Recipe time
On Thanksgiving meal traditions, Tom Brady's glasses, and the challenge of preserving memory in a time of ubiquitous cameras
Thanksgiving is a time of many traditions, not the least of which is the revival of family recipes, often preserved in well-worn annotated cookbooks. These artifacts have a special place in memory, no matter how trivial they may seem.
■ A family is an institution, and all institutions have at least three types of memories they need to preserve: Event memories, decision memories, and event memories. Event memories record what happened, when and where, and to whom -- the kinds of things recorded in a yearbook or a photo album. Decision memories record how and why choices were made; James Madison’s “Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention” tell us how the decisions leading to the Constitution were reached.
■ Ordinarily, a cookbook is the definitional record of process memory: How to get a task done. But well-annotated cookbooks are a superb illustration of crossover from one type to another. When someone marks up a recipe, they extend a process memory into an event memory. It’s no longer a simple cake recipe; it becomes the cake recipe Grandma made for every grandchild’s birthday. That new dimension is interesting because it adds depth to the memory. There’s no longer just “how”, there’s a “who”.
■ That dimension becomes hard to preserve, though, especially as people die, paper deteriorates, and other memories crowd in. It goes to show how fragile memory is in general. Preserving it in the face of pressure, whether acute or general, is a discipline all unto itself.
■ Things are forgotten all the time, usually at a rate much faster than they are remembered. Preservation of memory requires some degree of intentionality -- it doesn’t just happen by chance. In a world wherein Facebook is turning to celebrities like Tom Brady to make “Meta Glasses” look appealing as a way to record daily life in 3K video, deciding which memories to preserve (and how) is actually more difficult to perform with intentionality than before.
■ As the saying goes, “If everything is important, then nothing is important”. We are privileged to live in a period when we can record more than ever at practically no cost, but we have to match that privilege with a measure of discipline about not imagining that pictures are the only way to preserve a story.
