Food memories, fond or foul, are good for the soul

Rustum Kozain muses on how food triggers megabytes of memory

Somewhere during deep apartheid, when I was four or five, I discovered that a stale crust of bread can be as good a snack as any.

We were on a family road trip that took us from Paarl to Durban to Johannesburg, staying with family friends in Durban and, in Joburg, in someone's vacated flat, probably also family friends on their own holiday somewhere.

I have several memories about food from that trip: in Durban, drinking tropical fruit softdrinks from plastic pouches until I kotched (delicious!), tasting raw, freshly dug peanuts for the first time (eurgh!), masala lamb chops for breakfast (!). The puri patha in the white Tupperware that our hosts packed for our padkos I rejected, despite my father's lip-smacking encouragements. What a fool a child can be.

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In Joburg it was that stale crust of bread. I had been asleep on the back seat and woke with us stuck in traffic, my parents irritable, me hungry and crabby, and my brother probably teasing me. I found a ball of greaseproof paper on the parcel shelf, a rolled up sandwich packet from a take-away shop. In it was a small, elbow-shaped piece of crust, leftovers from a cheese sandwich, probably a day old. It was dry and crispy, as if it had just been toasted. It was delicious.

So sometimes, in search of lost time in summer, when the days are dry and hot, I'll slice fresh bread and leave it out for a while, so that the crust will crisp up a bit. Only then, I believe, does a cheese and tomato sandwich reach its true apotheosis.

Everyone now knows that food triggers megabytes of memory. Students of literature will immediately tell you of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (aka Remembrance of Things Past) in which a madeleine sets off the protagonist's memory and the book's investigation of different kinds of memory, writing, truth, and all manner of things for thousands of pages.

Had I the leisure of a French bourgeois gentleman in the early 1900s, I imagine my 2cm piece of dry crust could open up long, drawn-out vistas on road trips in South Africa, on family history, and on memory and forgetting.

How I cannot drive past the Knysna lagoon and not become that child again who yearned to paddle in a bright canoe on its placid water, while on the beach behind me an uncle pumped the damp sand for shrimp for his evening's angling. But then already, as a child, I knew why that canoe would never be mine. Memory is as much burden as it is the nostalgist's manna.

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"Food memory" has become a term of popular usage and academics write books on the mechanics of that memory - something about the centrality of the hippocampus in the brain and a level of technical jargon that makes me blanch.

Food writers produce little manifestos on how to curate food memories: what you should do, what to avoid, in order to have perfect food memories. It's like people photographing food in restaurants. It's all about curation and manufacture. Look, I have better food memories than you because: photographs! Have you ever seen such depth in foamed peanut brittle? #NoFilter!

Food memory is a "thing". But Proust's madeleine is about involuntary memory, the memory that comes to you unbidden. For him, this memory contains an essence (of an experience, of what was lost) that is absent from consciously manufactured and recalled memory. And thus food memories: to consciously want to create them is a fool's errand. The cake will flop, someone will get too drunk, cousins will argue and, despite the wonders of technology, the photographs will be overexposed.

Memory has its own way of working. And it is not only food that can evoke powerful memories. I cannot see a bluegum leaf without smelling a mixture of eucalyptus and human faeces, evoking for me memories of playing in the veld near my neighbourhood, of childhood friends, of someone stepping in that pile of excrement where perhaps a worker earlier had been forced to relieve themself on the way to work.

I cannot hear the word "Knysna" without hearing it from a late aunt's mouth as part of an extended family's story - a mythos - of annual holidays in Mossel Bay. The smell of wild garlic in that region. Of the child's dream of a canoe on the Knysna lagoon and the parents' grimaces.

Your memory can be jogged, you can manufacture false memory, but you cannot will memory into being. You can study and memorise things, but when during the exam your brain won't remember that key link in a history essay...

You can also pretend that a memory does not exist. You can work hard at this and repress it, but, contra to the idea that certain things belong to the past and that you should move on from the past, the memory won't go away. You might go through a period in which you do not remember something you'd rather forget, but it can come back when you least expect it or want it.

But even bad memories can be evocative. The feel of strips of tripe from your mother's curry that you imagine slithering like warm worms down your throat. The next Sunday you see and smell tripe being cleaned, you go up the road to Auntie Kaashiefah-them, to go "read the newspapers", until you're invited to join them for lunch.

Or you can recall wholesale the luke-warm fish fried straight from the freezer, in its shell of oily batter, the inattentive service in an empty eatery in the Mossel Bay harbour, as you stare over the bay at the ugly monstrosities that have risen over the decades in what was a little bit of childhood paradise, even if tainted by the botulism of apartheid. Even the forgettable meal is a food memory.

• Kozain lives in Cape Town. He has published two volumes of poetry, 'This Carting Life' (2005) and 'Groundwork' (2012), and compiled and edited a volume of poetry for high schools. Follow him on Instagram: @black_south_eater