Meat and Memory: An Introduction

Here's a fun question. What's the best piece of meat you've ever eaten in your life?

As one gets older, the ranking of one's life experiences into bests and worsts becomes more and more ridiculous. Older memories fade and evolve in their retelling. We reach a point where we're not sure how much of a memory survives from the actual experience and how much is a product of the recalling and retelling. While we imagine we can mentally thrust ourselves back through time to a specific moment, what we actually see in our mind's eye is the latest in an endless series of copies of copies that may have little resemblance to the original.

Nevertheless, slotting our memories into categories of goods and bads and bests and worsts is part of the human condition. The sum of these simplistically categorized memories forms the basis for our decision making process. Like all animals, we need to make thousands of rapid-fire decisions every day. When we see another person, we almost instantly categorize them into one of our facile folders of likes and dislikes. This is our subconscious protecting us from potential danger--our mechanism for surviving in the fight-or-flight reality of life. The same is true of food. We need some sort of instant visual or olfactory indication as to whether the food we put in our mouths will give us life or cause illness or death. Therefore, when presented with a dish, our subconscious performs a rapid search of our memories and brings up a verdict of good or bad. Ambiguities do not indicate a clear course of action so our memories avoid them. To rank our experiences into bests and worsts is slightly different but no less simplistic. It allows our egos to set broader goals and gives us the means to set long-term plans to achieve them.

But I digress...

To return to the meat question, I'll have to narrow it down to several finalists:

• A butterflied barbecued chicken breast
  
• A broiled ribeye steak with salt and pepper
• A pan seared foie gras with peaches
• A plate of yellow-fin tuna sashimi
• An order of tuna tataki
  
• A deer loin roasted in red wine and rosemary
  

 Each of these meat experiences, at the very least, deserves an article of its own. At the most, they could be expanded to a series of autobiographical novels. For to truly delve into the joy of food, one must delve into the joy of life. Food is not eaten in a vacuum, it is inextricably linked to our experiences. Our memories of food have less to do with the actual dish that was in front of us, than with the specific time and place in which it was consumed. Conversely, a particular dish may subconsciously lead us to recall a time or feeling in our deeper past.

Thus, in this upcoming series on Meat and Memory I will explore the strange, dark corners of my history and psyche. Like an archeologist, I will dust off the hidden layers of my mind, and piece together the ruins into some semblance of understanding. Will this lead to revelation? Maybe. But as in all things, the journey is more important than the destination.

(Image: Autumn Cannibalism by Salvador Dali, 1937)