Acceso usuarios
David Sutton
At a time when drink available in gas station coolers promise exotic ingredients to boost your memory powers, my own interest in food and memory meets with bem usem ent from friends and colleagues.' Both the study of food and of memory are relatively recent subjects in anthropology and social science more generally, and thus their convergence still provokes surprise and curiosity. In the words of one colleague, “Food and memory? Why would anyone want to remember anything they had eaten?” In this essay I wish to reflect on this question, and in keeping w ith the them e of this issue, pose the question in term s of “social” or “collective” memory. In what ways does food, ingested into individual bodies, feed social memory? Recently, a number of scholars have suggested that the topic of social memory suffers from a lack of precision in definition, a lack of common methodology and a lack of theoretical development.
