How much of that will he remember, and for how long, and how well? You might be able to tell me, with some certainty, what your breakfast was, but that confidence most likely diminishes when I ask about two, three, four breakfasts ago—never mind this day last year. (...)
For breakfast on January 2, 2008, I ate oatmeal with pumpkin seeds and brown sugar and drank a cup of green tea. I know because it’s the first entry in a food log I still keep today. I began it as an experiment in food as a mnemonic device. The idea was this: I’d write something objective every day that would cue my memories into the future—they’d serve as compasses by which to remember moments.
Andy Warhol kept what he called a “smell collection,” switching perfumes every three months so he could reminisce more lucidly on those three months whenever he smelled that period’s particular scent. Food, I figured, took this even further. It involves multiple senses, and that’s why memories that surround food can come on so strong.
What I’d like to have is a perfect record of every day. I’ve long been obsessed with this impossibility, that every day be perfectly productive and perfectly remembered. What I remember from January 2, 2008 is that after eating the oatmeal I went to the post office, where an old woman was arguing with a postal worker about postage—she thought what she’d affixed to her envelope was enough and he didn’t. (...)
Last spring, as part of a NASA-funded study, a crew of three men and three women with “astronaut-like” characteristics spent four months in a geodesic dome in an abandoned quarry on the northern slope of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano. For those four months, they lived and ate as though they were on Mars, only venturing outside to the surrounding Mars-like, volcanic terrain, in simulated space suits. The Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) is a four-year project: a series of missions meant to simulate and study the challenges of long-term space travel, in anticipation of mankind’s eventual trip to Mars. This first mission’s focus was food.
Getting to Mars will take roughly six to nine months each way, depending on trajectory; the mission itself will likely span years. So the question becomes: How do you feed astronauts for so long? On “Mars,” the HI-SEAS crew alternated between two days of pre-prepared meals and two days of dome-cooked meals of shelf-stable ingredients. Researchers were interested in the answers to a number of behavioral issues: among them, the well-documented phenomenon of menu fatigue (when International Space Station astronauts grow weary of their packeted meals, they tend to lose weight). They wanted to see what patterns would evolve over time if a crew’s members were allowed dietary autonomy, and given the opportunity to cook for themselves (“an alternative approach to feeding crews of long term planetary outposts,” read the open call).
Everything was hyper-documented. Everything eaten was logged in painstaking detail: weighed, filmed, and evaluated. The crew filled in surveys before and after meals: queries into how hungry they were, their first impressions, their moods, how the food smelled, what its texture was, how it tasted. They documented their time spent cooking; their water usage; the quantity of leftovers, if any. The goal was to measure the effect of what they ate on their health and morale, along with other basic questions concerning resource use. How much water will it take to cook on Mars? How much water will it take to wash dishes? How much time is required; how much energy? How will everybody feel about it all? I followed news of the mission devoutly. (...)
Their crew of six was selected from a pool of 700 candidates. Kate is a science writer, open-water swimmer, and volleyball player. When I asked her what “astronaut-like” means and why she was picked she says it’s some “combination of education, experience, and attitude”: a science background, leadership experience, an adventurous attitude. An interest in cooking was not among the requirements. The cooking duties were divided from the get-go; in the kitchen, crew members worked in pairs. On non-creative days they’d eat just-add-water, camping-type meals: pre-prepared lasagna, which surprised Kate by being not terrible; a thing called “kung fu chicken” that Angelo described as “slimy” and less tolerable; a raspberry crumble dessert that’s a favorite among backpackers (“That was really delicious,” Kate said, “but still you felt weird about thinking it was too delicious”). The crew didn’t eat much real astronaut food—astronaut ice cream, for example—because real astronaut food is expensive. (...)
When I look back on my meals from the past year, the food log does the job I intended more or less effectively. I can remember, with some clarity, the particulars of given days: who I was with, how I was feeling, the subjects discussed. There was the night in October I stress-scarfed a head of romaine and peanut butter packed onto old, hard bread; the somehow not-sobering bratwurst and fries I ate on day two of a two-day hangover, while trying to keep things light with somebody to whom, the two nights before, I had aired more than I meant to. There was the night in January I cooked “rice, chicken stirfry with bell pepper and mushrooms, tomato-y Chinese broccoli, 1 bottle IPA” with my oldest, best friend, and we ate the stirfry and drank our beers slowly while commiserating about the most recent conversations we’d had with our mothers.
Reading the entries from 2008, that first year, does something else to me: it suffuses me with the same mortification as if I’d written down my most private thoughts (that reaction is what keeps me from maintaining a more conventional journal). There’s nothing particularly incriminating about my diet, except maybe that I ate tortilla chips with unusual frequency, but the fact that it’s just food doesn’t spare me from the horror and head-shaking that comes with reading old diaries. Mentions of certain meals conjure specific memories, but mostly what I’m left with are the general feelings from that year. They weren’t happy ones. I was living in San Francisco at the time. A relationship was dissolving.
It seems to me that the success of a relationship depends on a shared trove of memories. Or not shared, necessarily, but not incompatible. That’s the trouble, I think, with parents and children: parents retain memories of their children that the children themselves don’t share. My father’s favorite meal is breakfast and his favorite breakfast restaurant is McDonald’s, and I remember—having just read Michael Pollan or watched Super Size Me—self-righteously not ordering my regular egg McMuffin one morning, and how that actually hurt him.
When a relationship goes south, it’s hard to pinpoint just where or how—especially after a prolonged period of it heading that direction. I was at a loss with this one. Going forward, I didn’t want not to be able to account for myself. If I could remember everything, I thought, I’d be better equipped; I’d be better able to make proper, comprehensive assessments—informed decisions. But my memory had proved itself unreliable, and I needed something better. Writing down food was a way to turn my life into facts: if I had all the facts, I could keep them straight. So the next time this happened I’d know exactly why—I’d have all the data at hand.
by Rachel Khong, Lucky Peach | Read more:
Image: Jason Polan
