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AT A TIME WHEN DRINKS AVAILABLE IN GAS STATION COOLERS PROMISE exotic ingredients to boost your memory powers, my own interest in food and memory meets with bemusement from Mends 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?" (see Sutton, 2001:1) In this essay I wish to reflect on this question, and in keeping with the theme of this issue, pose the question in terms 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 hi definition, a lack of common methodology and a lack of theoretical development (Climo and Cattell, 2002; Golden, 2005; Holtzman, 2006).
In this essay I hope to make a small contribution to clarity in exploring what we mean by memory, how food is implicated in very different types of memory, and how these different types of memory relate to each other. This will not be a review of the burgeoning literature on this topic, since this has been done recently and thoroughly by Holtzman (2006). Rather, I will draw on ethnographic examples from my fieldwork on the island of Kalymnos, Greece to suggest some of the ways that food and memory can be productively thought together.
SOCIAL MEMORY
Social or collective memory, of course, emerges from the work of Halbwachs, who argues that memory is only able to endure in sustaining social contexts (see Narvaez, 2006: 61). Connerton begins his book How Societies Remember (1989) with the claim "We generally think of memory as an individual faculty." Connerton, however, sees social memory as having a crucial normative role in creating social orders and identities. As he puts it: "It is an implicit rule that participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory." This is because, according to Connerton, divergent pasts would lead to the creation of divergent presents: "our images of the past commonly serve to legitimate a present social order"...