Building memories around local food experiences

Attending a recent facilitated food discussion got me thinking about the psychological or food memories we bring to the food spaces we engage in and how these spaces may look in the future by understanding our own psychology.  

For me now these food spaces are a community garden, my home garden and kitchen, and a slow recovery mental health recovery kitchen and garden where I work.

But in the past I ran my own little cafe.  I grew up living above our family restaurant and later, my family started a bakery. My father died in a car crash on the way to work at the bakery one foggy morning. I was 9.

I have wondered what my parents' food memories are and the reasons they choose the paths they did.

My mum was born in 1943 and grew up on a farm in England run by her mother while my mum's father was in France and India fighting with the Allies during WII.  She was sent off to boarding school at 9. 

My father was born in July 1939 and grew up in Nazi occupied Vienna during WII. At 14 he headed into the warmest place in Vienna in winter- a commercial kitchen as an apprentice cook.

Food, or fear of a lack thereof, must have played a part in their lives.  Why did Dad become a chef?  I will never know. 

I’m lucky to have been able to ask my mum about her early years, and hear stories of her mother milking the house cow, growing food, raising chickens and turkeys and selling eggs.  As a single parent.

Me, I tried to stay away from kitchens and food.  They were painful places.  I had dreams of joining the airforce or programming computers, but casual work in bakeries and restaurants during high school and Uni helped me to connect with part of my past.  It was painful to be in these spaces because they were my dads space and brought up memories and emotions I did not understand. And the smells in these places would trigger painful emotions.  I was emotional, but lacked the emotional literacy and words to understand why. Nor did I have the words to express my feelings.

I went about my life. Completing a uni degree. Working in hotels, running a car rental agency, getting married, teaching myself to cook using La Rouse Gastronomic while living at Ayers Rock, working in IT, running a ski lodge cooking for 30 people, six nights a week.  I knew the more I worked in restaurants the more I connected with my past, but I still lacked the language to understand and articulate my feelings.  I feared this.

Sessions with councillors started a few years after our daughter was born.  Doctors identified it as depression.  It would come and go over the coming years. Depression was a symptom, not the cause.  Recently, an ADHD diagnosis linked to trauma helped to pinpoint a cause.

I was in a good space when we choose to open Cafe Derailleur.  But I knew I would need more help from councillors at some point.  I didn’t know that running a restaurant was so ingrained in my past and my emotions until I walked into the cafe early one morning and smelt that aroma.

How to describe the aroma?  Imagine a restaurant kitchen with stock pots simmering away. Pans searing steaks of beef or chicken or fish. Vegetables caramelising, butter browning, jus reducing and alcohol flambaying. Oils and fats emulsified with steam.  All trying to find their way into each little gap.  Day shift and night shift the kitchen aromatics hide in the building. Year upon year.  Yes there’s an extraction fan, and yes the equipment and the walls get cleaned.  But these aromas seep into the plaster and the ceiling-anything porous. 

The kitchen acts like a well simmered stock liquid absorbing all the nuances of it’s ingredients.  

One day I walked into my 5 year old Cafe kitchen to open up at the usual 6:30am time.  It was a late spring morning and it felt warmer, and strangely familiar.  It’s the aroma.  I know it. From where?  That friend's restaurant in Beechworth I worked in for a few years?  Maybe our friend's Italian restaurant that I worked in as a 16 year old commis waiter?  Getting closer.  Who taught this Italian friend to cook?  My dad!  That aroma has to belong to the kitchen of the restaurant we lived in for 5 years from when I was 3.

It was the aroma of my fathers cooking. His signature dishes. Their essences all combined.  It was my home kitchen for 5 years.  Where we ate 3 meals a day. Where birthdays were celebrated and after school snacks were famishingly devoured.  And Christmas with cousins aunties and uncles celebrated.

If food memories are this strong for me, imagine if all young people spent time in veggie gardens or kitchens preparing and eating healthy nutritious dishes with family, friends and community from ingredients they have grown.

Creating these growing spaces in backyards and front yards and school yards and community spaces is an important start.  Growing, picking, preparing and sharing food make us human. Food connects us to our family and our community.  Growing and sharing food makes us feel valued. And participating in local food systems help us to build our personal, household and community resilience for the coming challenges.

But we need the shared knowledge to garden these spaces.  The tips and tricks to make a barren house block into an abundant food forest or transforming community spaces that brings people together to grow community around food.

We can’t all go off and do a horticulture course for a year or WWOOF around Australia.

Are community gardens expected to fill the educational gaps in our communities, or underfunded schools to patch together a food growing program?  Permaculture practitioners are building and sharing knowledge as best they can.  Maybe gardening Australia is trying, but they are all things to all people across the nation.

We need targeted local programs for local people to meet them where they are at. And to build connections so that we don’t have to reinvent the growing spaces when people move on. 

Just like a library, we need a local food knowledge bank.  One that doesn’t move, retire or die. One that is valued by our health organisations for the savings it brings to them. Valued by the businesses that employ healthy people from our community and schools that understand that healthy young people are a joy to educate. Valued by councils for the benefits urban food growing brings to the region and the food culture it creates. And seeing our silent partner -the environment, respond with more livable, resilient and transformative urban environments.

So tell me.  What does a local food knowledge bank and education space look like in your area, and how will it create the positive food memories of current and future generations of young people so they can live happy connected healthy lives in rural or urban spaces?