marvel. I found myself often eating while I read these, which is… complicated!
In particular, Empty by Susan Burton. Elegy for an Appetite by Shaina Loew-Banayan. The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty.
-This little fellow I ate last night, whose eyes were clear. Not haunted, but expressive, swimming in my memory.