Food & Memory in The Reporter’s Kitchen

As a writer myself, I related to a lot of what Jane Kramer explored in her short essay. She thought of the process of preparing a meal and eating food as a means of remembering, and it seemed that for our author, food and life experience whirled together into one muddy sense-memory. While Kramer is a journalist and a cook, at this point in my life I define myself mostly as a poet and a student. I am excited to be able to find a medium that compliments and questions my writing as Kramer has found in cooking.

Something that surprised me was reading about how food is prepared outside of the US. In fact, I am surprised that I didn’t realize in this reading that of course food is prepared differently outside of America. Sometimes I catch myself in this train of thought, where I assume out of ignorance or entitlement that the “American” way is supposedly the way the world makes and enjoys meals. I always try to snap out of those thoughts because I know they are exclusionary, and I have yet to taste some of the world’s more incredible foods.

Going along with this thread, I appreciated the fact that Kramer was not judgmental about eating things that may be outside of her comfort zone, out of respect for the culture and the people she is among. It must have been a growing experience for her, to be able to not impose her western habits surrounding meals to the various communities she visited in her work.

She beings page 168 with the thought, “Some dishes just don’t travel”. She goes on to say how you’ll never being able to exactly recreate the same meal you had, especially with differences in resources and cultural practices. This got me thinking about our cafeteria at K and how so many students hail from countries and cultures outside of Americanized pallets. My mom is from India, and so that has been my experience. I crave meals that remind me of home, and when our cafeteria has attempted to create meals from different cultures around the world, they unfortunately miss the mark. I hope that our school can find ways to move towards creating meals that are closer to home for me and my peers who enjoy other types of food.

I was also intrigued by the points when the author noted how she cooks something specific to the story she is about to cover, whether it relates to her mood or experience being in another environment. On page 170, she described how when beginning a piece, she is generally a bit panicked, and how her loved-ones “are able to gauge this panic by the food I feed them”. In this section she described how she cooked a “small Thanksgiving turkey, two Christmas rib roasts, and an Easter lamb” when panicked about how to tell the story of an Afghan Refugee.

Seeing this made me want to examine what I do when stressed in regards to my writing. I discovered that for my poetry or journaling, if I am severely overwhelmed I do one of two things: I either don’t write about it at all (my thinking is, if I don’t write it it’s not hurting me, right?) or I free-write in my journal for pages and pages, in an attempt to let it all out before sorting through my feelings. My journals then can be most associated with Kramer’s huge meals, I think. Both are indulgent. Both can be healing.